Spoilers, So Many, Many Spoilers…

The quotation in the title of this essay is from historian Jacques Barzun, denoting that there is nothing sadder then a great man being overcome by his circumstance, becoming a husk of his former genius.

Happy endings are a given. They have propelled most of the popular narratives of the last 30 years. The standard happy ending usually involves love, romance, reconciliation, even teamwork. Each protagonist learns a lesson thus ensuring a victory of some kind for them. Disney has made a profit off this formula for years, most people in the business of stories do. It doesn’t make them bad stories, it just makes them ones you’ve heard before. Occasionally the happy endings that audiences have come to crave receive a different treatment. This treatment is one that plays a little fast and loose with the established tropes. Instead of a massive, over the top victory, filled with friends and lovers, the audience is presented with a solemn lonely affair. Sometimes the hero simply lives to fight another day. There is a certain tragedy in this that is completely at odds with the happy ending we’ve come to expect. Maybe it just goes against everything you’re taught to believe. The hero has taken all the abuse the narrative has to offer, he has borne the brunt of suffering, failure and loss. Trial and tribulation are, by the end of the story, like two loyal dogs wagging their tails behind him. When he finally lifts the weight above his Atlas like shoulders and hurls it into to the void, what’s waiting to greet him? A pair of mutts by a different name. This could only seem unfair to a modern audience, though it shouldn’t be. Older civilizations had a much better understanding of the catharsis that tragedy drags in it’s wake. You can’t help but feel relief in watching tragedy unfold. It will hurt but it is worth the experience. It has been phrased better by greater men:

”A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in appropriate and pleasurable language;… in a dramatic rather than narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish a catharsis of these emotions”ii

The persistent tragedy mentioned above, the perfected art of picking oneself up and dusting oneself off is never better exhibited than by Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty. Admittedly it is an unlikely rock to turn over and find the kind of tragedy that Aristotle lauds under, but it is there. The show, which hails from Adult Swim and the minds of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, is a perfect blend of animation, comedy and everything that made science fiction great ( fantastic voyages and cheesy aliens included.) The aforementioned Rick and Morty are Grandfather and Grandson respectively. Rick is a Super-genius, the bastard love child of a twisted three way starring Doc Emmett Brown, Lex Luthor and Hunter S. Thompson (emphasis on the bastard) and the furthest thing from a wise old mentor you could imagine. Morty on the other hand is the very antithesis of the young sidekick. Utterly hopeless in any situation, devoid of any shadow of self-esteem, and nervous enough to keep Xanax in business till the apocalypse. You’d be correct in assuming that any cartoon that can turn such established Archetypes into something as malleable as warm play doh can probably do some fantastic things with conventional storytelling techniques. Each episode of the first season proves this:

The Pilot: A classic dimension hopping skit, involving Rick using his grandson as an intergalactic drug mule.

Lawnmower Dog: A parody of the 1980’s film The Lawnmower Man and the idea of a robot uprising, which takes a surprising turn when dogs are it’s driving force.

Anatomy Park: Fantastic Voyage meets Jurassic Park all inside the body of a homeless man, with guest appearances by Ebola.

M. Night Shaym-Aliens: The Truman Show crashes into Independence Day, all showcasing just how sad Jerry’s (Morty’s Dad) life is.

Meseeks and Destroys: One of the first truly original plots the show creates based around the ” Genie in the bottle” involving lots of blue creatures for whom existence is pain.

Rick Potion #9: Classic Love Potion romp for Morty which turns disastrous after everyone becomes obsessed with him, eventually leading to a mutated planet that the pair have to escape by leaving the dimension (no really)

Rixty Seconds: Endless alternate reality star gazing, with a ton of ”grass is always greener” morality that is slowly inverted to show how mundane life can be.

Something Ricked This Way Comes: A Ray Bradbury homage/ farce that actually inspects and dissects notions of karmic justice, because sometimes all that is required is a roided out beatdown.

Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind: The magnum opus of this particular season. A grand affair involving all the Ricks and Morty’s of the various dimensions and timelines. Eventually proving why the ones we watch each week are the best.

Ricksy Business: As the title would suggest a party takes place and Ricks true tragic nature is hinted at, the season ends in a very meta moment of trolling the audience with an almost tender moment.

These brief (and flawed) summaries serve to show how often Rick and Morty comes close to lowering itself to the easy simple feel good moments that plague modern sitcoms, then rises triumphantly to strangle them. Reconciliation, easy fixes, dime a dozen bonding moments are thrown into a abandoned by the shows writers.

What takes their place are tropes that shown nothing but disdain for hallmark moments. They create a show rages against them in it’s refusal to show anything but the strongest and truest of human emotions. These, as Aristotle points out, are the ones often viewed as sad and tragic. The loss of censorship and control they invoke is what grants them sincerity. The show will only concede its irreverent and joking tone when these tragic emotions are present. Seeking to ensure that such emotions materialise, it forgoes the average character development and growth through teachable moments, in favour a far more harrowing premise. It forces Rick and Morty to grapple with a meaningless universe on an episode to episode basis (established through various quantum lives and parallel dimensions.)

Nobody understood the trials of a meaningless universe quite like Albert Camus. . Camus recognised this meaninglessness as absurd (in other words impossible to comprehend and so unbelievably daunting to a normal man). Those who see it and attempt to continue existing within it (as opposed to simply giving up) are Absurd Men:

”The Absurd Man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given. He can decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope ( a masochistic practice in a meaningless universe), and the unyielding evidence of life without consolation”.iii

Each universe the pair find themselves in is limited but have different things ”given” leaving an infinite number of possibilities if only you can access the different universes. This is something Rick’s portal gun allows. Therefore the actions of the pair are limitless and so meaningless. This absurd Rick and Morty universe, affects both protagonists in very different ways. Morty is constantly shocked by the encounters he has with alternate realities and space travel. His shock in the earliest episode gives way to a strange kind of acceptance in later ones.

