Posted in: Adult Swim, Preview, Rick and Morty, Trailer, TV | Tagged: Adult Swim, dan harmon, rick and morty, Scott Marder, season 7

Rick and Morty: Harmon, Marder on Now Being Right Time for Rick Prime

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon & showrunner Scott Marder on making Rick Prime work and now being a good time for Rick to have a nemesis.

Well, no one can say that Adult Swim's Rick and Morty is trying to hide the fact that this weekend's going to be a huge, spoiler-filled, canon-busting episode – but just how big could S07E05: "Unmortricken" end up being? The aired promo admitted right up front that there wouldn't be much to see of the episode because of all of the spoiler potential – and no early screeners are being sent out. We're assuming that Rick Prime makes a return – but could we also see the return of Evil Morty? Could we end up seeing Rick Prime capturing our Rick – and then attempting to take over his life? Seeing if/how the family, Dr. Wong, The President, and others figure it out could lead to some fascinating fallout. While keeping themselves on spoiler lockdown for the next episode, series co-creator Dan Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder did explain to Gizmodo why now is the right time for Rick to have a nemesis – and for the backstory behind it to play out the way that it did.

Harmon: Staff Writers Keep the Canon Going: "The great thing about 'Rick and Morty' is that a lot of our staff are former 'Rick and Morty' writer's assistants—that whole tradition goes back to Mike McMahan before he abandoned us for his 'Star Trek' show ['Lower Decks']; he was the original first 'Rick and Morty' writer's assistant who left us at the EP level, executive producer. We've continued that tradition, and that makes these people not only workhorses but they are huge 'Rick and Morty' fans from the get-go. I'm so grateful to have people on the show that are like, 'Look, I'm on this show because I love this show, and I've loved it since the beginning—and have you noticed that we haven't given any red meat to the avid fans?' We'll be working on multiple seasons at once, so I won't notice. I'll just be like, 'Oh, have we not done Evil Morty in a while?' I have this general allergy to canonical stuff because I feel like it'll happen anyway, and therefore leaning into it is like leaning into gravity and falling down when your job is to jump and soar. But yeah, I was asleep at the wheel. [It was] our passionate writers that were like, 'No, it's time to resurface this.' And the fun thing is that the timing of it works out so that it's going to be smack in the middle of this season."

Marder on Making Rick Prime Work: "I feel like Harmon can feel our enthusiasm. He greenlit us doing [episode] 510, ["Rickmurai Jack"], which was obviously a bonkers, canonical one. That one was so crazy that we felt like there was suddenly so much pressure on having to solve that cliffhanger in season six that we just kept breaking and breaking that premiere over and over again. But we eventually landed on that idea that everyone gets sucked back to their original dimension, and it felt like it created such an organic idea: the guy that originally blew up Rick's original [wife] Diane and [daughter] Beth will get sucked back to his too, which was presenting Rick with the best opportunity to get that guy. It was just cool that we had a bad guy that had been in plain sight, that we had an organic idea that kind of helped him resurface. And we just loved that the story didn't really need to feel like it was retconned. It was always sort of there; we just sort of brought it forward. We were excited to have that guy that was always kind of available to us."

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