Rick and Morty Season 7 Episode 9 Review

Join Swimpedia as we review a screener of the ninth episode of Rick and Morty Season 7 with minimal spoilers.

[MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

Rick and Morty has always had an interesting relationship with religion and the concept of Christianity. Rick, presented as the “smartest man in the universe,” would often tell other characters in the early seasons that “there is no god, you gotta rip that band-aid off now,” yet the show constantly flirts with the idea of whether or not that’s true, or whether or not Rick himself even believes that. The first season has Rick meet the Devil, which doesn’t seem to make him question his worldview at all, and when faced with certain death in the season 2 premiere, Rick desperately prays to God, before gaining control of the situation and triumphantly proclaiming that such deity does not exist. After the first two seasons, Rick and Morty seems to tone down Rick’s atheism, save for Jesus appearing inside the Story Train in season 4. The concept of an afterlife is something the show hasn’t done anything with thus far. When the foundation of your show is built on alternate universes and clones, who cares about life after death? Still, in a show like Rick and Morty, a concept as widespread in every mythology as an afterlife can’t go unexplored for too long, and in season seven’s penultimate episode, we see Rick and Morty dive right into the subject.

Rick, seemingly over the funk that murdering Rick Prime back in 705 put him in, is back to working on science experiments. This time, killing and reanimating Jerry as he tries to figure out if an afterlife exists, and if it does, how he can either rob it or sap its infinite energy. After seemingly proving an afterlife exists, Rick heads out to get inside one, which proves far more difficult than he expected, as he faces challenges both from the afterlife’s rigorous protocols and the various religious institutions that might want to stop him. This is a VERY high concept episode, doing the classic Rick and Morty style of consistent, clear escalation in scale throughout the episode while also keeping its sharp, very dumb humor intact. Rick and Morty’s style of humor has evolved a lot throughout its seven seasons, and for the past few seasons it’s been more willing to stay grounded on Earth, with stories based around Rick and Morty coming into conflict with various societal institutions and expectations that bristle at their seemingly limitless power. While the first two seasons loved to focus on Rick dealing with galactic powers like the Federation, alien worlds, other dimensions or figures like Birdperson and Unity, recently the show has been having a lot of fun with what happens when there is a living god on Earth who just likes to get high with his grandson and play video games. This season especially, it feels like the show is having so much fun with Rick that it’s beginning to forget its other characters.

Morty is present this entire time and plays an integral role in the episode, just like Rick, but once again we have an episode where the family does very little. Jerry appears in the cold open, with his grandparents becoming tired of constantly greeting him as Rick sends him to and from heaven, and Summer has a hilarious cameo late in the episode, but that’s about it. This is the THIRD full episode in season seven where Sarah Chalke’s Beth doesn’t have a single line. Beth is entirely absent from Unmortricken, Rise of the Numbericons, and now Mort: Ragnarick. It’s a very interesting departure from this show, as no season thus far has ever pushed the family to the wayside like this. Whether this was an intentional choice or just how the scripts turned out remains to be seen, but we might be in for a surprise next week, and maybe the family’s absence will play a role in the big finale.