Rick & Morty have become something like the irreverent wandering comets of the pop culture multiverse, injecting that same disaffected millennial nihilism anywhere accessible via portal gun. What is only a formal heterogeneity of content – visually sumptuous settings, imaginative sci-fi plots, references to an infinite and infinitely bewildering multiverse – is compensated by a homogeneity in tone – Rick will berate, belittle, and shit on you with that same world-weary millennial “wisdom” no matter what universe he’s in, and in fact a lot of the humor comes from Rick’s mockery and subversion of the tropes of more conventional worlds.

I think this represents not so much a crisis of creativity (the plots are a Frankenstein monster of sci-fi tropes, but one with a surprising amount of gristle), but a leveling of the spectacle into the only “condoned” orientation one is allowed to uphold: the frankly flat nihilism of the vaguely depressed, vaguely anxious millennial. Rick & Morty doesn’t throw the doors open on an infinite, unlimited universe, it only subsumes the staggering potential of television’s first “sandbox” under the the “privileged” perspective of the know-it-all omniscient spectator whose audience surrogate is Rick.

You only need to watch Rick helping himself to Simpsons’ kitchen during the crossover couch cag to get what I’m talking about: one era has ended, another has begun. Watching Rick try Duff beer and then top it off with his preferred brand of liquor illustrates this perfectly: the outmoded humor of the 90s is altogether too weak, we need something “stronger”, what was only a twinge back then, easily remedied by the solidarity of familial love and bonding, has become a full-on chronic nihilism, a relentless consumption of worlds, an endless fascination with what Baudrillard called our “witnessing our disappearance”. Underneath the jaded millennial humor, however, still beats a wounded heart. Can anything save us?

To be fair, fartz