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This review should’ve been up on Monday morning. Hell, if I was still writing for The A.V. Club, it would’ve been up by one a.m. For most of its run, Rick and Morty didn’t offer screeners for critics, which meant watching them late and staying up later to try and get my thoughts in order. When Myles asked if I wanted to do a drop in review of the season six premiere to gauge reader interest, he was kind enough to offer me the benefit of a night’s sleep before trying to put words together. And I was happy to take him up on that. Whatever its problems, I still enjoy the show, and it felt lousy to not be able to do anything about it for its return.

As the sharper among you have likely noticed, this is not Monday morning. Nor is it Monday afternoon, or evening. Hell, it’s not even Tuesday. I could offer a clever excuse, but I don’t have one: at most, I could blame it on the general laziness of a holiday weekend. But what makes it worth mentioning here (apart from the simple “mea culpa” aspect) is that it’s a small piece of evidence pointing to a larger truth. Rick and Morty is still a show on television. It still puts out good episodes (“Solaricks” is a humdinger), although the ratio of good to bad in season five wasn’t as favorable as I would’ve liked. It’s still popular. But it’s no longer the lightning rod it once was. It no longer matters in this very specific, very fleeting way that some movies and shows (and occasionally books) “matter.” I forgot to watch because I’m a space cadet; but I wasn’t reminded by dozens of tweets or people arguing about the episode, and the premiere itself, as an event, didn’t feel special in the same way past Rick and Morty premieres have felt.

All of this sounds bad, but at least terms of the quality of the show it’s likely to actually be a good thing. At the very least, a lack of a certain kind of pressure can be a godsend. At its best, Rick and Morty plays in the high tension space of “how self-aware is too self-aware,” attempting to build stories (and stakes) around characters who are constantly aware of the conventions and cliches those stories come with. It’s like an entire show made out of lampshades, and what’s amazing is how often that worked–again, at its best, R&M can be hilarious, mind-bogglingly clever, heartbreaking, and weirdly comforting. At its worst, it can be sloppy, smug, and so far up its own ass it can see its own tonsils. Part of the fun of tuning in is finding out what you’re going to get, and while nothing can quite recapture the charge of seeing the show for the first time and realizing it was something special, having the cultural zeitgeist move on means it can just be a show again, and could be the sort of creative rebirth the series needs.

Whether or not it will be remains to be seen, obviously, but “Solaricks” is a strong opener. Last season ended with “Evil” Morty escaping the finite curve of infinite universes that Rick had established to ensure he’d always be the smartest person around (apologies for the inelegance of that explanation, as it is a cool concept); this season picks up with our heroes seemingly at death’s door, after escaping the mass slaughter at the Citadel but failing to prevent “Evil” Morty’s escape or stopping his plan in any meaningful way. Rick and Morty season openers often pick up where the previous season ended; the show’s approach to continuity is at once rigorous and flippant, but the writers are smart enough to know that occasionally reminding the audience of persistent relationships and consequences is a powerful way to build an emotional connection—and a good source of humor.

It’s not surprising, then, that “Solaricks” is a lore episode. What is surprising is the form that lore takes. Early in the first couple seasons of the show’s run, Dan Harmon expressed reluctance to dig too deeply into Rick’s backstory; providing some kind of reason as to why Rick is the way he is would be to go against the show’s general contempt for cliche and predictable answers. Even when it looked like we did finally get a some kind of origin story—”The Rickshank Rickdemption,” the opener for the third season that had Rick manipulating a virtual reality so he could destroy pretty much all of his enemies—it was undercut by a gag and a “what, you don’t think this is really true, do you?” eye roll. Caring is for suckers, of course. Everyone knows that.

But of course, the super duper ultra secret message of Rick and Morty is that suckers or no, we all end up caring anyway no matter how hard we pretend not to, and eventually, the show decided to come clean: Rick, our Rick, really did lose his wife and daughter when another Rick tried to kill him. This is, as “origins” go, pretty solid—it manages to dodge the cliche problem with the parallel universes, and there’s something bracing about the inherent simplicity of it. One of the tensions of the series is how being incredibly clever can only get you so far; a lot of just being alive is accepting that you can’t transcend your humanity by outthinking it. No matter where Rick goes, no matter how much he bends reality to his will, he’ll never be able to “solve” the fact that his wife and daughter are dead. He can bury it, ignore it, beat himself up about it, and obsess over finding their killer, but he can’t unmurder them. 

