It’s About Time ‘Rick and Morty’ Did A Western Episode

There are only so many movie homages and genre parodies possible if you stick to pure science fiction in your high-concept rigamarole. Sometimes, an animated series just needs to get its mouth ‘round a Western.

In tonight’s new episode of Rick and Morty, the aptly titled “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly,” the satirical comedy show about a dimension-hopping, space-faring scientist with dubious morals and an affection for alcohol finally did a a full storyline devoted to the tropes and archetypes of the Spaghetti Western film. Given that the cowboys of the classic blockbusters shared Rick’s morals, drinking habits and comfort with killing, all you’d need to do to Rick Sanchez to turn him into a Sergio-Leone-style anti-hero would be to swap his ship for a horse and his portal gun for a six-shooter. 

Given the similarities between Rick and the adventurous gunslingers of classic cinema, a Rick and Morty Western was something of an inevitability, which makes us wonder why Dan Harmon, Scott Marder and their writers waited until Season Eight to rustle up a cowboy episode. After all, they’ve been teasing cowboy Rick and Morty since Season One:

“The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly” has a classic set-up seen in countless cowboy movies, as well as the samurai flicks that inspired them — a jaded, past-his-prime gunman (Rick) lives an isolated, pastoral lifestyle until a group of outlaws drops by and begins to terrorize both him and the surrounding townsfolk. Despite his antisociality, the gunman lends help to the helpless, taking on both the outlaws and the wealthy, slow-talking megalomaniac behind the devilry.

As far as standalone storylines go, “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly” is just about a perfect Rick and Morty episode for how it introduces its takes on the archetypes of the genre it parodied, squeezes every last decent punchline out of them and then retires them at the end, leaving us, like good-haired Morty, pondering the souls of the cowpokes who came and went. And, after everything that Haircut Morty and Clone Master went through in these quick 21 minutes, the conclusion carried the kind of mournful narrative satisfaction that we always hope we’ll get from a one-off Rick and Morty episode.

And, critically, “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly” never let the joke get too old before getting the hell out of Dodge — I reckon that Overweight Southern Railroad Baron Rick was fixin’ to become unbearable if he got one more monologue in before credits. We didn’t want a repeat of last week’s “rent free” cringe.