Why ‘Rick And Morty’ Breaks Its Own Rules
Fans of Rick and Morty might not know there are some rules the show’s creators won’t break. [...]
Fans of Rick and Morty might not know there are some rules the show's creators won't break. They're casually referenced in the show, like the unused box of "time travel stuff" in Rick's garage workshop.
But when they set up a rule like "no time travel," they are actually challenging themselves to figure out clever ways to break it.
Dan Harmon explained the concept in an interview with EW.
"At one time we were saying, 'Let's make sure we never do the episode where we show why Rick is Rick.' That's a great rule to have," Harmon said." But when you have a rule like that, sooner or later, you have the episode where you break that rule in a clever way — which we sort-of did with the season 3 premiere by giving an example of what a Rick origin story might be and then left it up to the audience to decide how much of it was true."
In the Season Three premiere, an imprisoned Rick conned an interrogator into buying a sob story passed off as his origin, allowing him to take advantage of the situation and turn the tables. The story was all a ruse.
Similarly, there was an episode where Morty and Summer damage the time stream, causing fractions where four different realities were occurring side by side at the same time. The longer they went without repairing time, the more they risked destroying all of reality.
"We follow our taste and it all spans outward from loving TV and loving sci-fi and being afraid of wasting an opportunity to have a show that lasts forever and is eternally limitless," Harmon said. "We don't want to be the people who screw up the audience's first experiment with giving a TV show total narrative carte blanch."
Harmon's comments make it clear that even if a concept is off the table, it's not really off the table, and that if it does pop up on the show it will be in an unexpected way.
The season finale of Rick and Morty airs this Sunday on Adult Swim.
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