Season five, episode four of Rick & Morty starts with Morty shagging a machine designed to jack horses off, and somehow gets worse from there. I've written about Rick & Morty previously, including the – now clearly premature – prediction that season five looked set to correct the missteps of season four. The first two episodes were great and both seemed to keenly understand where the last season had strayed, and even episode three felt like an attempt to do what season four had not in helping its core characters evolve. Episode four is a gross, sticky disaster.
In most of my previous musings on Rick & Morty, I've found some way to launch a subtle dig at Claw & Order. This episode came in season four – where else? – and revolved around dragons. That's not too bad, except Rick complained the whole time that dragons were stupid, and as if to prove him right, the dragons in that episode all loved to have weird orgies together. Rickdependence Spray, which I'll always remember as 'the episode where Morty shags the horse machine', has replaced Claw & Order at the bottom of the pile – and what's worse is it feels deliberate.
Related: Rick & Morty's Premiere Was Like A Whole Season In One Episode
If the first two episodes were an attempt to address the criticisms of season four, Rickdependence Spray was a middle finger to it. After Morty… look, you know what he does. After that, Rick steals the barrel from the machine, assuming it to be horse semen. He needs horse semen because humanity is at war with a race of underground horses, and if you’re thinking ‘Oh, I must have missed the episode where they set that up,’ you did not. This plot is made up in this episode and presented as if it has always been the case to justify the ridiculous narrative. At times, Rick & Morty’s confidence in its ability to tell stories is to its credit; The Ricklantis Mixup, easily the show’s apex, would not have happened without this confidence. But here, and in the dragon episode, it allows the show to embrace its worst impulses.
You'd think Rick might test the semen first, to check it's not contaminated, but because Morty asks him not to, he doesn't, and so his experiment unleashes a giant race of evil Morty sperm that wants to go the Grand Canyon – the Grand Canyon being Earth's vagina, apparently.
It's not just that it’s gross – although sure, that's a huge part of it. Not only is the initial premise way beyond the show’s typical humour, it's then taken way too far in every direction with no real jokes to cover it. There's a soldier Rick and Morty meet and assume will be the deadliest killer around, seemingly because he's Japanese. It then turns out he wears women's underwear and is gay – geddit? I hate the 'very high IQ' meme, but Rick & Morty typically does trust its audience with more complex jokes mixed in with fart gags. This is just juvenile and pathetic.
That's not all. The horse people do eventually feature in the episode, only for everything to wrap up neatly (and again, grossly) when it turns out Rick got the horse princess pregnant, and we have to watch her give birth. The baby then immediately tunnels underground, along with the princess, and the episode ends. There's no story worth caring about, no jokes that land, nothing interesting in the premise, and no development. This isn't a wasted opportunity, it's a waste of time.
Television shows are allowed to have bad episodes. I'm not going to say the writers got lazy, or that Harmon phoned it in, or any other shallow analysis like that. Rick & Morty has produced a lot of hits, and while this is its biggest miss, it's not the end of the world that this week's cartoon wasn't as funny as the cartoon from two weeks ago. But it feels like this was a deliberate attempt for the show to see how far it can push things, both with the suits above them and with the audience. It's currently rated as 6.0 on IMDb, a whole 1.4 points beneath the next lowest – the dragon episode. With the episode having just been spurted out, I expect that number to drop a little further. The episode might have gotten past the suits, but with the fans, this experiment has failed.
I still have hope for Rick & Morty. There's no show on television like it, nothing that manages to be edgy without being offensive, and nothing that takes its level of risks, either dramatically or comedically. But it needs to understand its own limitations and understand that being Rick & Morty means it often gets away with things – but perhaps it shouldn't.