Spoilers for “Mort Dinner Rick Andre.”
Rick and Morty is back, and its new season started on a high note. Adult Swim created Global Rick and Morty Day to celebrate the premiere. While audiences were sitting down last night to enjoy the beginning of season 5, the team behind Rick and Morty were already hard at work on the show’s future. They’re currently writing the seventh season, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Scott Marder, one of the show’s producers, has said he believes a movie could happen someday.
Wherever the show goes, “Mort Dinner Rick Andre” is where it’s at now. The episode opens at the tail end of another “classic Rick and Morty adventure”. The titular duo is escaping from some alien planet covered in giant monsters trying to kill them both. Rick is grievously injured, so it’s up to Morty to fly them off the planet and through a portal back to Earth. As their ship begins crashing into Earth’s atmosphere, Morty is convinced this is the end for them both. He calls up Jessica for a sweet goodbye, but when she asks if he wants to watch a movie with her, motivation to live strikes Morty with new urgency.
With his newfound inspiration, Morty manages to land the ship more-or-less safely in the ocean, much to Rick’s dismay. Rick’s contact with the ocean apparently breaks an age-old treaty he’d had with his nemesis – Mr. Nimbus. Dan Harmon voices the wonderfully bizarre character, who’s something of a cross between Aquaman and Namor, if either of them were unnervingly sex-positive and capable of controlling the police (yes, that’s a real superpower). Mr. Nimbus is the episode’s Andre. He comes over for dinner and wine to hash out the details of a new treaty with Rick Sanchez.
The over-the-top characterization of Mr. Nimbus opens the door to some questions about the rest of the show’s cast. For one thing, it’s hard to believe that someone so ridiculous and silly could be Rick’s true nemesis. Even Jerry struggles to believe the development. The episode only ever hints at the relationship between Rick and Mr. Nimbus, with the latter claiming he’s the only one who has known Rick long enough to see how far he’s fallen.
On the other hand, Mr. Nimbus’s goofy sexuality gives Beth and Jerry a chance to flaunt their improving relationship. At the urging of Dr. Wong, the two of them are experimenting sexually to bring themselves closer. “We watch porn together” is an uncomfortable and hilarious refrain. The couple is faced with the question of how far they’re willing to go when Mr. Nimbus offers them a contract for a threesome. They’re willing to go pretty far.
It’s actually Mr. Nimbus’s taste for aged wine that propels most of the episode’s plot forward. Rick, as is his wont, uses a portal to store bottles of wine in a dimension where time moves faster than it does on Earth. Rick gives Morty the job of retrieving the wine while also balancing his not-quite-a-date movie night with Jessica. Trying to impress Jessica, Morty tells her he can get the two of them a bottle as well, and that’s where things start to go wrong.
On his first wine run, Morty enlists the help of a local cow-person to bring a case back through the portal into his own garage. Jim Gaffigan, the first of many new guest stars this season, shares a nice and quiet moment with Morty in the garage. When he returns to his world, decades have passed. His wife is dead, his son has gone mad, and his society begins a blood feud with the child from the other side of the portal.
At this point, playing with time is something of a Rick and Morty cliché. Some might feel that “Mort Dinner Rick Andre” is doing little more than retreading old ground. Others would stand by the maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it". As Morty makes more and more attempts at scoring a bottle of wine for himself and Jessica, the bovine society on the other side of the portal develops further. The escalating war is played out with the expertise of a show that’s run with this type of plot before, which really just means it’s as entertaining as ever. At least one consequence of the war might carry over into other episodes. Jessica is pulled, literally, into the Morty/cow-people conflict. In the process, she becomes a “time god” who just wants to be friends with Morty.
“Mort Dinner Rick Andre” shines most in moments that hint at broader implications for the show. For now, those are just moments, and all they do is hint, but that might be enough to carry the show through another season. At the very least, the season 5 premiere is a memorably entertaining entry into this long-running animated series.