Bird Person is dead and it’s probably for good.
“The beacon was activated, who is in danger?” Bird Person says, unaware that he’s been invited to a house party where Rick just wants to get riggity-riggity-wrecked. That was our introduction to the formal, monotone Bird Person.
At first he seemed like an obscure, one-note riff on DC’s Hawkman, Buck Roger’s The Hawk, and the Hawkmen of Flash Gordon (The shifting DMZ between sci-fi and sword and sorcery fantasy is populated with many avian honor cultures). But even in his first appearance, Bird Person exhibited more depth than most Rick and Morty alien species, explaining to Morty the bone-deep sadness behind Rick’s self-destructive behavior.
It has been a challenging mating season for Bird Person
— Blake Wysocki (@blaekw) February 29, 2016
By the time Bird Person was murdered by his own wife in the final episode of Season 2, “The Wedding Squanchers,” he had developed into one of Rick and Morty’s most consequential characters. Bird Person was Rick’s best friend and one of his few living attachments to the failed insurgency against the Galactic Federation that sent Rick into hiding on Earth.
On a show like Rick and Morty , with its endless dimensions and alternate Earths, what’s stopping Rick from just hanging out with an adjacent Bird Person, or even futzing with time in an effort to bring his best friend back from the dead?
Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, the co-creators of Rick and Morty, know better. In an interview with Comic Book Resources, the duo explain their aversion to the kind of time travel and dimensional hijinks that have become commonplace in shows like Doctor Who.
“Time travel is a real shark jumper. Once you introduce into the canon of your show the idea, it’s just a dangerous toy to pull out,” Harmon says. It’s far too easy for the infinite possibilities of multiple dimensions and fluid time to sap Rick and Morty events of their consequence. Just as Rick’s cosmic perspective has made him cold to human sentiment, misusing the show’s sci-fi possibilities could undercut its narrative power.
Even when messing with time, Rick and Morty is careful to keep it circumscribed, such as in the fragmented chronoverse of the Season 2 premiere. “Here’s what’s great about the first episode of Season 2, it’s that it’s a cautionary tale about why you don’t fuck with time,” Roiland says.
“Although your keen-eyed viewer will notice that Rick in his garage has a box that’s labelled time travel stuff,” Rick and Morty voice actor and co-producer Ryan Ridley says.
“That’s the joke, that it’s on the shelf,” Harmon says.
Rick and Morty ’s success goes beyond the expansiveness of its universe and the sensation that anything can happen. While freewheeling insanity has given the show some of its best moments (“Yeah, I’d like to order one large phone with extra phones please.”), a focus on character and narrative structure form the bedrock. Realms of endless possibilities are where you must be most careful about which paths you choose.
Harmon and Roiland are fantastic at finding the right balance between cosmic oddity and what’s most impactful to their characters. If Bird Person were to return, it could undermine what his death meant for Rick. Waving that all away with some timey-wimey, extradimensional hooey would be a mistake the Rick and Morty writers are unlikely to make.
Of course, knowing the medical technology available to the Galactic Federation and Bird Person’s obvious usefulness as a source of information, it’s always possible Bird Person never died in the first place…
