'Rick and Morty' Season 4 Episode 9 Review: There are dysfunctional families and then there is the Smith-Sanchez family
Spoilers for 'Rick and Morty' Season 4 Episode 9 'Childrick of Mort'
In the latest episode of Rick and Morty, the Sanchez and Smith family is going out on a vacation. it looks like the entire vacation is the brainchild of Jerry Smith (Chris Parnell), who simply want to spend some time with his family, and is bearing with Rick there at the same time. Literally, no one else in the entire car is as excited about this camping trip as Jerry.
His spirits, however, are dampened when Rick gets an SOS call from a woman that he impregnated. Now, the whole family must go meet the woman Rick impregnated because Beth does not want Rick to abandon any more babies as he did to her. 'Childrick of Mort' is very personal to Beth as she takes it upon herself to mend Rick's ways.
When they land there, Jerry is sullen about the fact that there are not going to be camping. He had hoped to share some quality time with his children, Morty and Summer (Spencer Grammer). But Summer seems to have already had enough of Jerry. She no longer wishes to spend any time with him, berates and insults him and then proceeds to simply walk out on him and takes a long Morty with her.
This pushes Jerry to venture out on the planet by himself and get into a series of accidents, misadventures, or in his case, perhaps the most exciting time of his recent life. He teams up with some of the discarded, "unproductive" children of Rick, and they make him their leader. Jerry easily eats this up, going around teaching them tips and tricks about camping, and trying to make himself feel important.
On the other side of the planet, Rick is bonding with his daughter Beth in the weirdest of ways. Together, they build an entire civilization from scratch for Rick's babies. But then, it turns out, Rick is really not the father of the children and it is literally God who had impregnated the planet. When he comes to lay his claim on parenthood, it leads to a war between Rick and him. On the planet, Beth and Jerry are fighting a war with their own armies and it is frankly akin to war about science versus religion.
While Jerry and Beth are in this tussle, Summer and Morty are lost and they have to go back and find the family. They find a spaceship of sorts that they try to run as a videogame, which eventually helps the grandfather out.
The episode is exceptionally important because after a very long time we see the family together. So far, since the show returned after its hiatus, it has refrained from giving us any episodes that feature the whole family. We have only been watching Rick and Morty together on adventures. By including both Jerry and Beth, this episode highlights the many problems of the family number one is that the husband and wife, the mother and the father, are at constant loggerheads. There are dysfunctional families and then there is the Smith-Sanchez family.
The episode also shows how the husband and wife are almost always fighting about Rick, over Rick, against or for him — almost all of the arguments our surrounding Jerry's father-in-law and Beth's father. Rick is such an unusual character who has set the bar for fatherhood both high and low at the same time. For Beth, he is always the person who abandoned her as a young girl. For Summer, on the other hand, Rick is the towering, strong, intelligent, will do anything to make it happen kind of father figure who she always compares with Jerry. As a result of this, her relationship with Jerry is extremely frayed and delicate.
Summer's crudeness towards Jerry comes from a place of respect and awe for Rick. Until she realizes all the problematic behavior and qualities that Rick possesses, she will not be able to accept her father for who he is and what he can be.
'Rick and Morty' airs on Sundays at 11.30 pm ET/PT on Adult Swim.