Well, if we’re done discussing the metaphysics of consciousness and the cosmos, let’s move on to…
Rick and Morty - S1E2 - Lawnmower Dog
Check it out: Rick and Morty - Lawnmower Dog.
This one’s not too exciting. The first few in the series aren’t. They’re kind of getting the point across that these are the kinds of adventures Rick and Morty are going to go on, but they’re kind of isolated and self-contained adventures at first. Later we’ll see some continuity between the episodes, at least continuity of themes and a thicker plot line.
In fact, Rick doesn’t use his portal gun until Episode 5: Meeseeks and Destroy ← That’s when things start to pick up. The first three episodes after the pilot feature other ways besides dimension hopping that Rick and Morty go on adventures, each different, sort of signifying that this isn’t going to be just about Rick and Morty’s crazy adventures through different dimensions.
The current episode, for example, is a spoof on Inception–Rick invents a dream device that, when stuck in Mr. Goldenfold’s ear (Morty’s math teacher), causes him to fall asleep and dream, and meanwhile, similar devices are stuck in Rick and Morty’s ears, and they too fall asleep and dream–the devices coordinating their dreams together such that they experience being in each other’s presence in each of their respective dreams. They go several layers deep in dreams, of course–5 layers deep to be exact (not sure how many layers deep DeCaprio went). ← All to convince Morty’s teacher to give him straight A’s in math so that Rick can continue to pull him from school behind his parents’ backs.
^ But that’s all we’ll ever see of Rick’s inception device throughout the whole series. ← An isolated episode.
While Rick and Morty are gallivanting through dream worlds, Snuffles, the family dog, is getting smarter. Jerry bargains with Rick and convinces him to invent a device that makes dogs smarter (maybe other animals too ← I don’t know). Jerry’s sick and tired of the dog being too dumb to figure out not to pee on the carpet. So after whipping up something in 5 seconds from kitchen utensil and such, Rick comes out with a helmet that, when applied to Snuffles, makes him smarter. Then they go on their inception adventure. While they’re gone, Snuffles gets smarter… and smarter, and smarter, like Lawnmower Man. He eventually invents a walking mobility contraption and a voice synthesizer so that he can speak to humans and possibly overpower them with electronic and hydrolic appendages:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGFev2BmnhE[/youtube]
This happens quite often in sit coms: there’s the main plot line (inception) and then there’s a parallel secondary plot line (lawnmower dog), and the two needn’t have any relation to each other, but in this case, I suspect there is a connection (I can’t quite put my finger on it). The title of the episode is “Lawnmower Dog” even though that subplot is the minor one (or maybe it isn’t, maybe that’s just my perception, but it would be odd if the main characters, Rick and Morty, weren’t involved in the main plot line). Also, after Rick and Morty come back from their dream escapades, securing straight A’s for Morty in math, they go on one more dream escapade into Snuffles’ dream in order to convince him not to enslave humans. ← So there is a connection, but not a “moral of the story” so to speak–they just happen to tie two plot lines together in a trivial/meaningless way.
Actually, come to think of it, the moral might be this: the theme of the Frankenstein Monster will recur more than just a few times in the series. This is one example: Rick invents the intelligence boosting helmet for Snuffles, and while Rick has his back turned, Snuffles becomes a monster. Just like young Victor Frankenstein, Rick completely neglects his responsibility for creating the monster–he obliviously allows it to go so far while he and Morty completely ignore it for the sake of doing something equally irresponsible: helping Morty cheat in school. ← But this is not entirely fair. At least young Victor was aware of the damage he created and ran away from the problem in order to escape his responsibility. Rick, on the other hand, was oblivious during his absence. On the other hand, when they returned, Rick did say to Morty:
“Well, it’s possible that your dog became self-aware and made modifications on the cognition amplifier then turned on Jerry, Beth, and Summer after learning about humanity’s cruel subjugation to his species, but your guess is as good as mine, Morty.”
