note: pulled from Discord posts, so the first three seasons don't get discussed week by week and some episodes get missed (which probably meant they were mediocre!). Probably some spoilers.
S01-S03 - Great!
S04
2&3 - The worst of the entire series so far, just really poor. I'm going to be severely disappointed if getting such a large episode order on one go means that they don't bother pushing themselves any more and take a Simpsons-style dive into lazy mediocrity.
4 - Terrible.
5 - A return to form. It's not a groundbreaking classic or anything, but it was funny and light on its feet.
6 - Great! Such a relief for the ratio to be going back up.
7 - Not awful but not particularly good either. Bit of a confused, unimaginative mess.
8 - Okay. Some funny stuff, wraps up a bit lazily. This seems to be the new standard - season 1 level laughs and ideas, but a little less care taken over it.
9 - The beginning and end were a little sweaty, but the middle section was great. It does still feel like the writers have got a bit lazy - there's stuff that definitely could have used more work.
10 - Proper good! Clever, funny, exciting, fast-paced, pulling off satisfying lore updates while simultaneously poking fun at them. Not in the top ten or anything, but not in the bottom ten either. Probably my only niggle is that they didn't add anything new to the ||'sad Rick ending'|| trope so it felt a little pat.
S05
1 - Okay. Not great, not awful. Felt a little derivative of previous episodes.
2 - I did enjoy it, and at times it felt quite fresh, but then other times it would hew too close to something from a previous episode and it would suddenly taint the whole thing. Plus I'd be thinking 'now I'm not going to be as excited if they do another Council of Ricks/Evil Morty' episode because they've done so many slightly-adjusted copies of it now.
As I wrote that, I suddenly realised that this episode is probably a metaphor for how they realise they're writing the same thing over and over and the episodes gradually turn into 'slightly worse copies' as it goes on :(
3 - Felt again like a remix of old stuff, along with whatever random ideas they had floating around, rote edgelord stuff, and a straight-up rip-off of the Funny Or Die Captain Planet videos. It wasn't as bad as that dragons/cat episode, but it was getting close.
4 - I was quite enjoying it at the start, felt like a fun low-stakes romp. But it kept getting worse as it went. I swear the show never leant on meta humour, pop culture references or 'lol random' stuff this much before. It's actually starting to remind me of Family Guy. I'm kind of scared to go back and watch the first three seasons now, in case it was always this bad and I just never noticed because it wasn't done so clumsily/lazily.
5 - Really good!
6 - Quite fun, but it ran out of steam a little in the second half.
7 - Mediocre at best
8 - Really good! I think it's only one of two this season I've actually enjoyed (along with ep 5), and certainly the only one that's felt up to S1-3 standards.
9 - I enjoyed the Morty story, but the Rick one felt pretty rushed and flimsy. And the ending just had no emotional heft. As we've said previously, this show really needs to change or expand or something, and I guess they're not going to because they have this safety net of the 70(?)-episode commission or because vocal fans turned them off it or whatever.
10 - Watched the second one. For the first half I was like 'Jesus, this is weak. Another full-blown anime pastiche?' Then they just did a sharp turn into a Citadel episode halfway through, which was a fun twist, and it actually felt like they were trying again. The problem is, I could barely follow the serialised stuff! I don't know if that's because I'm not smart enough or I haven't been poring over wikis and fan theories, or if it's because they didn't do good job. But it didn't really feel like it did anything new with the character arcs either - I liked the whole 'I'm only Evil Morty because I'm sick of him' thing, but it doesn't say anything about the Rick-Morty dynamic that the first Evil Morty episode didn't say. I wish they'd spent two episodes on this instead of mostly doing the crow shit. They even could have tied it in loosely with the Birdperson stuff. Oh well, if I ever do a R&M rewatch again I'll be skipping a lot of 4 and 5 but this one at least makes it onto the list, I think.
Okay, just looked at some story discussion, and these are two things I didn't fully grasp from the episode:
a) The Ricks specifically bred Morty to be the perfect sidekick by hooking their daughter up with some loser with the right DNA, i.e. Jerry. (I initially thought this was happening under evil Morty's rule.)
b) The reason all the universes have a super-smart Rick is that he’s walled off those universes, and has been visiting only a small (but still infinite) part of the multiverse in which he dominates – the central finite curve.
I think that was all told in a pretty muddled way, and also I thought there was a line there about how Rick created the Citadel, but it turns out his wife was killed by a Citadel guy? So what's up with that?
