"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse, and I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it’s your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces, your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I am bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass, because the thing about repairing, maintaining and cleaning is: it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is: some people are ok going to work and some people, well... some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

==============Update:for this entry. 100+ comments, most of them thoughtful. Turns out /r/KotakuinAction beats /r/RickandMorty for quality conversation about the show. Yay.]=============="Pickle Rick" was a groundbreaker: it was the first episode of Rick and Morty written for fans of Rick and Morty who hate Rick and Morty. Or at least, it was the first episode written for fans who hate Rick and aren't interested in anyone else. Beth flipped wildly back and forth between being a deranged jerk and being absolutely right, the kids were mentally retarded, Rick was plain, and Jerry was absent. All to make way for... Behold this enormous sack of cringe, nope and word salad they've tried to pass off as a rhetorical crescendo:Or read the transcript:Here's what the diatribe's writer, Jessica Gao, said about it in an interview I wanted the therapist to have the last word over Rick because Rick always dominates every single person [No he doesn't. -AVH], and so I really really wanted some person in the world --She trumped him!Yeah, totally!An' it was dope as fuhhk.I love that moment--No it was, cuz it was such a dope little turn, cuz she trumped him.I love the moment when Rick says his shit, and then he sits back, like so pleased...Yeah, he had to eat what she said.This writer openly admits that she fails to distinguish between fiction and reality. Rather than use these fictional characters as the relatable lifelike tools for cracking jokes and addressing the human condition that they are, she felt a need to vindictively single one out and give him what-for, as if he was a real person. And then, because he's not a real person, writing the episode allowed her to effortlessly strongarm her way to the last word by just... not writing Rick any more dialogue in the scene. Voila: victory. Against a cartoon character. You go, girl!She also confessed in the interview that her artistic choices are driven by racist and sexist nepotism: "So when I wrote it, I specifically named her Doctor Wong because there haven't been any Asian characters, and any time I can, I want to give an Asian actor (who isn't a male) a job." Integrity's for white men, amirite? One can't help suspecting that this same sort of cancerous nepotism is what elevated her to her esteemed position . But that's beside the point of this writeup, which is to discuss artistic merit.I'll address Gao's utter disaster in segments."Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness."No, they don't. This is a lie. Think about it for three seconds. They all, including the conveniently absent Jerry, regularly attack the notion that Rick's intelligence is an excuse for bad behaviour. "It's not right for Rick to do _____ just because he's smarter than me," is practically a mantra for Morty (who can argue the point well), and also for Jerry (who can't so much). Jerry would have loved this massive non-sequitur of a monologue, because just like the woman who wrote it, he resents Rick for his intelligence. It's easy to imagine him sitting on the sidelines munching popcorn and giggling to himself, steeped in a schadenfreude inspired solely by tone of the therapist's endless droning. But oh wait -- Jerry's the only family member who wasn't there. Why might that be? I know why: there was no way to keep Jerry recognizably in character while simultaneously making the therapist look smart. And still Jerry would have come off as a better person than she, because even Jerry is sometimes right, and when he isn't he at least remains lovable and forgivable.At best, Rick's intelligence explains his alleged 'sickness.' Explanation is not justification, but this writer (and thus her petty Mary Sue) suffers from the borderline thinking styles produced by. She is either not intelligent enough or not sane enough to appreciate the value of understanding in itself. People like this mistake mere explanations for justifications because they practice, which means they explain things not with the purpose of understanding them, but with the purpose of destroying them. The Smith family doesn't understand Rick's character with the purpose of destroying it, they understand it for what it is as best they can, and are thus both frustrated and fascinated by him. That's not good enough for this judgmental stranger -- in her view, if you're not destroying, you must be justifying. There is no room for objective understanding, and certainly none for intellectual humility. There is no middle ground. If you're not with the deconstructors, you're against them. Black and white. Judge first, ask loaded questions later. Zero tolerance for mystery.The phrase "justify sickness" is also nonsensical. Sickness is not a matter for moral justification. It's just sickness. Maybe the word Gao was looking for when she wrote "justify" was "rationalize," or maybe she just enjoys