Good sci-fi is hard to come by these days. With its futurist heyday long since come and gone, great works within the genre are simply not forthcoming in the new millennia. Sure, we might occasionally stumble across an Arrival or an Ex Machina, but those are both few and far between.
Sometimes, though, we have Rick and Morty. One of the few modern works of genre fiction that is as unerringly excellent as it is popular, the animated sitcom is the perfect blend of high concept rigmarole and nihilistic ennui: all wrapped up in a series that has consistently been one of the funniest things on TV since 2013.
Both to the delight and frustration of fans the world over, the series’ creators have opted for lengthy hiatuses between seasons: keeping the writing quality high by not rushing an unfinished episode into production. Season 2 ended in 2015. Two years later, an early first episode for season 3, wrapping up the previous season’s cliffhanger, made a surprise debut.
That was three months ago, and we’ve still got nothing to go off of since.
That is, we didn’t until today. The series’ creators hinted on social media earlier this week that a big announcement was coming concerning the show. As many suspected, that announcement was the next episode’s release date: Sunday, July 30th.
Similar to the show’s now-iconic opening credits sequence, the Season 3 trailer reveals a number of situations and plot points that may or may not come to pass in the upcoming season. I mean, we never saw Rick steal a baby Cthulhu with his grandkids, or stumble in on Jerry being distracted by a robot version of Morty.
That grain of salt aside, however, it looks like we’re going to have a lot of fun this time around. Between the extended Pickle Rick gag — carried over from a previously used promo for the show — and the introduction of Seal Team Rick — apparently left over from the destruction of the Counsel of Ricks in “The Rickshank Redemption” — there’s a lot of comedic gold to sift through in just these 90 seconds alone.
Interspliced between scenes from the surprise, April Fool’s Day release of the season’s first episode are shots of Summer teaming up with a cybernetic version of herself and Rick refuses to respond to a distress beacon because he “refuse[s] to answer a literal call to adventure.” It teases a return to Anatomy Park, an intestinal amusement park housing the most devastating diseases known to man in an obvious parody of the movie Jurassic Park.
Walking alone in a desert, Summer approaches a mortally wounded alien crawling desperately toward her. He begs her to kill him, causing her to flippantly agree, “but not because [he] told [her] so.” Morty, now sporting a monstrously over-sized, muscular arm strangles a man to death while Rick loots through the man’s lab full of beakers and equipment. And just before the announcer reveals the next episode’s release date, he proclaims that “only a show this smart could be this stupid.”
I feel as though I’ve gone through as much Rick and Morty withdrawal as I can reasonably take. It’s high time to get schwifty again.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DeAw6aXHzcY%22+frameborder%3D%220%22+allow%3D%22accelerometer%3B+encrypted-media%3B+gyroscope%3B+picture-in-picture%22+allowfullscreen%3E%3C
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