S06
1 - Enjoyed it! It was basically a lot of plot tidy-up but it was funny and interesting, and not lazy in a way they could have got away with. It probably worked a lot better with me having done a rewatch of the first three seasons plus the good episodes from the next two.
2 - It was okay. The Roy thing was a really interesting idea but didn't really develop into anything after the first half, and the Die Hard stuff was pretty uninventive. It's not like I mind them riffing on stuff - the Inception/Nightmare On Elm Street mash-up is still great - but when it's like this or the whole 'two crows anime pastiche' thing, it's just so 'South Park did this fifteen years ago'.
3 - I don't mind them doing a slow character-based episode, but it wasn't particularly funny or inventive (shagging your own clone is like plot device 3 in a clone story).
4 - Really enjoyed it! Strong premise, well done. Not laugh out loud funny, and it even has a couple of Futurama moments (dynamite museum, ugh, funny Jewish stereotype robot, what the hell was that? I feel like I was missing some reference there, but still, eesh), but overall very enjoyable.
5 - Enjoyed it. There were a couple of elements that didn't really work, but mostly very funny and cool.
6 - Bad. Just disjointed and tired and unoriginal and not funny at all. Utterly bland autopilot episode.
7 - Okay, but a less funny rerun of the story train ep.
8 - Pretty good, a funny metaphor for toxic online discourse.
9 - Mediocre at best. Total autopilot.
10 - This show is so tired. It's just 100% recycled bits.
S07
1 - I don't think it was in the five worst episodes or anything, but only because of its lack of ambition. It was like a better-written episode of Family Guy. Turns out the new voices are more convincing than the new writing.
2 - A little better just by dint of having a story idea and being a little less lazy, but also just felt like reheated elements of previous episodes while not fully examining its own premise.
The whole show needs some kind of shake-up. The 70-episode commission didn't do it, Roiland leaving didn't do it, maybe if Harmon leaves too that will do it? I guess the issue is that because it's animation, there are no enforced changes. Roles can be recast, characters are much less affected by their actors aging or having other life issues, locations never become unavailable, budget doesn't have as much effect. Simpsons at least had show-runner changes, though - R&M hasn't even had that.
Community losing Harmon for a year and having an awful season, then losing half of its main cast in quick succession probably led to a much better two seasons than if everyone had just stayed put for season 4.
3 - Dull. Doesn't do anything new with the Unity concept, relies mostly on dialogue being read out very fast rather than actually being clever and funny.
4 - Best one in ages. Probably better than the weakest S1-3 episodes. (Can't believe they went to the 'watch someone's whole life in a montage' well again but it was at least a good version of it.)
5 - This was okay, the fight and action choreography was fun and Evil Morty still works well as a character, but as a 'continuity' episode it felt perfunctory. There was nothing to it except moving the continuity on a step. I used to get very excited when these episodes came up but now it just feels like wiki fodder.
6 - Great! Good old taking a fun concept and squeezing it for all it's worth and writing good jokes instead of just making everyone talk real fast. Also, I genuinely forgot Roiland was gone until after I finished watching. (One could argue that the fake clip show format is something they've done a bunch before and is maybe easier to write than a full story but hey it shows they can still do some stuff well.)
7- So bland, felt like an AI wrote it. And almost every single joke had a line of dialogue explaining it directly after. Wondering if that 'rich dickheads thinking 69 is funny' bit was a jab at Musk, though. If so, either it got snuck past Harmon or he's finally come around on 'Musk is a useless tool'.
8 - Bad. Taking something that worked great as a post-credits gag and stretching it out over a whole episode without any extra layers to it. (I did like the post-credits scene to this one, though. Probably bodes poorly for about three seasons' time...)
9 - Another bland one, with some story stuff that didn't really track or at least was muddy. Also another example of the references getting lazier, just like naming and showing the actual thing (here Pokéballs and Pokémon) and that's it.
10 - Pretty good! The 'conquer your fear' mechanic didn't always make complete sense, which it didn't need to have done by the end but was a little distracting in the moment. And wow yet another 'live a whole life' sequence though at least it was quick. But overall interesting and fun.
S08
1 - mixed bag. The 'Summer and Morty have scarred middle-aged minds now' thing works really well, but it all devolves into the usual 'whole life montage'/world where everything revolves around one thing/wacky extreme action stuff, which is fine but directionless.
