Rick And Morty Season 8 Is Getting A Fresh Start, And The Smiths Are Finally Hitting Home Again

Rick and Morty dropped its Season 8 preview, and it feels like home. The preview sees Jerry with Christmas levels of Easter spirit, which is as ridiculous as it seems, as everyone in the family dismisses his cheer from room to room. There are no portal guns, no intergalactic watch agencies, no space politics. It’s just the family in full sitcom mode as Rick performs shady experiments in the garage. It’s funny, it’s simple, it’s nostalgic, and it’s perfect as the show looks to correct course after recently vaporizing the canon storyline through seven seasons.

The series has remained fairly consistent over its decade-long run, despite a crucial changing of the guard with the loss of disgraced co-creator Justin Roiland. But, although the show has managed a few great episodes per season of late, it hasn’t lived up to the consistently groundbreaking animation audiences enjoyed over its first couple of seasons. The story became cumbersome over the years and seemed to have lost some heart, along with its initial simplicity, along the way. Let’s hope the back-at-home trailer isn’t too good to be true, because if it isn’t, audiences might be in for the most satisfying Rick and Morty ride since Season 1.

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Rick And Morty’s Season 8 Preview Is Refreshing

Almost half of the preview is just Jerry singing an appropriated Christmas carol about Easter milk. It’s great. Fans know from another, more ill-fated preview, that the episode this clip is from eventually enters space to take down space popes. Still, the focus on grounding these characters at home with substantial attention to their daily lives is a huge step in the right direction.

At this point, fans know what happens when interdimensional forces assail the smartest man in the universe and his increasingly savvy grandson. Everyone dies, often multiple times, sometimes even being replaced by alternate versions of themselves using Rick’s infinite resources. That’s great. What the show needs is to explore what happens when those same resources are applied to much lower stakes.

There’s actually quite a bit of promotional material for Season 8 that’s centered around the Smith household, which is a promising sign that the writers are rediscovering Rick and Morty‘s original lifeblood. The first season of Rick and Morty established its premise as the misadventures of a broken family in a rippled universe. It seems Season 8 is a return to form, with shenanigans, tomfoolery, and a certain level of wholesomeness that’s nearly impossible to capture beyond the Smiths’ home doorstep.

In a holiday-themed preview released in December, Rick auditions alien replacements for his hated son-in-law Jerry, possibly voicing a writers’ room quagmire in bringing the show back to its homeward-bound roots. During the audition, one alien reads Rick’s lines as Jerry, whining “Riiick, I got my head stuck in this laundry basket…I have a job interview, please!” to which Rick responds through a belch: “And I’m trying to keep our universe from collapsing.” It will be fun to see the writers figure out a way to once again balance such polarizing interests among its characters.

Rick And Morty Should Bring It Home And Keep It There

There’s a moment in Rick and Morty Season 1, Episode 8, “Rixty Minutes,” as series creator Dan Harmon narrates an ad for a car called the Sneezy XL with a horn that sneezes when you honk it, that encapsulates the bygone spirit of the show. After the little car sails off of a cliff into the ocean and Harmon delivers the tagline “It’s sneezy, breezy, McDeluxe,” we’re warped from the TV onto the couch with Rick and Morty. Morty observes that TV from other dimensions has a “somewhat looser feel to it.” Rick abides, adding: “Yeah, it’s got an almost improvisational tone.”

Through the last five seasons, there’s been an increasing feeling that fans would never see another episode like that one again. With a complicated plot that only grew more convoluted with time, there was too much concept to imagine a story as light as having the writers just improvise an entire episode. This improvisation was confirmed by one of the series creators at the Convention Junkies fan expo in 2017. The writers did try and recreate interdimensional cable in Season 2, but unfortunately, they weren’t successful, as it was truly a series low in terms of execution. Still, the attempt at unrestrained silliness was admirable and integral to the series as fans knew it.

The whole episode is anchored in the Smith house. The Smith house is where some of the most classic Rick and Morty episodes are based, including “Meeseeks and Destroy” and “Total Rickall.” The show managed to tell layered stories inside the Smith household, allowing for sitcom comfort to lay the bedrock for some truly mind-blowing sci-fi escapades based on space-faring classic films. If infinite possibilities are Rick and Morty‘s bread and butter, then Season 8, the numeric symbol for infinity, is the perfect one for proving they can still butter bread in their own home kitchen.

Rick and Morty

Created by

Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon

Where to watch

Adult Swim