'Rick and Morty' Season 4 finale recognizes nihilistic alcoholic’s toxicity as his family moves on without him
Spoilers for 'Rick and Morty' Season 4 Finale 'Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri'
The thing that is often overlooked in Dand Harmon and Justin Roiland’s animated sci-fi comedy series ‘Rick and Morty’ is that at the end of the day, Rick is a bad guy. The series revolves around the cult of the Rick, an alcoholic, nihilistic, mean-spirited scientist, who cares little for much else than being right. He often puts his grandson in tough situations. He had abandoned his daughter when she was young. And he’s anything but a good role model for the children in the house.
But obviously, we love Rick. He is smart. He is an iconoclast. He values rationality over everything else. And, of course, he has really cool gadgets. Rick is the kind of edgy anarchist people love to love. And with this admiration comes the choice we have to make as fans: Do we acknowledge that he’s a colossal a******? Or do we ignore those traits as collateral damage?
The season 4 finale of ‘Rick and Morty’ decides to settle that. For the time being, at least. 'Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri' reveals that Beth on Earth is a clone and the real Beth is wandering around the multiverse, a callback to season 3 when Rick had presented Beth with the option to clone her so she could be free from the meaningless responsibilities of a wife and a mother. Rick even then, absolved himself of all responsibility. At the final steps of the cloning process, he took the easy way out and decided to not know which was the real Beth and which was the clone Beth.
This constant abdication of responsibility comes back to bite him in the season 4 finale. At the end of the episode, the Smith family has found peace. But not with Rick in the picture. Summer and Morty now have two moms, Jerry has his short-lived streak of being an invisible superhero, and they all seem to have found new reasons to move ahead in life.
But not Rick. And they all make sure Rick knows how much pain he causes the family constantly. In the end, he realizes that he is a bad father, an idea that he has consistently denied all throughout the run of Rick and Morty. And this finally, thus comes as a bit of a shock for viewers all around. A question, however, remains: do the showrunners want to antagonize us against Rick?
That may not be the case. Rick’s sadness and viciousness have always been visible to us, whether or not we chose to see it as a bad thing. What this episode effectively does is give us a perspective that we don’t often choose to see. Rick is toxic. And his presence in the lives of others invariably ends with the others getting hurt. Maybe, it’s an opportunity for Rick to introspect. Although, knowing the show, and knowing Rick, he will try and find a logical hole in this construct and go back to his nihilistic, iconoclastic ways.