Hello! Last night was Rick and Morty night again, which means I got to wake up early and share my tired thoughts with the internet on the new episode. This was the fourth episode of the third season, called Vindicators 3: Return of Worldender and I warn you, my thoughts are not exactly positive ones, but they do also contain spoilers for the episode, which I normally avoid major spoilers, but this time it was somewhat hard to talk about the episode without first pointing out some direct issues I had with it, so read ahead with caution.

This was possibly my least favourite episode of the season by far. I just want to put that out there. I really like this show and I really want the episodes to be good, but this one, just wasn’t and that sucks. It wasn’t overly funny, the plot felt rushed and full of needless, yet predictable twists and the characters that we already know and love felt different like they were acting how they shouldn’t.

Whilst as always the animation was sleek and good looking, complemented by mostly awesome voice acting, the lack of actually interesting characters and scenery marred that a little. You can nicely animate a trash can, it’s still a trash can. The backgrounds were dull, the enviroments uninteresting and a noticable lack of actual characters beyond the main group of Vindicators led to it becoming a tad repetitive to actually watch, which is a shame because the animation is something that is almost always amazing on this show.

The episode essentially follows Rick and Morty going on an adventure with the superhero group, The Vindicators, who we learn they have worked with in the past, but the earliest “twist” is that the group went on an adventure without the pair prior to this third instalment. Which leads to Morty, a huge fan of the group, acting odd. I say oddly because I found it honestly hard to work out what the show was trying to portray Morty as feeling betrayed by the group perhaps? But that wouldn’t make sense, on account of the fact that the group rejected them because of Rick.

This leads into the main drama of the episode. For some unexplained reason, a blackout drunk Rick actually killed Worldender earlier and built a death maze thing for the group, which Morty is able to solve easily for the most part. Which would be fine and make sense if it was showing Morty as proving himself to the group, but it really felt more like Morty just didn’t care at all and was just wandering through these puzzles for no reason.

Rick and Morty is only ever as strong as the titular characters, and so when the writing is poor for them, the episode will suffer massively. And that is where Vindicators falls flat. Rick feels actually like the bad guy here, which I felt was going to be revealed to be a grand twist and fakekout, but it just wasn’t, Rick got drunk and did some bad things that got some people killed. Rick and Morty are just hostile to one another throughout and this is left unresolved by the end. Everything in this episode feels like cheap twists and pointless development.

Character development can be done well, this was not it. It pitted Rick and Morty against one another with no real reasoning, just to likely set up a conflict in a later episode. And to make things worse, the Vindicators themselves were honestly hard to care about, their voice perfomances felt lackluster and their characters were just very stock, which I can understand, it’s a 22 minute show, but it just felt like every character here was a device to prove that Rick Sanchez is an A hole. And it worked.

I hate saying bad things about this show, but right now, 4 episodes in, we’re looking at two for two on bad episodes, which, when you look at other seasons, is pretty damn bad. Vindicators 3: Return of Worldender is the worst episode of this season, and probably one of the worst in the history of the show, it feels like cynical, poorly written filler and is honestly a little boring. Hopefully, the show will pick up with the next episode, but with the threads left dangling from here, perhaps we’re in for another depressing ride on the pointless character development train.

Thanks for reading, and thanks also to the huge numbers of people reading these reviews, they have become some of the most popular things we’ve done on this site. So it’s pretty clear to see you guys like them so you can expect this review series to continue (you can check out my thoughts on episode 2 here and episode 3 here). So tell me in the comments below or on Twitter @G33kP0p what you thought of the episode, did you agree with me or did you utterly love the episode? For more Rick and Morty, check back here every Monday to hear my thoughts. Until then, keep it G33k!