Rick and Morty finally returned for the final half of the much anticipated fourth season of the series last Sunday, and completely destroyed its central infrastructure with its meta midseason premiere. Standing in for the series’ now annual anthology episode, “Never Ricking Morty” saw Rick and Morty board on a train that’s packed with all kinds of past Rick adventures. But as they begin to unfold this mystery, layers upon layers of other stories begin to play out as the series began to collapse in on itself right before our eyes.
The meta joke heavy episode had quite a few hilarious twists and turns, but one cutaway gag was certainly a standout from the others. As Morty had to keep Rick from running out of oxygen, he had to tell a story that passed the Bechdel Test — a now popular way to open the diversity debate — and spawned one of the oddest scenes yet. Check it out in the video above!
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As explained by Rick in the episode, the Bechdel-Wallace test was conceived by cartoonist Alison Bechdel back in 1985 as a way to measure women’s representation in media. The main conceit of the test asks the audience to determine whether or not two female characters in the story talk to one another, and they are talking about something that does not involve one of the male characters.
Morty in his panic previously revealed in the episode how terrible he was at coming up with story beats on the spot, and this conceit forces him to have a robotic delivery for his mother and sister. Placing his mother and sister in this story, Morty then has them talk about their reproductive cycles before using the power of cede reproductive organs to fight back against a wave of female scorpions.
It made for quite a hilarious clashing of images that littered the rest of the episode, and is yet another critique Rick and Morty seems to be aiming at itself and the fans of the series. The entire episode seemed to have this explicit purpose, and by the looks of the next episode, the wacky adventures are gearing up to return after this experiment. But what did you think of this scene? What did you think of Rick and Morty‘s midseason premiere? Has it passed the Bechdel test before this callout? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or talk to me directly about all things anime and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!