vilifying people for not knowing how to be happy. But it's probably both. Stupidity and cruelty are the two halves of the Cunt Yin Yang.The word "sickness" most likely shouldn't have been used either. It degrades humankind to treat Rick as sick in any conventional sense of the term (aside from the alcoholic puke burps), as his superhuman intelligence causes him to suffer a condensed and magnified caricature of an inescapable element of the human condition. The fact that great intelligence produces nihilistic existential crises is a thematic cornerstone of the show. Doctor Wong didn't even bother telling anyone what the "sickness destroying the family" is, but I will. The "sickness destroying the family" is the nihilism that is a byproduct of so thoroughly understanding the universe that one gains the powers of a god while simultaneously operating within that same universe as an intentional agent trapped inside a frail mammalian body while helplessly loving the agents inside other frail mammalian bodies. The "sickness destroying the family" is the existential threat posed by curiosity and power (via science and technology) to the human sense of selfhood and meaning.And on top of all that, it's not fair to say that the family is being destroyed by their greatest challenge. They're taking care of themselves pretty well considering their circumstances -- that is, when they're not being written as pants-pissing, glue-sniffing retards, as they were in this episode and this episode only. The wonderful thing about Rick and Morty is that it so consistently uses its strong and complex characters to make some of the most terrifyingly poignant concepts in science and philosophy hilarious. And of course there's a lot of other good stuff too, and then the occasional fart joke appears as blowback to prevent the show shoving its head up its own ass.The writer of that abhorrent lecture, on the other hand, stores her head up her own ass. She is too dense and self-important to relate to any of this. She should not be a part of the writing team. She does not understand the show. In this race, she has been lapped. She is so far behind that she thinks she's in first place. She even tripped up her grammar right out of the gate: because the "you included" was an aside, "use" should instead have been "uses." Her style is graceless and her content is simultaneously confused and boastful. This writing is worse than bad: it is deliberately destructive. It is metastasizing and its source must be cut out before it kills everyone we love. Onward!"You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse,"Rick's mind is both of those things simultaneously. People can not naturally control how intelligent they are. This "therapist" Mary Sue (and implicitly Gao herself) mistakenly assumes that they can because she has artificially constructed her own 'intelligent' persona. She has not felt the paradoxical pressure to make herself stupid to maintain her sanity, because she is naturally stupid. The pressure she feels is not to be stupid, but to appear smart. She is an impostor among intelligentsia. Conversely I, though not as desperately as Rick, need to drink. I'm not exaggerating much: after enduring the Pickle Rick episode, my fiancee and I dragged ourselves down the street to the bar and ranted exclusively about this speech over a few pitchers of beer. That was how distressing it was to watch Rick and Morty develop potentially terminal cancer in real time. The way to endure people like this shallow, stupid, boring, "non-judgemental" hypocrite is by drinking -- or by writing about them, but the rage needs some time to distill first, hence I'm writing this at least a month after the episode aired."...and I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it’s your mind within your control."This woman knows nothing about the nature of the mind.That's the very first step. That's the preschool of psychology. That's the potty-training of psychology. No, that's the fucking opening your eyes and screaming at the first touch of the cold world outside mommy's womb of psychology. Are you the Buddha? Are you God? No? Then your mind is not under your control. She doesn't have a clue what a contentious rabbit hole the very concept of controlling one's own mind becomes when it is subjected to even a faint sliver of skeptical inquiry."You chose to come here, you chose to talk,"You chose to write for a show you didn't create, disparaging a main character you don't understand, in a genre where you don't belong, and you chose to expel meconium all over it. Rick, conversely, did not choose to go to therapy. He went into the room to get his depickling serum back because his daughter stole it. He did not "choose to talk" in the therapeutic sense that is implied by the phrasing."to belittle my vocation,"That's right, you brain-eating parasite."Just as you chose to become a pickle."While smart people can choose which challenges to seek out, and while some choices are better than others, smart people must choose to seek out challenges because they psychologically need challenges. The need for a challenge is not a choice."You are the master of your universe...""Your universe" is a solipsistic concept for the same solipsistic morons who say shit like "I respect your truth," and "Let's agree to disagree." Rick is a master in one sense and a slave in another sense, just like all conscious mortals in this universe (or transfinite-curve multiverse), only the dichotomy is made more extreme in Rick's case by his intelligence and his old age, which is what makes him such a chaotic yet sympathetic character."