Which is heavy for a comedy show, and while “Solaricks” isn’t exactly a heavy episode, it is heavier than I was expecting. The premise is less a mind-meting concept than it is an excuse to dig into some dark shit: after being rescued by Bad-Ass Beth, Rick tries to reset the portal juice to make the portal gun active again, and in doing so, inadvertently resets everyone who has traveled via portal, zipping them back to their point of origin. Before the zip, Rick tells Summer to activate a beacon back at the ruined Citadel that will allow him to find his way back to this universe, which is apparently a much more complicated process now that “Evil” Morty has messed everything up.

It’s a neat starting point, but it’s interesting that that’s all it is; there’s no real escalation here once the concept is reduced, no iterations and only one additional twist. Rick ends up back in the garage where his wife and daughter were blown up; Morty is back to his original Cronenberged Earth; and Jerry just ends up in a place where everyone has contempt for him, which is basically Jerry’s whole deal. Eventually, Summer gets the beacon up, allowing Rick to find his way back to her and rescue the others, the ultimate twist being that Rick brought a cute alien back to this Earth, and that alien devours the entire planet, which means it’s time to go find yet another home whose versions of Rick, Morty, Summer, Beth, and Jerry are all dead. 

This is a fun/unsettling reinforcement of the whole “found family with your actual relatives” idea the show has been playing with for a while, but for most of the episode, we follow our Rick and our Morty as they wallow in the mistakes they’ve been trying to avoid. Our Rick built a “ghost” with his dead wife’s voice, constantly haranguing him and guilt-tripping him from the next room over; he also created a time loop to lock that Earth on the single day when he lost everything, but unfortunately forgot to stop people from aging, which means that grief-stricken heart-broken Rick is even more of an inconsiderate bastard than regular flavor. Back on his Earth, Morty meets his original dad, who’s lost everything and become a total badass; he learns that the original Beth and Summer are dead. And we later find out that this version of Earth’s Rick is the guy who murdered our Rick’s family. Our Rick set up shop with this Morty in part as an attempt to lure the killer out of hiding, but unfortunately Killer Rick doesn’t really care enough about anything to take the bait.

Got all that? If it sounds confusing, it is, but the real thrust of the episode is ultimately simple: the show is establishing a potential new Big Villain along the lines of “Evil” Morty from earlier seasons (that Morty is still out there, but who knows if we’ll ever see him again now that he’s gotten what he apparently wanted), and reinforcing the emotional connections between the major characters in a straightforward, effective way. The episode even cleans up a loose end by having Killer Rick off the original Jerry–I doubt it was giving anyone sleepless nights, but there’s a certain neatness to having all of Morty’s starting family gone. 

What this will mean for the season going forward, it’s hard to say for certain; but given that Rick And Morty isn’t quite the lightning rod it once was, I think there’s reason for fans to hope. “Solaricks” isn’t the most ambitious premiere the series has put out, but it’s the kind of story writers tell when they’re invested in building something sustainable. R&M has swung from the fences right from the start, building bridges just to see the color of the flames, and I doubt it will ever completely lose that ethos. But there’s something weirdly stable in all of this that makes me eager to see where the show goes next. There’s no strain here, no need to prove that everyone involved is the smartest person in the room. It’s just a good story, with good jokes. I doubt I’ll be forgetting to tune in next week.

• Hey all, Myles here now. So, I want to be able to have Zack continue his reflections on Rick and Morty’s sixth season—I actually watched this premiere before him, my first time watching the show since I saw a random episode for an A.V. Club feature—but we’re at the point where we’re stretching things thin. Accordingly, I absolutely encourage you to like, comment, and subscribe if you’re interested in more coverage, in whatever form that will take. We’re throwing around some ideas, and will be in touch.

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