Season four of Rick & Morty wasn't great. I recently wrote about how season five seems to be the show back to its best, and what I meant by that was "back to its best, after whatever the hell season four was." This seems to be a trend with Dan Harmon-adjacent shows. I didn't mind Community's season four gas leak, mostly because Herstory of Dance is still a great episode. Still, it remains the worst season. So it is with Ricky & Morty. Season four wasn't terrible, it was just very obviously the worst. Where Community has Herstory of Dance though, Rick & Morty has Rattlestar Ricklactica.
Rick & Morty has always done high concept episodes. Total Rickall sees the Smith family dealing with an ever expanding legion of memory parasites, Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind follows the Council of Ricks hopping through different universes hunting our Rick, and The Ricklantis Mixup explores the life and times of the various Ricks and Mortys on the Citadel. Rattlestar Ricklactica deserves to be put on a pedestal with these three for how well it executes an idea other shows wouldn't even think to try. Unfortunately, Rattlestar never gets the love it’s due. It's not quite as good as The Ricklantis Mixup in my book – few episodes of television are – but it can kick it with the rest of them.
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Season four isn't universally hated, and The Vat of Acid Episode even saw the show win its first Emmy, but I'm not alone in viewing it as a bit of a long foul. Perhaps it's Rattlestar Ricklactica’s close proximity to Claw & Order – the dragon fucker episode – that drags its rating down. But I'd quite happily never think about Claw & Order again, so I'd rather it didn't drag down one of the best and most under-discussed episodes of Rick & Morty, thanks.
Rattlestar Ricklactica is all about snakes. Morty is bitten by a space snake – yeah, it's a thing – and in finding the antidote, Rick and Morty find a snake planet on the brink of a race war. The snake who bit Morty was their first astronaut, set to unite the planet, but since Morty kills it in retaliation, the future for the planet now looks bleak. Rick points out that the snake bit its first alien contact, but it's no use – Morty feels horrible, so he buys a pet snake that looks similar to the dead one and drops it onto the planet, hoping to unite it once more, now that the astronaut – or what he hopes the snake will think is the astronaut – returns home.
Here's where things get weird. The snakes understand the snake they get back is not the snake they sent. There's then a long montage where the government meets with this new snake, fails to understand its language, several scientists go through an Arrival-style deciphering exercise, Morty's snake falls in love with – then has sex with – one of these scientists, and a revolution begins. The snakes even have their own Nazi uprising, complete with a protesting August Landmesser. The best part? All of this happens with no dialogue, only different styles of snake hisses. There are no subtitles and no attempt to convey what is being said, other than the hisses. It was an experiment, and one that could have gone so, so wrong, but in the end, it all works perfectly.
After this, there's time travel, more pop culture references, a lot of Terminator stuff, and a very quick time travel plot that surprisingly holds up to scrutiny while bringing with it a few jokes that land. That's before you get into a subplot where Jerry being made slightly lighter somehow makes him seem like a racist basketball player, who almost gets killed at a biker bar then almost dies from suffocating before taking his pants off and using the rain in them to weigh him down. Oh, and there's an epic snake v snake showdown at the end – it's top notch stuff, even if nobody else seems to even care about it.
I know the idea that Rick & Morty audiences have high IQs is a meme – and based on their war over Mulan sauce, not a very accurate one – but Rick & Morty trusts its audience more than most cartoons, maybe even more than most live action shows, do. Rattlestar Ricklactica is one of my favourite episodes for that very reason, and it's a shame it seems to have been swept away with the rest of season four.
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