2 - Fine but very watered-down. It's essentially a standard sci-fi action story with a ton of lazy lampshading and Futurama-level 'comedy bad guy' stuff slathered on top. They can't even get their post-modern riffing right the whole time, they misuse 'foreshadowing' and mix up their unlikely ally tropes. The one smart thing they do is an idea I've had in my back-pocket for ages ('successful heist plan narration continues over the actual heist going tits-up') so even that was a bit annoying!
3 - So, another kind of story they can't do well anymore, the 'serialised side-story without R&M prime'. There was nothing really interesting, funny or satisfying about this one, it was just 'more Ricks and Morties fight'. It didn't really take advantage of the fact that it was all clones with their own stereotypical identities, it didn't move anything on, and there's a weird incongruence where they remind the viewer that all the non-clone Ricks and Morties got pulled back to their own dimensions but then there's a non-clone Rick here with no explanation. There's probably some way it makes sense, but for a show that complains a lot about doing serialised episodes, it sure made its own lore irritatingly complicated.
4 - Some fun ideas, but the lore was just too stuffed full. I know that was the joke, but it still meant that there wasn't any space for actual jokes (outside of 'puke is funny' and 'sex is funny', and if you're too scared to show sex or even nudity uncensored then don't try to make comedy out of showing it). Then there was the weird epilogue with Summer which was also overstuffed with lore, and perhaps that was supposed to be playing on the theme, but it didn't make sense (why has spring break gone on for so long and turned into its own hierarchical society just because Summer has a high drug threshold now?) and again didn't really have any space for jokes. R&M at its height would have just enough moment to moment story information to force you to pay attention but not so much that you couldn't keep up without focusing on anything else or that it stopped feeling like a comedy. It felt smart, but now it feels like they've read that 'you have to be smart to understand R&M' meme and actually found it inspirational.
5 - Mediocre. Picked up a bit with the Mad Mad Mad World stuff, wish they'd gone with that a bit more and actually put some mini-arcs in there and stuff. Otherwise, same old same old. Didn't feel overstuffed, but the jokes weren't that funny and the ideas were pretty bland.
6 - Okay! There were some fun ideas in both stories, and nothing too obnoxious or tired (though obviously we've done de-aging before). It all felt pretty aimless and lightweight, but it was a perfectly pleasant watch.
7 - Some fun stuff, but it did feel like the story train episode mixed with the Numericons (and also that one Black Mirror episode, though that's not their fault and presumably really bummed them out when it premiered) and so many of the post-modern jokes were over-explained or not quite sharp enough. (To just pick a few examples off the top of my head: the grate should not have faded in like magic, it should have been so flush to the floor that it wasn't noticeable until it opened; the line "I literally wrote us into a corner" shouldn't have "literally" in there nor be its own entire comedy beat; the guy with the sports car shouldn't say he forgot how to drive, he should kick a dog or reveal himself to be a paedophile so the theoretical audience doesn't feel bad when he gets hit by the bus.) It was fun to have Snyder and Gunn show up and have some actual comedy acting to do, though it still felt really stilted a lot of the time, and only occasionally in a post-modern intentional way (which still feels like a lack of confidence and serves the episode less well than fixing the problem).
8 - Pretty good! It felt like something they hadn't really done before (what if some Jerries were pro-active enough to not just get stuck in Jerry daycare, and they had their own Rick style social dynamics), there were some good jokes, it wasn't over-stuffed or too try-hard or lazy or anything. It didn't get out of third gear at any point, so I can't really put it up there with S1-3 or the two good episodes of each subsequent season, but it was a fun watch.
9 - Filler. A couple of okay story ideas raced through with overloaded shout-don't-show plotting rather than anything particularly funny or interesting.
10 - Pretty good! Probably the best of the season, a smart Kaufmanny/Nolanny story with no gratuitous bullshit in it. Only drawbacks are a) very little comedy, which would be fine -even good - for them to do occasionally, if it weren't for the fact that the comedy episodes comprising the rest of the season were mostly unfunny and b) the whole 'multiple versions of a character' thing is so tired now, especially when there are two of them in the main cast - the show needs to do a moratorium on it for a while, get back to Cronenbergs and bug cops and bird people (not literally, just that kind of thing, as bringing back old characters is getting dangerously regular and low-rewarding).
So yeah, this is the first season ever to not have a single episode in it up to S1-3 standards.
