Ok, so this didn’t take as long as a I thought.
The pilot is relatively simple. Before we go any further, however, I would like to say something which I should have said in the OP: SPOILER ALERT!!!
This whole thread is one gargantuan spoiler.
There, now that that’s out of the way, watch this:
Rick and Morty - Pilot.
If you want to browse all episodes ← well now you can.
I’m sorry I couldn’t get a link to a youtube video, thereby allowing you to watch it without leaving ILP, but most of the R&M pilots that managed to get on youtube are low quality (half of them, for some reason, have the tempo of the characters’ voices raised).
Anyway, on with…
Rick and Morty - S1E1 - Pilot
The pilot was kind of shallow. Not much to dig into yet. Not a big surprise, mind you–when you release a pilot, you do want to be careful not to go too extreme–not at first.
But I really like how it starts out: Rick comes into Morty’s room completely drunk. Right away, this must have reminded me of myself (I don’t quite remember). I’m a conditional alcoholic (conditional on caffeine). You can read all about it here. ← That’s a personal issue. I don’t have anything philosophical to make out of it. Maybe someone else can.
Right away, I see symbols of American Conservatism: Rick’s ship has something almost resembling the American flag sticking out of the back (I take it the creators must have had to deal with certain legal considerations about putting an actual American flag on Rick’s ship, but that’s shear speculation).
Jerry waltzes in on Beth while she’s performing life-determining surgery on a horse. He wants to go out to lunch with her. She kinda gives him the tone that “now’s not a good time”–he appears oblivious. He proceeds to walk out but “accidentally” drops a brochure for a senior’s home. ← All of a sudden, we see why he wanted to take Beth out to lunch.
^^ We’re going to see a lot of this from Jerry. I didn’t quite see it myself until the last episode of season II, but once I saw it, and watched the pilot once again, I now see it was there from the beginning: Jerry doesn’t know how to love. He expects that every kind act should be followed by a reward. He didn’t come by to take Beth out for lunch just to spend some time with her, he wanted to slip the idea of putting Rick, Beth’s father, into a home (not to mention the fact that he did it anyway–got the idea of the senior’s home across to Beth–when he got the hint that lunch wasn’t in the cards).
However, to be fair to Jerry, there will be times when he pulls through and becomes a “real man”. They’re far and few between, but it’s in him.
Furthermore, when Beth finally does have some time, and talks with Jerry, we find that she’s not so virtuous either. They have a relatively meaningful talk, and Jerry finally sees it from her point of view (that Rick, Morty’s grandpa, is Morty’s only friends). He says “I suppose you’re right.” Beth, in turn, says in a rather sarcastic tone “Uh, yeeeaaah, I’m smart. I am my father’s daughter, after all.” (or something to that effect). ← So Jerry concedes, sees it from her point of view, and she responds with sarcasm. Like Jerry, we will be seeing a lot of this from Beth.
Then there’s Rick and Morty’s first adventure:
There was a short little speech Rick gave to Morty upon arriving in what Rick called an “alternate evolutionary timeline” (presumably still Earth, but where evolution went in a wildly different direction?). I’m not going to quote characters verbatim (unless I happen to have it memorized), but Rick said something along the lines of: I’ve been through a lot of dangerous adventures, Morty, and seen some pretty crazy shit. I know what it’s like because I’ve been there. So just stick with me and you’ll be all right. I’ll get us through this. ( ← Probably not my best Rick impression
).
^^ This speech pretty much sets the theme for the whole series. This speech pretty much defines their relation and their rolls with respect to each other. Morty defies this quite a bit in the series, usually on principled grounds, and this almost always gets him in trouble. But of course, Rick always comes around to get him out of trouble. He’s really very unforgiving of Morty when he does this (and quite frankly abusive), going so far as to rename “taking a shit” to “Morty” ( ← as in: “I’m going to take a big Morty.” ← but that’s in another episode. ), but he always proves to be the good guy who gets Morty’s ass out of trouble while everyone else would either have not given a flying hoot or have been trying to kill/hurt him. The idea, we are lead to believe, is that everything would go just swimmingly if Morty would simply listen to everything Rick says (of course, the series has several examples of how Rick, with his arrogantly cocky attitude, is the one to goof up but somehow always finds a way to blame Morty ← And that’s another thing about Rick we’ll learn–that he has a tendency to place the blame wherever’s convenient for him, and he does this through his determinism). ← Once again, the theme of the ruthless, greedy capitalist comes to mind–seen, of course, through a conservatist’s eye.
As we get to know the character, we get a sense that he brings Morty into these situations in the first place because he honestly believes he can easily get himself and his grandson out of any sticky situation whatsoever, and all due to his superior intellect. Yes, he is incredibly cocky (which is what I love about him!), and his ego is blown way out of proportion, but he’s not all together mistaken about himself. He is smart enough to get himself and his grandson out of any sticky situation–not as smoothly as he’d like to think, but he gets the job done–but it’s these sloppy imperfections that occasionally get in through the blind-spots that his ego creates for him that end up hurting Morty more than it’s worth.
We get a perfect example of this when Morty falls off the edge of the cliff (because he didn’t realize he had to turn the boots on), and ended up writhing on the ground in extreme pain, his legs mangled and broken. Right away, Rick blamed him: “You have to turn the boots on, Morty!” We also get a sense of Rick’s insensitivity here. The first thing he says, after blaming Morty, is: I know you’re in a lot of pain, Morty, but can you still help me? Finally he resolves to go to another dimension where they have an instant cure for “mangled legs” and bring it back. There’s a good 5 second wait time while Morty lays there moaning in agony, and it makes you wonder: could Rick have returned instantly if he cared to? Anyway, he fixes Morty’s legs, and Morty says that he “never felt better in his whole life.” ← I don’t know if we’re supposed to take that literally or not, but it’s a perfect example of what I said above: how Morty will praise Rick, or at least marvel at Rick’s work, when he saves the day.
Beth is surprised to find that Rick has been taking Morty out of school to go on his adventures with him, and she is furious. Jerry, while also furious, plays a petty game of “see, I told you so,” with Beth. Yes, Morty may have a “friend”, but that’s definitely not worth taking him out of school for. It’s decided (somehow) that Rick should leave. But Rick, of course, finds a way to manipulate his way back into staying (mainly appealing to Jerry’s “wearing the pants” in the household).
There’s a weird sequence at the end (which I swear has hidden messages in it
) with Morty writhing on the garage floor in a semi-vegetated state with Rick looming over him talking about “Rick and Morty for 100 years” or something and “www.rickandmortyadventures.com”. ← I didn’t remember that sequence being at the end of the pilot first time around. I think it’s because the first time around was on youtube; they must have cut it short.
^^ Now, besides the possible marketing ploy (i.e. go to rickandmortyadventures.com*), I came up with an interpretation of this scene which I’m not sure is obvious to everyone: those seeds which Morty has up his ass did indeed have the effects that Rick said (made him really smart then made him really dumb), but there’s an additional effect Rick did not tell him, and that’s this: in the dumb phase, where Morty is writhing on the ground in kind of a semi-vegetated state, he can be brainwashed extremely easily. This weird speech that Rick gives is not just Rick mentally masturbating but mentally programming Morty to become his side kick for all the adventures they will go on. ← That was the whole point of getting the seeds (it’s kind of suspicious, isn’t it, that while Rick expresses disappointment that the seeds have already dissolved in Morty’s system, he’s taking it rather lightly for something that was that important to his research).
Wow, this turned out to be more of a character analysis than a philosophical one. ← But like I always say, that’s fodder for depth philosophy.