It’s a particularly jarring for Rick and Morty because Dan Harmon is famously married to structure and plots out everything he writes with a story circle based on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It’s my guess he’s the major factor in keeping the plotting in this show on track, stabilizing Justin Roiland’s makeshift madness. But it seems like Roiland needed an episode just for puking random, consecutive bull hockey into, so “Rixty Minutes” spends a lot of time just showing you what Rick and Morty are watching on TV. This includes an extended ad for fake doors (as in doors that lead nowhere and can’t be opened), a movie about a guy who loves eating shit (until he gets a court order telling him, oh no!, he can’t eat shit anymore), and a version of SNL mostly starring inanimate objects (including “a hole in the wall where the men can see it all”).

Rick notes that TV from other dimensions has got “an almost improvisational tone” (wink, wink) and I can appreciate some Roiland uncut. I’ve been watching his nonsense since he was making sketches on Channel101.com and much of the content in “Rixty Minutes” is effectively the same kind of stuff, turning a lot of the episode into a weird sketch show. But, as with all sketch shows (especially improvised ones), the output is hit or miss. A number of these drag and just aren’t that funny or memorable. But then there’s stuff like the ad for “Ants in My Eyes Johnson Electronics,” run by a guy with ants in his eyes who can’t see: “Our prices, I hope, aren’t too low!” And the Lucky Charms parody is likely to stick with you (but not because it’s funny…).

But what I love about this episode is that it pulls what’s becoming a Rick and Morty signature move by surprisingly introducing pertinence in the third act and somehow making it work. If there’s any consistency in this episode, it’s with Jerry, Beth, and Summer who are going through pretty dramatic stuff as Summer learns her parents originally considered aborting her while Jerry and Beth’s peeks into their lives in other timelines confirm for them how much happier they would’ve been without each other. It’s a masterstroke that these two dissimilar plots—one focused on bullshit TV parodies and one about the family falling apart—actually come together at the end.

We’re given a reminder, after all this TV parody silliness, that Rick and Morty isn’t actually just throwing random crap at you without any thought behind it as there’s continuity here. Morty, we learn, hasn’t forgotten and, in fact, regularly thinks about how he had to bury his own corpse only a few episodes ago. And the lesson he imparts to Summer that would be the sickly-sweet moral in a crappy sitcom is, in this show, about as bleak as you can get while still technically counting as “cheering someone up.”

But if Morty’s lesson to Summer is essentially that nothing matters and nobody belongs anywhere in the universe, so screw it, Jerry and Beth reach a truly unexpected revelation about their marriage that basically says, miserable or not, they’re meant to be together. I was beginning to wonder how this show could keep sustaining the idea of Jerry and Beth’s marriage constantly being on the brink of collapse, but I think this plot development will help keep things more plausible in the future. Were this another show, I would assume this happened just to wrap up the conflict in this one episode, but this show has demonstrated that it’s big on continuity, so everything has the potential to matter quite a lot.