Thought dump thread! Also, I can't get over how bad the AV Club's redesign is. It makes me irrationally angry.
Is it alright for me to post a link to the episode? (I watched it through this Youtube link.)[
Here are my notes:
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- There's a quote that sums up this episode for me: "Hell is the place you go after you die where you meet the person you could have become."
- "Normally I would come down on any kind of disruption but it seems to reflect a positive change on your character."
- Holy shit, poor Stacy. Sea Cucumber, sea cucumber!
- That Toxic Rick was tricking Detoxed Rick was a complete surprise to me. It kind of reminds me of how the most successful chatbots in the early days were those that were hurled insults at human users.
- Did anyone notice that Rick keeps in the household not one, but two devices that clone him in emergencies?
- Is it just me, or does this episode feel very experimental? I'm not sure if it's because the story had to go faster, or if there was a lack of B Plot, or if it's because the other characters in the episode were literally just another version of themselves- I'm not really sure.
- Personal note: For as long as I've known, I've been on the depressed, self-loathing side of things. But there once was a span of two years where I felt I was a fundamentally different person, a wide-eyed extrovert fresh off of a read of How To Win Friends and Influence People and first entering into my university's debate team with confidence and gusto.
I was dating someone at the time, and there was a particularly rough patch where I began belittling her for not conforming to the grand scheme of ideas in my head- I relied on a lot of my confidence and gut feeling to justify myself. It was an odd step in my life where I had never been confident before, I was like a superhero first getting used to their powers, collateral damage included.
That said, that version of me would have watched The Wolf of Wall Street and would have been inspired to work in finance.
- This kind of feels like the first weak episode of the season to me, but I wonder if it's because I've overhyped it for myself, I kept watching the teaser trailer over and over again. Vulnerable Rick is a treasure, I may have played it out too much for myself.
So to me there were sort of two layers to the story, but they interrelate. The first, and more surface-level one, was the question of whether the parts that we hate about ourselves are really something we could do without. At least without changing us. Morty's confidence also made him a sociopathic asshole. He became "successful" by our society's definition, which says quite a bit about where we are as a culture right now. One of the things I've thought about a lot lately with regards to mental illness is that it's all about arbitrary divisions. Everything's about where you fall on some spectrum or another. Confidence is good, to a point, and so is self-doubt. Success in life is, to me, all about finding balance. Every negative thought, feeling, and emotion has its roots in something good and necessary. We're only here to talk about this episode, to create art, to do whatever because we had ancestors somewhere along the line who were willing to kill to survive, rape to continue their bloodline, you name it. Rick could only get them to the detox place because of the same skills and knowledge that made him into kind of a dick. But remember that their adventure leading up to it was implied to be a heroic one? I also thought there was an interesting underlying current about moral relativism. Towards the end, Rick says that "our toxins have as much a right to their world view as..." He's cut off by Morty slapping him, then saying that "obviously [his] version of health is a hell of a lot different from [Rick's]." Rick then wonders how the machine would know what "healthy" means? Free speech has been on our minds a lot lately, and one of the things with censorship is that it inherently involves making a moral judgment. If we want to censor something, we're saying that whatever the information content of that speech is morally unacceptable, and that it's morally unacceptable even to express it. Part of making a society work, of course, is figuring out a decision-making process for just this kind of question, i.e. what are the moral truths upon which we agree. The genius of liberalism (as that word was originally used) is a recognition that we're not all going to 100% agree on everything, and that this is okay; we'll only enforce what we can all agree on. But that same societal backlash against neo-Nazis is the same underlying impulse that was used against civil rights protests in the 1960s, against anti-government protests everyone on Earth, etc. A hammer doesn't suddenly work differently on one nail versus another. What was so cool about Rick's line was that I, and I expect most people, had automatically inserted my own idea of what was "toxic" into what I imagined was removed from both Rick and Morty at the beginning of the episode. Toxic Rick became a cipher for our own views about what is toxic in a person (an especially apt choice of words, giving all the talk of "toxicity" online). But notice how one of the things that was actually removed was Rick's attachment to Morty? How after he was a "better" person he suddenly gave 0 fucks about his grandson's suffering? Few of us would've pictured that; if anything, we'd expect Rick to care more after being de-toxified. But Rick only respects rational things, and love is by its nature irrational. What Rick threw out is something most of us would choose not to, and when Toxic Rick converted the whole world there for a minute, it was based on his view (and so of course Rick's) idea of what was toxic. So one of the big takeaways for me was to be careful about being so quick to decide what is healthy and what isn't.
That the same story device could be used to critique the "ideal" versions of our selves and moral relativism is gorgeous. That the toxic versions of Rick and Morty are so different, and that the detoxed Rick knows that the toxins have a right to their world view-- I got fucked by the mindfuck, to put it lightly. I definitely need to give a rewatch to this episode, I couldn't settle on the definition of what "toxicity" is, and it threw me off while watching, not realizing that it was part of the big mystery of the episode. Your comment has helped a bunch.