Rick and Morty: Auto Erotic Assimilation Review

Rick has relationship troubles in the latest episode of Rick and Morty. Here is our review!

A conundrum that often comes up is whether or not a work of comedy is doing its job if it’s not making you laugh. But this is an outdated way of thinking. Back in the early sitcom days, you’d be very right to suggest that if an episode of I Love Lucy hadn’t made you laugh, it was a failed episode of I Love Lucy. There wasn’t much more to the show’s premise than watching a dizzy lady make a chump of herself. If it didn’t have laughs, there was nothing else for it to fall back on.

But in this modern era of devil-may-care genre-splicing, comedy can be many different things. Veep and The Office (mostly the British version) provide more cringing than laughter. The output that comes from people like Tim and Eric and PFFR is equal parts horror and humor. Rick and Morty is a comedy, but it wouldn’t be the show it is if it didn’t also occasionally suggest it has a heart and, most crucially, if it didn’t take the occasional hard look at the tragic hopelessness of existence.

The thing is “Auto Erotic Assimilation” is clearly trying to be funny throughout most of its running time, but I found it more clever than hilarious. I chuckled a number of times, but only had maybe two big laughs. However, of season two, this episode has the most disciplined, structured plotting and is also easily the darkest thus far. For what I personally look for in sitcoms in general, and in Rick and Morty specifically, it’s the best episode of the season yet.

The cleverness comes from what is truly a brilliant premise: Rick, Morty, and Summer run into one of Rick’s former lovers, a hive-mind entity named Unity (voiced by Christina Hendricks… most of the time), who has taken over the minds of an entire planet. As Rick reconnects with Unity, the episode explores the fun and then the inevitable fallout of an exciting, yet dysfunctional relationship, but with the joke always layered on top that one half of the couple embodies thousands of people. Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs certainly comes to mind, but this is better. Sorry, Futurama.

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It’s ingenious how Unity explains it has grown emotionally and mentally but also literally: it used to inhabit the minds of a small town and now it’s taken over a whole planet. Beta 7 (Patton Oswalt) is a neighboring hive-mind who has an alliance with Unity, fulfilling the role of the friend hoping to be something more should a moment of vulnerability arise. And when Unity has to break up with Rick again, it does so by leaving him a note, multiple copies of it, all over the planet. One of the best lines: “Rick, forgive me for doing this in notes. I’m not strong enough to do it in persons.”

As mentioned, the plotting is tight and focused. Everything is in service of exposing Rick’s character by reflecting it off of Unity, who describes Rick as “the only single mind I’ve met that really sees the big picture.” This ultimately comes to mean Rick is an immature, self-centered bastard. So much does he see the pointlessness of everything that his focus is on getting his kicks in the most ostentatious, scientifically-improbable ways possible.

Summer gets an arc, which too, functions to illuminate the extent of Rick’s self-destructive nature—a nature which pulls in and also destroys those around him. Summer sees Unity’s inhabiting people’s heads and taking their free will as evil until she realizes how horrible these people were before Unity got to them. In turn, she concludes that it’s Rick who’s a bad influence on Unity.

The moment that some of the planet regains its consciousness, causing a race war to instantly break out is the sloppiest part of the episode. It basically works, but it’s a little sudden. You have to fill in the blanks that, before these people were absorbed into Unity, they were constantly at war (or at least on the brink of it) over the issue of having conflictingly-shaped nipples. I do like the dynamic that Summer—who’s still fairly new to all this high-concept sci-fi rigamarole—takes the place of Season One Morty here, while Morty, who’s seen a lot of shit on his adventures with Rick, is like a Rick Lite. “Ah, Summer. First race war, huh?” he quips.

I haven’t mentioned the Jerry and Beth subplot because when Jerry and Beth are together it can be kind of hard to appreciate them. I didn’t find them boring and completely dumb this time, unlike with that lousy deer subplot in the premiere, but well, they’re a highly dysfunctional couple and after a point it really does just feel like watching a dysfunctional couple viciously argue. The alien who gives them a dressing down at the end for being intolerable was unfortunately kind of unintentionally echoing my own feelings. I do think this subplot is good in that it’s in part about Beth’s relationship with her father so, it too, is about Rick’s self-centeredness, and Beth’s conversation with Rick at the end ties in with the A-plot, making for a small payoff.

And, of course, there’s that ending. It’s a wonderful, tragic insight that Rick—sociopathic, disconnected genius that he is—is lonely. In fact, with all he knows, he very well might be the loneliest person alive. And without the stimulus of others (which he may view as something like love or, more cynically, a distraction), he’s regularly on the brink of just ending it all.

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Though “Auto Erotic Assimilation” is mostly about the ending (and the build to it) for me, there are funny bits. There’s Jerry mention that he once saw Rick briefly forget the word “human,” something we see Rick do moments later. Morty’s useless, silly contribution, “You’re really up to no good around here in this place” made me laugh harder than anything else; it’s great when Justin Roiland’s dumb adlibs stay in. Also, there’s that Community joke. We all love the Community joke very much, don’t we? (It’s worth noting that in the Rick and Morty version of Community the entire study group had an orgy on the table.)

I do worry a little bit that the sad, dark side of Rick and Morty could get formulaic. It’s the show’s signature move at this point to bring all the hijinks to a crashing halt, show us something super fucked up, and then play some (always-awesome, Roiland-selected) indie music over the ending. Right now, the show earns these moments and hasn’t gone overkill with them; they still work on me every time. Dan Harmon recently stated that a core feature of the show is “the permanence of cynicism,” adding, “Hopefully that’s not a shark that’s capable of being jumped.” I hope so too.

Rating:

4.5 out of 5