Rick and Morty season 4's first five episodes have been somewhat shaky - just like Jerry's confidence or Rick's emotional wellbeing.

After an exceptionally strong start with the anime-themed horrors of episode one, subsequent stories have mostly sidelined character development and smart plotting in favour of goofy and sometimes just plain infantile humour.

The Talking Cat was great and all, but not even his obsessive fan trolling could quite make up for that whole 'Slut Dragon' mess in episode four. Even with that flat tyre, 'Rattlestar Ricklactica' still managed to right the ship in part with a genius riff on time travel and why the show actively avoided this trope until now.

There's too many highlights to cover here, but Snake Hitler deserves a shout-out, as does the Snake Jazz song Summer dances to with her friends.

Unfortunately, this brief yet hilarious interlude highlighted a bigger problem with season four, and much like Snake Jazz itself, that issue has slinked its way into our brain and refuses to leave.

Namely, when did the show stop caring about its female characters?

Adult Swim

The final episodes of season three foregrounded Beth in ways the show has never done before. After delving into her childhood traumas, 'The ABC’s of Beth' suggested that the Smith matriarch we know and love might have left the show and been replaced by a clone.

Surprisingly enough, fans have had to wait even longer than the two year break between seasons to address this. Not only have the latest episodes ignored this arc entirely, but Beth herself has barely been in the show at all.

Where's the wine swigging horse veterinarian fans grew to love in earlier seasons?

While Summer has appeared in more scenes than her mother, she's still been sidelined more than we would have expected, and that's particularly squanch given how many major subplots Jerry has already starred in this season.

It's almost like the show has regressed to the dynamics of season one, where the female members of the Smith family barely got a look in. Of course, we're only halfway through season four right now, and things could change in 2020, but still, this shift is especially surprising considering that more female writers were hired a few years back for season three.



Adult Swim

Back then, co-creator Justin Roiland promised (via The Wrap) that adding female writers to Rick and Morty would have an "awesome" impact on the show:

"Having many different points of view and perspectives in that room is only going to make things more interesting."

While toxic elements of the fandom might disagree, season three was one of Rick and Morty's best yet, and part of that was down to how the writers fleshed out all of the Smith family, including its female members.

As Harmon pointed out in the aforementioned interview:

"The writers were able to talk more about Beth and Summer without stopping to double the conversation with asterisks, as in ‘well we’re a bunch of guys talking about a teenage girl.'

“It wasn’t so much all of a sudden there was an influx of ideas about Summer… it’s just that characters that were maybe protected by people’s trepidation were now also out there on the playing field and able to be manipulated and dimensionalized.”"

In season three, Summer suddenly became so much more than just a teenage girl who's always on her phone and thinking about boys. At the same time, later episodes helped Beth transcend the 'nagging' tropes often associated with similar cartoon mothers.

Adult Swim

These aspects weren't ignored completely as time progressed, but they were instead fleshed out beyond the mere one-dimensional caricatures that Summer and Beth started out as.

Unfortunately, this forward momentum is completely absent from what we've seen so far of season four. Instead of delving more into Beth's marriage, she's barely a footnote in the script, and while Summer does go on one adventure into the land of Slut Dragons, her character has still seen little to no progress since the show's return.

Would it kill the writers to take a page out of the comics and finally explore Summer's queerness? Not only would this help develop her character further, it would also address the show's reluctance to incorporate LGBTQ themes into the show head on.

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Of course, even when Rick and Morty isn't getting schwifty like it used to, the show is still god-tier, much like Rick believes himself to be. Nowhere else on TV right now are we seeing animation this intricate — and few other shows are this ambitious with their storytelling.

That's why it's so frustrating to watch the new season sideline fan-favourite characters like Summer and Beth. Hell, if the writers aren't interested in them anymore, give them a spin-off set to the soothing tones of Snake Jazz instead, and watch the plaudits slither in.

Rick and Morty season 4 airs Sundays on Adult Swim in the US, and airs in the UK on E4 and All 4 on Wednesdays.

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