…indicating that he might have been aware of this possibility all along, but then again, he only whips up this spiel after seeing the dogs surrounding the Smith’s house and shipping boxes in and out. But in the end, Rick does handle the situation (through inception on Snuffles), which, though dampening the theme of the irresponsible Victor Frankenstein, highlights the other theme I mentioned before, namely that for all the damage Rick causes, he still pulls through and saves the day in the end. So maybe the theme is that while Rick’s escapades seem irresponsible on the surface, they can be put to good use in solving the problem that they, in a sense, helped create.
Another major theme that shows up in this episode (unrelated to the Frankenstein theme) is Jerry’s arrogance–we catch a glimpse of Jerry’s character in this episode (presumably to set the stage for how we’re supposed to feel about Jerry throughout the series) as kind of having a “master” mentality with respect to Snuffles (and by implication, with respect to his entire estate–including wife and children ← You know, the man of the house). This is not to be confused with Nietzsche’s master morality, which might be more characteristic of Rick, master of his own destiny. But Jerry is definitely portrayed in this episode as the cruel master over a victimized Snuffles. This theme actually picks up and goes to extremes, touching on political issues like slavery and racism.
After creating a whole supply line of intelligence enhancing dog helmets, Snuffles manages to form an organized army of dog rebels, all of whom have, so to speak, awoken to the horrible truth of their state of slavery, and work almost effortlessly towards overtaking the White House and (we are to presume) all humanity. If Rick represents the Conservative’s hero: the capitalist, then Snuffles represents the typical stereotype of the Liberal (seen from the point of view of the conservative creators of Rick and Morty, or so I speculate)–in a position to righteously rebel against an evil oppressor.
In an effort to play the dogs at their own game, Jerry thinks he has a clever strategy. He walks in front of their guns, stock piled in the corner of the Smith’s house, whips open his fly and pees on them, saying “See that?! I’m peeing all over your special guns! That means I own them!” ( ← Kind of homoerotic, now that I think about it… wait til we get to Total Rickall). But this does nothing but subject his face to being shoved by Snuffles into his own pee, as Jerry did to Snuffles at the beginning of this episode. ← To me, this hinted at Jerry’s faith in stereotypes, adding to his arrogance.
Morty, on the other hand, is seen in this episode in a whole other light. While Jerry is pictured as the cruel slave-driving master, Morty is pictured as Snuffles’ only friend. He protects Snuffles from his dad when Jerry pushes Snuffles’ face into his own pee, and near the end, Snuffles tells Morty that he will spare his testicles while the rest of the world will be neutered and that Morty will be his best friend and sit by his side. Morty reluctantly accepts, on the one hand feeling relieved, but on the other, worrying for his family. ← Morty here is depicted as the only worthy person, morally speaking, and this will show in later episodes. If Rick is the hero we look up to and want to be, Morty is the character we love and want to praise.
Anyway, to wrap it up, Rick and Morty come back from their successful mission to get Morty straight A’s in math to find themselves stuck in the middle of a dog rebellion, and being kept hostage in the Smith’s house. Rick comes up with the ingenious idea of incepting Snuffles with the idea that the superior thing to do, the high road to take, would be to let the humans free and find a better world in which to live using Rick’s dimension hopping portal gun ( ← So I lied–Rick does use his portal gun in this episode, but not to go on one of his crazy adventures… and technically we only see the portal’s open, not Rick using his gun.) ← So there you go, Rick comes back to find the mess that he’s made and uses his inception technology to clean it up.
(Not sure what Mr. Goldenfold did with the inception device stuck in his ear, or Snuffles for that matter, or when they found it–assuming they did at all–and it makes me wonder: did they ever explain this in the actual movie Inception, or did people just wake up not noticing the thing in their ear.)
Finally, I just wanted to point out that while this episode counts as the first “isolated” adventure, it is continuous with the first in the sense that this one in particular is a kind of “preliminary” adventure. Rick has to find a way to fill Morty into the roll of side-kick without his parents finding out he’s pulling him from school, which is a condition Jerry and Beth imposed on Rick at the end of the pilot, and in reaction to which Rick sarcastically placated Jerry with the “you’re the man of the house” bit. ← Well, he had reason to be sarcastic. But more to the point, this inception thing turns out to be a preliminary necessity that got in the way because Morty’s parents found out he was missing school–Rick wouldn’t have done this otherwise.