Morty is again doing crazy adventures with his eccentric scientist grandfather Rick, travelling through various dimensions or alien planets: Rick meets his ex-girlfriend again, an alien beehive entity called Unity; an alien instills fake memories in them and disguises as hundreds of absurd cartoon characters, claiming to be part of the family in the house; Rick has to visit a miniature AI world inside his battery, created to generate energy for him; Jerry and Beth undergo an alien marriage counseling; after a wedding goes awfully wrong and the groom, Birdperson, is killed, Rick gives himself in to the Federation so that his family can return safely to Earth.
Even the second season of the highly popular "Rick and Morty" comedy series did not manage to lift itself up from the level of a "mixed bag", since it contains both moments of genius which are then followed by several ill-conceived or misguided ideas, most notably in a couple of disturbing depictions of murder which are treated with an incompatible lightness, as if nothing happened, which is suppose to be funny, but only falls flat as morbid. Two and half great episodes — 2.1, 2.3 and one half of episode 2.5 (the first half involving a satire on religion is brilliant, but the other half involving Rick and Morty trying to sing for the giant heads in the Universe are lackluster and lame) — yet the remaining seven are a lot weaker, whereas this is also a ratio that is weaker than the first season — meaning that in reality its quality is still a notch below all the hype surrounding it. The worst episode is probably 2.7, involving a bizarre marriage alien counselling in which a machine depicts Jerry's vision of Beth as a black Xenomorph while Beth has a vision of Jerry as a slimy, disgusting worm, and their visions then escape and start killing everybody for no good reason justifying this concept, while the worst joke is probably found in episode 2.10, where Rick and his family go to an exile on an Earth-like planet — only for the Sun to rise and "scream" at them, which is just plain stupid. Yet, it deserves to be seen for two highlights: one is episode 2.1 which features a "fractured" time, presenting a split screen in which Rick, Morty and Summer are in two parallel times, with only minimal differences: the viewers will have to pay twice as much attention to notice all the details in it. The second one is 2.3, featuring a surreal metaphor of Rick having a relationship with the "beehive" alien entity Unity whose consciousness spans millions of people on a planet, which offers him the opportunity to sleep with several women wearing Unity's mind at the same time. And it ends with a striking philosophical, even emotional contemplation about how even controlling a million people cannot compensate for the emptiness of life, the nature of free will and Totalitarianism, the question if a character is willing to either change to keep his love or to stay alone to keep his own identity he loves. There are some interesting themes here in several episodes, ranging from artificial intelligence, infinite regress or the unreliability of memory, but it would have been far better if all the garbage surrounding them was edited out.
Grade;++
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