Rick and Morty season 4, episode 3 recap: One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty

This week, Rick pulls off the ultimate heist on Rick and Morty.

Rick and Morty are out on a Temple of Doom sort of graverobbing adventure, completely bypassing the boobytraps and the fun by wearing impenetrable anti-boobie suits. Rick is taking no chances about submitting to any overused adventure movie clichés. Unfortunately, the grave they’re robbing has already been robbed by a heist artist named Miles Knightley (Justin Theroux), whose adventures are “60% putting a crew together and 40% revealing that the heist already happened.”

They go to confront Miles at a thing called Heist Con, but they need a crew to get in as professionals and Rick refuses to buy fan passes because it would be a “symbolic expression of support for this genre.” So what he does, which is definitely not any kind of heist genre convention, is put a crew together in a slick montage of random acquaintances basically saying, “You son of a bitch, I’m in.” They enter Heist Con and then Rick ditches them.

Rick confronts Miles Knightley as he addresses a fan panel. Rick gets booed but it means nothing to him because he’s “seen what makes you cheer.” Miles challenges Rick to a Heist Off to steal the Crystal Skull of Horowitz. The loser has to join the winner’s crew. Rick accepts, but as Miles introduces his crew (three of which belonged to Rick to help him get into Heist Con), he reveals in another slick montage that he already stole the skull. But when Miles goes to pull the skull out of the bag and comes back with a handful of poop, Rick reveals that he actually has the skull.

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In a much less exciting montage on Rick and Morty, Rick builds a robot called Heistotron and has it calculate Miles’s plan and adds a double-cross and a switcheroo. Rick sits at the convention center bar while Morty works on his heist movie screenplay (which involves a plan where the heroes bake cake-based body double corpses?). Meanwhile, the Knightley Eight are “recruited” by Heistotron via mind control darts to heist the Crystal Skull. All Rick did was write an algorithm based on two heist movies he slept through to automate a joyless process Miles calls art. Burn.

Not only that, Heistotron recruited the entire convention to Rick’s crew. Things go drastically wrong when Rick orders his new crew to steal every inch of Heist Con and they end up tearing Miles apart to steal him. Heistotron goes rogue, carrying on with his mission to pull off heists. He must be stopped, or else all sentient life will be absorbed by the never-ending assembly of a meaningless crew. Rick hates heist movies and the crew assembly is the worst part – so he’s gonna need the help of some old friends…(cue crew assembly montage)

Oooweee, welcome back, Mr. Poopybutthole! Rick and Morty recruit their old friend, who is now a Professor teaching African American Women’s Studies, by hiring his students to attack him to test his martial arts skills. He’s still got it. They also recruit the god Hephaestus, a magical ventriloquist who throws her voice via arrow called Ventriloquiver, and Elon Tusk (played by guest star Elon Musk). Rick didn’t want to work with regular Elon because he can be a little controlling, but Elon Tusk isn’t his opposite. He’s just Elon Musk with tusks.

Meanwhile, Heistotron begins heisting whole planets using incredibly contrived methods. Rick needs to stop him, but any plan he makes will be canceled out by the reveal that his plan was part of Heistotron’s plan all along. So instead, Rick’s crew will be taking their orders from Randotron, a robot whose algorithm is derived from three David Lynch movies that Rick pretended to like to make his friends shut up. That’s me, by the way. I’m Rick’s friends who won’t shut up about David Lynch. If their behavior is random enough, they should be able to walk through Heistotron’s lazily contrived bullshit like it’s not even there.

While Rick plays Minecraft waiting for the perfectly random time to start his plan, he realizes that the Earth has already been stolen by Heistotron. But that’s the best random time to start the plan, so Randotron shoots them with mind control darts that set them each out on random tasks that eventually lead them to Heistotron’s space station control room. Rick and Heistotron reveal to each other a series of switches and double-crosses in which Heistotron and Randotron traded places. Heistotron is designed to explode after reaching six degrees of contrivance and self-destructs. But the last reveal is that Heistotron really did get the last switcheroo and has been disguised as Randotron the whole time.

So now Rick and Heistotron get into a recursive argument about who programmed who to believe what. Did Heistotron program Rick with his nanobots to believe that he’s immune to Heistotron’s nanobots when he’s not, or did Rick program Heistotron to believe that and is actually immune to his nanobots? Two hours later, Rick finally gets the last word and Heistotron self-destructs with the realization that the only perfect heist is the one that was never written.

Morty needs to get to a pitch meeting with Netflix by 3:30, so Rick portals him to it and says they can put the Earth back later. Netflix is pretty interested in Morty’s heist script and Rick is unusually supportive. But as Morty begins to pitch his script, he loses enthusiasm as it devolves into a series of all the most basic heist movie conventions and clichés. Morty says he’s starting to think that heists are really dumb now and can’t quite put his finger on why, but he’d like to go.

As Morty leaves, the Netflix executives comment on how it’s almost like someone stole his enthusiasm for his idea without him even knowing about it. Cut to Rick, who two weeks earlier is getting sick of Morty skipping out on their adventures to work on his script. Rick plans to put a stop to it, but Beth warns him that if Morty ever gives up on a single one of his dreams it better because of his own disillusionment. Morty, now completely disillusioned, just says that he’ll go on adventures with Rick and do whatever he wants to do forever. Who needs dreams?

Post credits, Rick, Morty, and Mr. Poopybutthole sit on the roof watching a storm come in. Mr. Poopybutthole is confused about Rick’s plan to test his martial arts skills by hiring his students to attack him. Rick trained them, but it didn’t take long because they all showed a unique aptitude for martial arts, perhaps connected to their interest in African American Women’s Studies and Maya Angelou’s personification of both acquiescence and perseverance. That’s a connection that Mr. Poopybutthole would have liked to explore in his class. Too bad he got fired for attacking his students.

Oh man, as a film nerd this episode was so enjoyable to watch. It both subverts and celebrates a certain genre of film, analyzing and criticizing it’s conventions and taking pleasure in exaggerating the clichés into parody. The fact that a heist movie could potentially be reduced to an infinite series of double-crosses and switcheroos lends this plot an added level of absurdity, especially considering that the kind of foresight needed to execute those plot twists would be almost supernatural. What a joy to watch!

What did you think of this episode of Rick and Morty? Be sure to tell us in the comment section below!