...and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces..."No woman who conflates getting your hands dirty with wallowing in filth has any business writing in the field of science fiction."...your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand."No woman who participates in the zombie horde that is reducing the word 'literally' to yet another emotive cliche has any business writing at all. No, I don't give a fuck that the dictionary now acknowledges the popular backwards misuse of 'literally.' Explanation is not justification. It remains misuse. Tear that weed out by the root, writers. File it away next to your historical misuses of 'ignorant' in place of 'rude' and never touch it again."Your mind literally vegetating" is a humorless attempt to riff off Rick's body having been transformed into a physical vegetable despite the fact that this is not what "vegetating" means. Nothing about Rick's pickle-Rick circumstance caused senility, dementia, or any other mental laziness or degeneration. Rick's mind was not "literally vegetating" in any way. In fact he was doing the opposite: feeding his intelligence by presenting it with the challenges it needs. The only evidence that he was getting dumber in any way by his circumstances was that he sat there and silently tolerated this cheap and condescending tirade."I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I am bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass, because the thing about repairing, maintaining and cleaning is: it’s not an adventure."Reducing the mind to an inconvenient object that must be maintained by scrubbing it is the epitome of misanthropic anti-intellectualism. This "therapist" is a monster. And yes, I mean that. People who think in this dehumanizing way, who reduce human beings to objects, who conflate mental health with brainwashing, become just as monstrous -- and contagious -- as the power they are given will allow."There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die."There's no way to do it so right you might live."Risking death" is not what the word "adventure" means. That Rick's adventures are extreme does not change the meaning of adventure itself. Adventure is play . Self-directed, creative pay, both solitary and cooperative, is how people freely and constructively go on adventures to develop themselves. The source of humor here is that Rick is paradoxically so insanely intelligent that he must risk death in order to play. And he must play, because play -- from dollies and dumptrucks, to games and sports, to sexuality and ritual, not to mention the arts -- is how people take care of themselves psychologically, a truth which renders the world's unimaginative, unqualified, self-aggrandizing "therapists" absolutely useless.Hey Gao -- want to know how real human beings play, in a safe and psychologically self-sufficient way, with ideas that involve risks as steep as life and death? They do it through adventure stories. Through make-believe. We need Rick and we need the Smith family. We need them to be exactly who they are, unmarred by the indignantly nihilistic vandals who seem to have invaded the Rick and Morty writer's room. Complicated, flawed, vulnerable characters make us better, and -- I know this will be hard for parasitic quacks to understand, but -- they do it by inviting us into their world by making it experimental, argumentational, funny, heartwarming and ultimately interesting. They don't need to lecture us, threaten us or demean us in order to convince us to grow. They just do it, by reflecting us in ways that help us understand ourselves by relating to them. And because they make it so much fun, we love them for it. And you hate them for it, because they are threat to your cynical ruse: that is, the facade of usefulness you authoritatively project to enable your social parasitism."It’s just work."The scrubbings will continue until morale improves? I don't think so. The smart people don't work for you. They value their freedom, and they have playing to do."And the bottom line is: some people are OK going to work and some people, well... some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."Once upon a time, Doctor Wong -- throughout most of my youth, in fact -- I thought that becoming an adult necessarily meant turning into a droning, entitled, purposeless, parasitic authoritarian like you. It made me want to die. I was suicidal for quite a while. But I never took the addictive psychoactives that your zealous contemporaries prescribed. I did not accept these strangers' claims that my uncomfortable thoughts and feelings were diseased, nor that the physicality of my brain was the primary source of my unhappiness. I did not submit. I kept searching. And searching. And then finally, I grew up: I broke free."Don't make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you're doing as play, and don't imagine for one minute that you've got to be serious about it.": I've started paying attention to Diversity & Comics. A lot of his positions apply across mediums. For example:Other shit signalling the end of a good thing: