Rick and Morty Season 3 Episode 2 “Rickmancing The Stone”

Rick, Morty, and Summer deal with Jerry and Beth’s divorce in their own post-apocalyptic ways.

The brilliance of Rick and Morty is that the show takes very basic human things, like dealing with your emotions during family member’s divorce, and plays them against very nonbasic backgrounds. In “Rickmancing The Stone”, Rick and his grandkids do some soul searching in a Mad Max but more bondage-y hellscape.

Rick, Morty, and Summer are on an adventure in a post-apocalyptic world, looking for a certain green rock that is very valuable. Rick finds a small rock and is ready to leave, but then the marauders reveal that they have a giant green rock, so Rick wants to stay so he can steal it. Summer and Morty stay as well because the environment provides the perfect place to deal with their feelings in the wake of their parent’s divorce.

This whole episode, in fact, is pretty much exclusively about the collapse of Beth and Jerry’s marriage. The two have been through a lot together, but they never quite fit. In season 2, we saw just how dangerously codependent the two are. Jerry is ineffective, morally driven, and a bit of a coward with low self-esteem. Beth is the opposite, as she is smart and brave, but her high opinion of herself has always left her feeling like she’s underachieved, and the main cause of that has been Jerry…and maybe Summer.

Summer is the focus of this episode, and it speaks to the strength of the characters and writing that we can have these episodes where the title characters aren’t the focus and it still works out great. Summer has always had issues about her parent’s relationship, mainly that they are possibly only together because they accidentally got pregnant with her.

So when the relationship finally crumbles and a divorce is pending, Summer looks for any reason to get out of the house, so she dives head first into a nihilistic world where she can kill everyone, hook up with the lead marauder Hemorrhage (voiced by Joel McHale), and process her feelings.

Morty gets injected with the muscles (and muscle memories) of a giant disembodied arm, and the arm takes over and starts killing the crap out of everyone in the Blood Dome. (Some would call it a Thunderdome, but save it for the Semantic-Dome, E.B. White). Morty is the deadliest person on the planet until his arm has a muscle memory flashback and seeks revenge on the people who killed him and his family.

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Morty is more accustomed to everything being so emotionally messed up after 2 seasons of adventures with Rick, so he even acknowledges out loud that he’s clearly dealing with some issues by letting his new arm smash people.

Rick, who is the actual cause of Beth and Jerry’s divorce, even recognizes that he’s having a hard time dealing with the fallout of their relationship. It’s interesting to see Rick struggle between being smart enough to know that his connection with his family will be his downfall, and being unable to stop those feelings anyway.

In episode 1, Rick makes it very vocally known that he doesn’t care about Summer or Morty and that he can just go to another universe where they’re alive if he wanted to. And yet, he still devised a plan that involved saving both of them from death. Of course, that was followed up with his Szechuan Sauce rant where he tells Morty that the only reason he saved them is so Beth wouldn’t be mad.

But again, in this episode, Rick has the chance to leave his grandkids behind. He even creates robots to take their place while the three of them are gone so that Beth doesn’t get worried. But in the end, he goes back, helps Morty kill a slave lord, and breaks up Summer’s relationship with Hemorrhage by using cable television.

That’s twice that Rick could have abandoned his grandkids and just gotten new ones, and it’s twice that he hasn’t done it. Will we see more of Rick growing soft as the show goes on? Or is it specifically just because Rick is lazy and doesn’t want to find new Mortys or Summers for his current universe?

Next episode we get PICKLE RICK so I think we’re all excited to learn 1. Why? 2. How? And 3. What?