Where this becomes particularly apparent in the episode ”Rick Potion 9”. As mentioned Rick and Morty must flee their home dimension, having mutated every living human on the planet. Where do they go a dimension that their counterparts recently died in. The episode ends with the pair burying their own corpses. The pair must then assimilate into a world that is not their own and Morty must live with the knowledge that the family of this dimension is not truly his. This does not seem to bother Rick at all. This is something that Morty comes to accept in a horrific way as in the following episode”Rixty Seconds” he convinces his sister not to run away by revealing his secret to her:

”Don’t run, nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody dies. Now come watch TV.”

This is a harrowing truth, difficult to accept by even the most Zen of folk, but Morty’s understanding is tempered by the tragedy that he has endured. In many ways it echoes Camus’ statement on surviving in an absurd world:

”What counts is not the best living but not the most living.”iv

All that really matters is survival, even if that means usurping your alternate selfs life.

Ricks far more callous nature within the show is better explained using this same logic. He never loses sight of the big picture, his knowledge of the multi-verse makes him believe the majority of life is meaningless, therefore he can simply interchange the common elements of his existence with any of the others and never feel a thing. At least most Ricks can, this is shown time and time again with alternate Ricks who treat their Morty’s as little more than necessary space filler and whose families have been abandoned long ago but to paraphrase Camus, the absurd can never be accepted only endured through constant will. This is where the Rick of Earth C-137 (the Rick that we the audience follows week in, week out. Hereby referred to as Prime Rick) becomes the embodiment of tragedy.

For all it’s toying with emotion and playing with the staples of a sit-com, Rick and Morty never compromises on it’s depictions of Ricks deeper emotions, most of which are depression and desperation based. His misery was hinted by Birdperson at the end of Season 1, who explains that Rick’s recurring catchphrase ”Wuba- dub-dub” actually means ”I am in great pain, help me” in his language. This is the reason for his excessive drinking and self-medication which would put Hemingway to shame. The show quickly plays this off with the meta finale leaving the viewer to ponder (or forget as the case may be) whether Rick is truly depressed. Why would he be? Simple, Rick is utterly exhausted. Morty’s acceptance of the absurd is mostly down to the naiveté of his youth. He has only been aware of the multi-verse’s existence for a short time. As such he has only endured a small amount of tragedy. Rick on the other hand is a Grandfather, he has been dimension hopping for decades. Who knows how many Beths, Jerrys, Summers and Mortys he’s buried. These constant deaths will have eroded his will against the absurd. Camus’ original question was that should this occur is suicide the only answer to an absurd universe.

This is a question that Season 2 answers with a resounding yes. The Rick the audience follows is marked as an anomaly in Close encounters of the Rick Kind when he is seen to cry when viewing memories of Morty, something that disgusts one of his more evil versions.

The notion of Rick caring about Morty is often hinted at in the series but truly comes to the fore in the first episode of season 2 ”A Rickle in Time”. Through a minor mishap Summer and Morty manage to split time over and over and Rick must attempt to fix it. His rescue is hijacked by an immortal trans-dimensional being, whom Rick quantum beats the crap out of ( a feat of plotting and sequence so daring it could only be pulled off by this show). However things fall apart just as he is about to realign the various splintered timelines, as Prime Rick cannot sacrifice his Morty. He can’t do it because he cares.

Again he eventually represses this when confronted but it shows that Rick is nowhere near as numb as he appears.

This feigned numbness is finally obliterated in the episode Auto Erotic Assimilation. This is a darker episode than any that have come before and it grants us a truly tragic insight into just what Rick goes through and how much he depends on his hedonism. The episode is very simple, Rick rekindles a romance with a world conquering hive mind named Unity. By the end of the episode we come to understand just how charismatic Rick can be to those around him, not to mention the destruction his charisma carries with it. Eventually Unity leaves explaining how painful it is to be with him. Naturally her speech ends with a joke as is characteristic of the show. Then comes a silent minute and half that changes the tone of Ricks character completely. It would be pointless to do anything but show it:

SPOILERS

This is true tragedy. A man so at his wit’s end from repression and the numbing of a million failures, only to fail yet again by falling unconscious on his work bench. Rick does nothing but suffer, he leaps from dimension to dimension running away from his problems, engaging in Camus’ ”fatal act of elusion”, drinking, smoking and snorting everything in the process. Each time he meets new people he causes them nothing but misery.

Understanding Ricks motivation, that is to say his tragedy (one which makes Rick and Morty not only one of the most complex cartoons ever created but one of the best shows on television.) portrays Rick as a man burdened by his own infinite experience this alters Morty’s function to a comic foil. Rick Sanchez has saved countless multi-verses but damned others. He constantly attempts to convince others to leave them well enough alone (He constantly tells Morty that he has to be in charge, not because he likes it but because he must bear the responsibility) like a hardened Prometheus who has stolen fire from the Gods only to burn himself beyond recognition in the process.

As long as Prime Rick exists Rick and Morty may be a show that can never find it’s happy ending. He is in every sense ”a great mind overthrown” by an absurd existence that has finally claimed his will, a tragedy as thought provoking as any of the best

iiAristotle, The Poetics

iiiCamus, Albert. ”The Myth of Sisyphus”: The Absurd Reasoning.

ivCamus, Albert. ”The Myth of Sisyphus”: The Absurd Reasoning.