Rick and Morty is back this weekend with its long-anticipated third season. Set to debut this Sunday at 11:30 PM EST on Cartoon Network, it has a lot to live up to. Between its immaculate first two seasons, a protracted hiatus that gave everybody plenty of time to nurture their favorite fan theories and a surprise episode on April Fool’s Day to cap off last season’s cliffhanger, expectations for the series have never been higher.
That’s not even mentioning the amazing Season 3 trailer that dropped last month, teasing dozens of potential story and episode possibilities. From the absurdity of Pickle Rick and the promise of an incredibly dark Mad Max spoof where Summer unceremoniously kills off a dying alien, it’s unlikely that even a series this dedicated to the bizarre can pull them all off in just one season.
Besides, there are still all of those loose ends dangling about from the first two seasons. What’s the deal with Evil Morty? Did he really fabricate his backstory in The Rickshank Redemption? Will it really take Rick nine seasons to get more of that McDonald’s Mulan Szechuan dipping sauce?
It seems likely that series creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon will continue to do in Season 3 what they’ve been doing since day one. Like the opening credit montage, most of the clips we saw from the trailer are merely story suggestions, rather than anything set hard in stone for this season.
They’re concepts that they might bring up in the future, although they are just as likely to leave them on the cutting room floor. It’s like Jerry giving birth on the dining room table or Rick and his grandkids flying madly away from Cthulhu: all perfectly valid possibilities that the series may or may not have the time to explore in further depth.
Rick and Morty is actually in an incredibly strong position right now as a franchise. Not only have they banked a ton of good will from their run thus far, but they’ve built up an incredibly strong internal mythology that lets them go in virtually any direction they might want to, even on an episode-by-episode basis.
This is why they can include something as on-the-nose silly as Pickle Rick in a Season they promise will be “the darkest year of [their] adventures.” This is why they can show Morty slowly strangle some nameless background character while Rick robs the poor guy, and yet also have the stated end-game of the series be bringing back a promotional fast food dipping sauce that nobody remembered until they brought it up in the last episode. That’s the impossible degree of flexibility that the show has fostered over its first two seasons.
So forget The Inhumans. Rick and Morty is the most exciting thing hitting the small screen this year.
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