Rick and Morty just wrapped up its ninth season, but where does it rank among the others? Since the beginning, Rick and Morty has been a perfect intersection between a relatable family sitcom like The Simpsons and a mind-bending science fiction series like Star Trek or Doctor Who. It uses hard sci-fi concepts like interdimensional travel to reflect grounded human emotions like nihilism and regret.
There are plenty of great individual episodes of Rick and Morty, but they don’t always add up to a great season. Some of the show’s seasons are dragged down by weak installments, like season 4, while others have been practically flawless, like season 2.
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Season 4
It’s pretty much universally agreed that season 4 was Rick and Morty’s worst year. It got off to an exciting start with Morty’s Akira storyline in “Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat,” and “The Vat of Acid Episode” has been hailed as one of Rick and Morty’s most devastating and thought-provoking installments.
The season has some decent episodes, like “Rattlestar Ricklactica” and “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” but it has a lot of bad ones. “Never Ricking Morty” is way too meta and inside-baseball, “Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri” is a pretty uninspired Star Wars spoof, and the less said about the dragon episode, the better.
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Season 7
A lot of Rick and Morty’s later seasons have been hit-and-miss, but season 7 is on another level. It was a roller-coaster of highs and lows, flitting between some of the show’s all-time greatest episodes and some of its absolute worst. It kicked off with the series’ weakest three-episode run, recycling stale sitcom tropes like interventions and rehashing previous storylines.
Then, it started to pick up with the delightfully dark spaghetti episode, which featured a twisted metaphor for the ethics of meat consumption. From there, it switched between instant classics like the revenge episode “Unmortricken” and disappointing duds like “Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie,” which dragged out a one-joke season 2 post-credits scene to a full episode.
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Season 5
After the disappointment of season 4, Rick and Morty stopped being as consistently great as its near-flawless initial three-season run and settled into being very hit-and-miss. Season 5 has a couple of dull, uninspired episodes; “Amortycan Grickfitti,” for example, just rehashes the same Rick/Jerry begrudging friendship storyline we’ve seen a few times.
It also has what is widely considered to be Rick and Morty’s worst (and certainly its grossest) episode, “Rickdependence Spray,” which has giant Morty sperm and the conception of a kaiju-sized “incest baby.” But it builds to a momentous two-part finale in which Rick and Morty go their separate ways and reluctantly come back together.
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Season 8
The problem with Rick and Morty season 8 is that it doesn’t have any bad episodes, but it doesn’t have any really great ones, either. Every episode in the season is really good, but none of them will be remembered among the all-time best installments of the show. All the other seasons, even the weakest ones, have at least one classic.
“The Last Temptation of Jerry” is a great parody of werewolf movies. “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly” is a great parody of Unforgiven that explains what happened to the survivors of the Citadel. The season put a clever sci-fi twist on a wide range of satirical topics, from capitalist greed to A.I. filmmaking to the class divide.
The closest the season came to greatness was in “Nomortland,” the episode that sees rogue Jerrys wandering “The Road.” It gave Jerry a bit more depth and agency and elevated the character above his usual laughingstock status. If any season 8 episode becomes a classic, it’ll be that one, but it doesn’t quite reach the heights of a “Pickle Rick” or a “That’s Amorte.”
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Season 6
The first half of season 6 is one of Rick and Morty’s all-time greatest runs. The premiere episode, “Solaricks,” hits the reset button and sends Rick back to the universe where he lost Diane and became the soulless drunk he is today, and sends Morty back to the universe where he turned everyone into Cronenberg monsters and jumped ship.
From there, it has a pitch-perfect Die Hard parody where Summer battles terrorists at Blips and Chitz; a “San Junipero” love story between Beth and her clone; and a Twilight Zone-style horror satire about the class divide, in which Rick and the family delegate menial chores to their nighttime selves and unwittingly inspire an uprising.
It gets a little shaky in its second half as Rick and Morty venture beyond the fourth wall and get into a virtue-signaling contest with a bunch of self-righteous dinosaurs. But the season finale does have a great twist that reveals the Rick who’s been a lot kinder to Morty recently, is actually a robot created by the real Rick while he searches for his arch-nemesis.
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Season 9
Season 9 brings back some of the magic of earlier seasons with a range of fun episodic adventures like “Ricks Days, Seven Nights,” and “Rickuiem Mort a Dream” delivering punchy, innovative, and clever narratives that make the season as a whole stand out.
However, it was episodes like “Mortgully: The Last Rickforest,” and the season premiere, “There’s Something About Morty” that make this season truly great. It feels as though the new voice actors have fully settled into their roles, and that the flow is back in a way that suggests the show will continue to go from strength to strength in the coming years.
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Season 1
The first season of Rick and Morty got the series off to a terrific start and set the bar really high. The pilot is a bit shaky — the creators hadn’t fully figured out the characters’ personalities or the idiosyncratic voice of the show yet — but the season quickly finds its footing with early classics like “Anatomy Park” and “Meeseeks and Destroy.”
“Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind” introduced the Trans-Dimensional Council of Ricks. “Rixty Minutes” introduced the fan-favorite concept of interdimensional cable (and the surprisingly improvisational tone of the voice acting). And “Rick Potion No. 9” forced Rick and Morty to relocate to a new reality in just the sixth episode of the series, promising that it would subvert expectations at every turn.
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Season 3
The season 2 finale had left season 3 with a heck of a cliffhanger to resolve, and season 3 managed to tie up all the loose ends within one awesome, action-packed episode. That premiere episode got the season off to a promising start, and most of the episodes that followed represent Rick and Morty at its absolute best.
It has the iconic “Pickle Rick,” which became a fan-favorite from a brief trailer clip alone. It has “The Ricklantis Mixup,” a The Wire-like examination of the broken institutions of the Citadel. It has “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” a fun spin on the interdimensional cable-style anthology episodes. It has “Rest and Ricklaxation,” an incisive study of Rick and Morty’s toxicity.
The only thing holding it back from being the best season of the show is its underwhelming finale episode, “The Rickchurian Mortydate,” a soft parody of the Trump administration. The show usually puts a bleak sci-fi spin on its satirical subjects, but this episode just lazily reflects dysfunctional U.S. politics without any of that Rick and Morty magic.
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Season 2
It’s not uncommon for a show that starts out as strong as Rick and Morty to peak early on. Every season since season 2 has had both great episodes and not-so-great episodes, but season 2 is all bangers, all the time. Every episode deftly mixes intriguing sci-fi concepts like hive minds with relatable human concepts like codependent relationships.
It kicks off with “A Rickle in Time,” a devilishly complex blend of quantum uncertainty and the human condition, and it builds to a game-changing ending when the Federation catches up to Rick in “The Wedding Squanchers.” This season is truly Rick and Morty at its finest. The show will probably never be able to top its flawless sophomore outing.
- Release Date
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December 2, 2013
- Network
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Adult Swim
- Directors
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Bryan Newton, Dominic Polcino, Anthony Chun, John Rice, Stephen Sandoval, Jeff Myers
- Writers
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Tom Kauffman, Wade Randolph, Eric Acosta, David Phillips, Erica Rosbe, Sarah Carbiener, Matt Roller, Michael Waldron, Caitie Delaney
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Justin Roiland
Rick Sanchez / Morty Smith
