Text 丨 Lucifer
"When a person dies, the first thing that disappears is his creativity."
At the beginning of the first episode of the sixth season, Grandpa Rick laughed at himself. Although Rick & Morty's popularity remains high to this day, second only to "The Dragon Family" on HBO since its sixth season of airing, the anime has been criticized in recent seasons for creative decline.
Season 6 of Rick and Morty
In 2013, Rick and Morty was released. It's like a Black Mirror version of Doraemon, with Einstein's same haircut as Rick, like an alcohol-poisoned Doraemon, always dragging his adolescent grandson through the multiverse (did anyone notice that Morty's clothes are the same color as Nobita?). No matter what kind of trouble he encounters, Rick can always come up with magical props to overcome danger, the most important of which is the teleportation gun, which is equivalent to Doraemon's random door in the play.
The brain-opening plot, the meaty strips, the pop culture symbols and a little cynicism are the impressions that "Rick and Morty" leaves us.
Season 1
Perhaps because the first season was so impressive, the sequel to Rick and Morty never satisfied a discerning audience.
After a season or two of almost squandering creativity, "Rick and Morty" has entered a relatively stable rhythm, and the fourth season's intensive de-typification of Hollywood genre films is a relatively clever way of creation, although there is still no shortage of laughs and brain holes for people to shoot, but it can clearly feel the time that the creators are delaying for the direction of the series.
Judging by the three episodes that have aired so far in the sixth season, the dust seems to have settled. Two writers, Justin Rowland and Dan Harmon, steered Rick and Morty in an extremely orthodox direction for American dramas: family values.
Season 6
The plot of the first episode follows the ending of the fifth season: the evil Morty who incarnates as the president destroys the base camp and travels through the "central finite curve", the deaths and injuries of Morty and Rick in the various parallel universes are not counted, Rick can't even use his iconic teleportation gun, and just when the mountains are exhausted, Rick's daughter's doppelganger, Space Beth, falls from the sky.
In Rick and Morty, family has never been more important. His preference for turning into a pickled cucumber in order to escape family counseling has become the highlight of the entire series.
However, at the end of the last season we once again see the "false memory" of Rick's wife and daughter being killed: this time it is different from the memories of the first episode of the third season, the killer of Diane and Beth is not the "Rick Council" but the evil Rick of some parallel time and space, Rick has been hunting himself in the parallel universe all these years, but has never found the real culprit, his harshness and cynicism are out of punishment for himself.
What's more, after nearly sixty exciting adventures that always return to nothingness, Rick for the first time shows a clear purpose in life: to avenge his dead family. For the first time, Rick is no longer a lonely king sitting on a perfect toilet and calling the wind and rain, but always has a hole in his heart, and he has an unattainable goal in his life that must be achieved, even though this goal is in a sense himself.
Rick becomes softer after losing the teleporter gun, and he returns to the universe where he originally lived alone, leaving the empty garage with only the AI that he made to torture himself to simulate his dead wife. Rick drops a clichéd handsome line, "I don't want to put it down, but I have to put it down" and plunges headlong into the rift of space-time, where at the other end of the cress is his family waiting for him.
At the end of the episode, the scene where Rick buries the body of himself in the parallel universe seems to be recreated in the first season, only this time he takes the whole family with him. "I could have left you behind, do you think the concept of 'family' is important to me?" I'm not your Morty" I was surprised to find that even Jerry, the lowest in the family, could now complain about Rick: "You're a hard-mouthed Morty."
Although Jerry is still in the same old state, Rick's other family members have become more and more accustomed to adventure, and the role has become more and more heavy. When Rick infiltrates the video game to salvage Morty split into five billion psychic pieces, Sangmei, who has been through a lot of battles, is in full swing with alien terrorists in the real world.
Coincidentally, the theme of the video game world in this episode is also family: Morty's personality fragment is transformed into a Jewish girl named "Marta", who experiences reconciliation with her father and children, and the ending is unexpectedly "normal".
But even with the narrative focused on family relationships, Rick and Morty continued the series' provocative style. In the last season, the writers used Morty's rampage sperm and Sangmei's huge egg to create an incestuous giant baby and launch it into space, which was the lowest-rated episode in the entire series on IMDb, and even American audiences could not accept such a weird brain hole.
Season 5
And this season's writers continue to work hard, first to let Earth Beth and Space Beth get together, and then let her husband Jerry know about it.
Jerry was furious first, who knew that he had played "threesome" with the two wives, and we saw for the first time that even Rick was embarrassed - Grandpa Rick was a cosmic stallion in the universe, and Morty was howling due to a mental breakdown, and the current episode is also the lowest-rated episode on IMDb this season. It is conceivable that in the other episodes that follow, the writers must have had more and bolder combinations to stimulate "common sense" about the family.
Some say that the vast majority of Hollywood movies can be summed up in the same theme, which is "Odysseus Homecoming".
This statement may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the obsession of American pop culture with the theme of "family" can be said to be obvious to all, and the expression of "family" in various cultures around the world is much the same. Family values and family concepts are dialogue-based between different cultures, which is convenient for the spread of popular culture, such as Bruce Wayne avenging his parents and becoming Batman, a story that people all over the world can understand; On the other hand, in a society that highly values individual freedom, the family is almost the only stable object in life, which is both a shackle and a dependence for the individual, accumulating a large number of feelings.
Therefore, American literary and artistic works, no matter how magnificent and complex the worldview setting, often have to return to the family level in the end.
No matter how much "Rick and Morty" ridicules traditional family relationships, the step of avenging his wife and daughter already means that this millennial nihilistic drama has begun to reveal its own "reality", and "Rick and Morty" has touched the boundaries of all possibilities in the multiverse?
I wouldn't assert this prematurely, after all, no matter what universe it is, Rick hasn't said "I love you" to Morty.