At the end of the Rick And Morty panel at San Diego Comic Con earlier this month, the last audience question came from a young girl who asked, “Will Evil Morty come back in season two?” She was referring to the cliffhanger ending of the first season's penultimate episode; in Usual Suspects fashion, the episode had revealed a new character who seemed destined to become the series' overarching villain. The girl's question solicited applause from the audience, but sitting at the dais, co-creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon didn’t have an answer to match. "Talk about a reaction to a question that makes us know the answer is wrong," Harmon said sheepishly.

Since its debut in December 2013, Rick And Morty has managed to generate a rabid following with only 11 episodes. What on the surface is the story of a mad genius scientist Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty traversing various dimensions is in practice what you'd expect of anything from Harmon, the creator of Community: meta-commentaries on everything from M. Night Shyamalan-style twist endings to teen horror to Jurassic Park to Inception. Because the show was episodic, Harmon and Roiland threw in plenty of one-off characters. Yet, as the fanbase was growing, the two creators were already off working on a new season—with exactly the same focus on self-contained stories.

"Our instinct was 'let’s not ruin this by curling back in on our own tail too soon,'" Harmon says. That’s not to say he doesn’t allow his fan-service side to dream about those possibilities. "There are a couple of instances where the joyful TV viewer in me says we should’ve done another Meeseeks episode," he says, referring to a fan-favorite character poofed into existence by a magic box. "But overall we had a very gun-shy approach of avoiding that temptation."

The result, which premieres tonight on Adult Swim, is some of the most joyously vulgar science-fiction satire this side of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The intricately constructed worlds of Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe are all highly rewarding, but Rick & Morty is on the opposite side of the spectrum—trading in pure, unbridled hilarity without worrying about a larger narrative arc.

The season premiere—which Roiland has admitted went through a rough production—picks up six months after the end of the first season, with time still frozen from last season's finale. But as Rick, Morty, and older sister Summer unfreeze time, they learn that readjusting to the world’s time is unstable; most of the episode then takes place in a split-screen that depicts multiple possibilities, with slight variations in scene blocking and dialogue for each quadrant. It’s deliberately difficult to follow, but not in a Bane’s original voice from The Dark Knight Rises way—rather, it underscores the episode's theme of teenage uncertainty without detracting from the comedy of Rick’s attempts to brute-force a solution through his genius. It's a potent deconstruction of familiar science-fiction tropes, and not nearly the disaster Roiland worried it would be.

But even while Rick And Morty revels in, as Harmon puts it, "pulling the panels off" genre conventions to "see where the batteries are," the show still isn’t overly dependent on references. In one of the first jokes in the season premiere, Jerry (Chris Parnell) insists that he’s wearing his shirt backwards on purpose so he doesn’t appear stupid; Rick equates that to someone called "Redgren Grumbholdt." When Morty and Summer laugh as through they understand the reference, Rick reveals that there's no such thing as Redgren Grumbholdt, and castigates them for not admitting their ignorance. Roiland calls the joke "one of the eleventh hour rewrites." For Harmon, whose beloved Community wrestled for years with finding a balance between gleeful fan service and complete opacity, it’s a relieving bit of self-deprecation.

Adult Swim

Regardless, the show's episodic nature doesn't preclude all chances of later callbacks. At the end of the Comic Con panel, Roiland noted, "We’ve got a lot of little loose sweater threads we’ve sprinkled throughout [seasons] one and two that we’re going to come back and tie in a nice little bow in subsequent seasons." In the meantime, there are guest stars. Lots of guest stars. To go along with first season voice appearances by Alfred Molina, David Cross, and John Oliver, the second season has its own murderer’s row of talent. Sunday’s season premiere features Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as fourth-dimension time-cops; next week’s episode gives us Jemaine Clement as an singing, omniscient cloud-like being, and promotional clips promise Patton Oswalt later down the road.

The thing is, that's all window dressing. Promises of returning favorites and high-profile guests are fine, but what made Rick And Morty’s debut season so great was being insulated enough from fandom and criticism to emerge as a fresh take on an increasingly popular area of pop-culture. Not factoring in viewers' hopes allowed Roiland and Harmon to continue developing individual stories that expand their creative canvas rather than restricting it too soon.

"The danger is over-tilling your soil," Harmon says. "You don’t actually get anything new done." There are small, occasional references to the previous season—and one background cameo of note in the second episode for eagle-eyed viewers—but otherwise, according to Harmon, "it’s pretty much 10 brand new story ideas." For the emerging Rick And Morty universe, that's a great thing to hear. Wubba lubba dub-dub.