Posted in: Adult Swim, Preview, Rick and Morty, TV, YouTube | Tagged: Adult Swim, Evil Morty, rick and morty, rick prime
Rick and Morty Reveals More Details on Evil Morty's Origin Story
Adult Swim UK released the cold open to Rick and Morty S07E05: "Unmortricken," connecting three very key previous Evil Morty episodes.
Article Summary
- Adult Swim UK posted the cold open to Rick and Morty S07E05, revealing more of Evil Morty's origins.
- The episode connects key events from three prior Evil Morty episodes.
- Co-creator Dan Harmon and team discuss the impact of Rick Prime's takedown.
- We also have a look ahead to Rick and Morty S07E06.
Adult Swim's Rick and Morty S07E05: "Unmortricken" is definitely the best episode of an already-impressive seventh season – and could end up being one of the best episodes of the Emmy Award-winning series' run. By the time the credits rolled, Rick brutally eliminated his Rick Prime problem (imagine if there was a switch?), Evil Morty elevated his "big bad" street cred a whole helluva lot, and we learned that there was a deeper tragedy to Rick losing Diane – that he lost her across all of infinity, courtesy of Rick Prime. But you don't need to look any further than the episode's cold open to be impressed with what this episode was able to accomplish – offering us backstory & connecting some very important Evil Morty "dots" leading up to S01E10 "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind" (directed by Stephen Sandoval, written by Ryan Ridley), and then developing the threads that tied that episode together with S03E07 "The Ricklantis Mixup" (directed by Dominic Polcino, written by Dan Guterman & Ryan Ridley) and S05E10 "Rickmurai Jack" (directed by Jacob Hair, written by Jeff Loveness & Scott Marder).
For the record? Leaving it to us to imagine what horrors Morty was inflicting on Rick after that garage door closed was a masterstroke because our imaginations give us chills every time we see it or think about it. Here's a look at the cold open:
in the following "Inside The Episode," series co-creator Dan Harmon, director Jacob Hair, and writers James Siciliano & Albro Lundy discuss what taking down Rick Prime means moving forward for our Rick, how Evil Morty showed himself to be the show's real overarching nemesis and more:
Could it be Morty to the rescue in S07E06: "Rickfending Your Mort"? Well, it's not like he trying – but we're not sure invoking those "Morty Adventure" cards is the kinda thing that Rick needs at this moment – or maybe it is?
While keeping themselves on spoiler lockdown heading into this past weekend's episode, series Harmon and Marder explained 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."