Ahead of Rick and Morty’s seventh season, all anyone cared about was the new voice actors replacing Justin Roiland. Four episodes in, the show itself has reclaimed the spotlight, with last night’s standout “That’s Amorte” offering some particularly poignant and gross food for thought with its storyline.
“That’s Amorte” was Rick and Morty at its best—it had the potential to make you laugh, cringe, and tear up all at once, while also exploring deeper issues that allowed for character growth and made the viewer ponder their own points of view on a thing or two. In a new interview with Variety, the episode’s writer, Heather Anne Campbell, who’s also a Rick and Morty executive producer, talked more about its meaning alongside showrunner Scott Marder and co-creator Dan Harmon.
Without going too deep into spoilers, the thrust of the episode examines what happens when Morty discovers the spaghetti Rick’s been serving at Smith family dinners comes from a morally complicated and very uncomfortable place: the corpses of people who’ve died by suicide on an otherwise Earth-like planet. The spaghetti, it must be noted, is so amazingly delicious it makes this horrible truth especially difficult to negotiate, both among the Smith family and the population of the spaghetti-suicide planet, especially once its leaders realize what a valuable resource they have access to.
“There’s so many different ways in which we are barricaded from the truth of everything that we enjoy, and I think that the puzzle of being alive is how to reconcile that,” Campbell said.
“No matter how nihilistic we get it, I like to keep things therapeutically nihilistic so that you’re confronting the idea that life is meaningless, but falling just short of what I call ‘punishing empathy,’” Harmon said, noting that the underpinnings of the episode’s plot are “fodder for a very dark cosmic mirth,” and also pointing out that Rick and Morty’s “willingness to go into the void” is a part of why it resonates so much with audiences. “Those are my favorite types of ideas—the ones that feel like only your show could do them,” Marder said of the episode.
Next Sunday marks the halfway point of the 10-part season; episode five is apparently so pivotal Adult Swim is using only enigmatic promos to drop hints about its plot twists. In the meantime, though, it’s hard to imagine season seven topping “That’s Amorte,” even if it might put you off eating spaghetti forever.
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