Rick and Morty writer, producer and voice actor Ryan Ridley appeared on the most recent episode of the Y Combinator podcast to discuss the Rick and Morty writing process, Season 3 episodes and the possible return of single-episode characters introduced in earlier seasons, like the Evil Morty who orchestrated a murderous conspiracy in Season 1 episode “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind.”
Throughout the podcast, Ridley described and discussed various elements of Rick and Morty Season 3, the first episode of which, “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” premiered April 1, with the rest of the season expected this summer.
Most concretely, Ridley describes the inspiration behind an upcoming episode in which Rick accidentally turns himself into a pickle. First revealed at San Diego Comic-Con 2016, footage from the Pickle Rick episode is all we’ve seen of Rick and Morty Season 3, outside of the premiere and two early animatics (that may or may not make actually appear in an episode).
In a wide-ranging discussion about the influences expressed in the Rick and Morty writers’ room, Ridley described the Pickle Rick episode beginning with “very specific movies,” specifically the James Franco survival thriller 127 Hours and Sandra Bullock’s space disaster movie, Gravity.
“I’m going to try and weave through this without spoiling anything,” Ridley said. “What the episode’s really about is, he turns himself into a pickle, and then he gets trapped and ends up involved in a situation where one twist leads to another and he’s totally screwed. And he doesn’t have the same resources he usually has access to — he’s a pickle, he’s not himself. He can’t reach into his lab coat and pull out his portal gun or any of his other infinite inventions he has hidden in there. And yet he’s in the most mundane of circumstances. He’s just on Earth. He’s a few 100 feet from the house, but he’s a pickle. So he has to figure out how to get himself out of that with really basic ingenuity. So we kept talking about 127 hours or Gravity, these movies where people are in these situations where they are alone and they have to figure out what to do to get out of this.”
The result doesn’t feel much like 127 Hours at all. Filtered through the Rick and Morty worldview, this translates to some serious brutality against the local rat population, at least according to the animatic the Rick and Morty team screened at Comic-Con:
While Ridley didn’t discuss any other Season 3 episodes in depth, he did talk about the promise and peril of bringing back characters originally introduced to serve a specific function in a specific episode.
It doesn’t look good for fans of the temporary helper beings, Mr. Meeseeks. “We’ve talked about how we’d bring back Meeseeks,” Ridley said, the past tense on “we’d” suggesting they won’t. “Really if we were going to bother doing it, we’d want to explore a different aspect of it.”
But while it sounds like Mr. Meeseeks didn’t make the Season 3 cut, Evil Morty might. Revealed as the Machiavellian puppetmaster behind a series of multi-dimensional Rick murders and Morty kidnappings, Evil Morty got away with it too, escaping detection by both the Rick we know (of Dimension C-137) and the Council of Ricks, which has since been destroyed, in the Season 3 premiere.
While Ridley wouldn’t confirm Evil Morty returns in a Season 3 episode, he spoke of the character in the context of building an ongoing continuity that satisfies dedicated viewers. “What I like about the show, Ridley said, “is that people seem to be invested in the reality of the show. In other words, people are wondering about certain characters.”
Ridley posed the question himself: “Eyepatch Morty — who’s the evil Morty — is that character going to come back?”
While he didn’t answer, not directly, Ridley did say, “in Season 3 I think that we stay true to the idea that the world is real, there are consequences.”
“You saw it in the first episode, they get divorced. That has consequences that play out through the whole season. But there’s also consequences that are outside of — some of the stuff you’ve seen already is going to play out more in Season 3.”
While Ridley also said there would be plenty of one-off episodes, just as in previous seasons, his answer suggests a continuity not just within Season 3, but enfolding events from previous seasons. If one consequence of the Season 3 premiere is the dissolution of Jerry and Beth’s marriage, another might be the power vacuum created by Rick’s destruction of both the Citadel of Ricks and the Galactic Federation government.
And who better to step into that vacuum than the Morty who outfoxed Rick?
The remaining episodes in Rick and Morty Season 3 still don’t have a firm release date, except that they’ll premiere this summer.
