Rick & Morty Season 6.
Featuring the voice talents of Justin Roiland, Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, Sarah Chalke, and Kari Wahlgren.
SYNOPSIS:
Rick and Morty: Season 6 appears on Blu-ray in a handsome SteelBook package. All ten episodes are included, along with a decent batch of bonus features, but a code for digital copies of the episodes is conspicuously missing. Another way to get more people signed up for HBO Max, perhaps?
Any time a popular TV series comes along, there’s the inevitable discussion around how long it should last. I’ll confess that at one time in my life, I felt that any show I enjoyed should ride that wave as long as possible, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the desire of many creators to end their stories on a high note.
Rick and Morty is a perfect example of that. Originally conceived as a Back to the Future parody, with Rick taking the Doc Brown character to insanely dysfunctional heights, it has since followed the precedent set by The Simpsons, South Park, and other series that poke fun at popular culture.
As I mentioned in my review of the collection that houses the first five seasons on Blu-ray, the fifth season saw the show settling into a rhythm that should carry it for a while, barring any fallout from co-creator Justin Roiland’s departure from the series, considering the fact that he also provided the voices for the title characters. (As I write this review, the domestic violence charges against him have been dropped, although Rick and Morty broadcaster Adult Swim had already severed ties with him.)
Season six, which has been issued in a handsome SteelBook with a smattering of extras, serves up ten episodes that manage to be funny and poignant, as anyone who has followed the series beyond its early episodes knows. I assume co-creators Dan Harmon and Roiland have had a master plan in mind all along, but who knows? Maybe they envisioned the series as a crude parody of a beloved film and then decided to do more with it when it gained traction.
At any rate, this season is a mix of standalone episodes meant to simply elicit some laughs and what some people call the “story episodes,” which are the ones that move along a larger story about the title characters, their family, and the multiverse that they traverse. Unlike The Simpsons, which has kept its characters in mostly the same state for over 30 years (except for a few deaths, of course), Rick and Morty is building toward some kind of climax, and even has Rick, in particular, going through a character arc.
Then again, given Harmon’s trickster nature, maybe the end of the series will be just as nihilistic as the show seems to be on its surface. Perhaps that will be his final joke for viewers. Regardless of where the show is headed, though, it will be interesting to see how Roiland’s absence affects it.
Moving on to the bonus features, this edition has the same Inside the Episode micro-featurettes as previous seasons on disc. There’s one per episode, and each one is about 1.5-2 minutes, except for the one for “A Rick in King Mortur’s Mort,” which clocks in close to seven minutes. It’s the penultimate episode in the season, and it’s one that connects to the overall storyline, so it makes sense that it would get a longer Inside the Episode.
There’s also an Inside Season 6 featurette that’s a little over nine minutes long, as well as three Anatomy of a Scene micro-featurettes that are 2-2.5 minutes each. Unlike some of the previous seasons on disc, there are no commentary tracks found here. However, what’s here should be enough to whet the appetite of any Rick and Morty fan. I imagine someday there will be a huge box set of the whole series, with a really long documentary chronicling the whole thing.
However, there is one key thing missing compared to previous seasons on disc: a code for digital copies. It’s odd that Warner Bros. didn’t toss one of those in this edition, but maybe they want to spur more HBO Max subscriptions for people who want their Rick and Morty on the go. Or perhaps Harmon is messing with us again.
Brad Cook
