During the Rick and Morty panel at Comic-Con 2016, co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland dropped some hints that Rick and Morty Season 3 will be more serial in format than the first two seasons.
So far Rick and Morty has largely eschewed the television trend toward serialized storytelling. Even as episodic shows like South Park have tried out serialization, Rick and Morty has largely constrained itself to a new, discrete adventure in every episode. The only two real exceptions are the season finales, each of which ended on a cliffhanger. The Rick and Morty Season 2 premiere opened where Season 1 ended, with time frozen after a wild party. Presumably the Season 3 premiere of Rick and Morty will continue or resolve the Season 2 cliffhanger, which saw Rick locked up in Galactic Federation prison.
At the Comic-Con panel, Dan Harmon described two episodes of Rick and Morty Season 3 that we’re given to believe come from mid-season. One episode is about Rick’s alcoholism without ever mentioning alcohol, the other is full of Rick drinking without being thematically about alcoholism. Though presented as separate episodes and separate narratives, Harmon clearly sees the two as complementary stories.
In case you want to hear for yourself, here’s the Comic-Con panel. Harmon begins describing the episodes at 18:00:
Roiland chimes in, providing for a clip from one of the two episodes. It’s during his intro that we get a hint of more serialization than the show has previously seen. “I’m going to navigate around any serialized stuff,” Roiland said. “So Rick is trying to get out of going to a place he doesn’t want to go to and he ends up getting into quite a...”
“Rick turns himself into a pickle,” Harmon finishes.
Here’s that clip from Season 3:
It’s certainly not much, but Roiland worrying about navigating around serialized stuff suggests some fundamentally different storytelling to come in Season 3. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since the end of Rick and Morty Season 3 radically changed the series’ overall dynamic by putting Earth itself under the control of an alien government. The line between Morty’s “normal” home life and intergalactic adventuring is beginning to blur.
In even better news, Rick and Morty Season 3 may ditch “Interdimensional Cable.” If you’re unfamiliar, both seasons have featured an entire episode of semi-improvised television skits from around the galaxy, turning our main characters from the plot agents into couch potatoes (Season 2’s “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate” fared better by having an interesting B-plot centered around Jerry’s penis and a Werner Herzog cameo). As episodes, they’re intermittently funny but held back by the total lack of Rick and Morty’s best feature: it’s tight, inventive, relentless, high-concept, sci-fi plotting.
“We’re literally deciding whether or not to do ‘Interdimensional Cable 3’,” Roiland said, to massive cheers from the audience. “So that’s the ‘yes we want it,’ now can we hear from those who are like ‘nah, can we see something else,’ anybody?”
Slashfilm describes a similarly ambivalent response in a follow-up interview. “Possibly, yeah, we’re figuring it out,” Roiland said. “It’s very rough on production. It’s not an easy episode to make. We’re introducing something amazing we can’t say much about, but there’s probably room for both, ultimately. I’d be down to do it.”
While fan demand (“Interdimensional Cable” episodes are fan favorites) may push the Rick and Morty crew toward a third iteration, it sounds like they’re looking for any reason possible not to do it.
Rick and Morty Season 3 is expected to premiere later this year on Adult Swim.
