Evil Morty is back - but is he broken? || Rick and Morty Season 9

Rick and Morty is back, baby! Season 9 is all certified bangers. No AI slop! Just Grade A organic slop, made by real humans with real human traits like back hair and cysts. Please watch, or we'll have neglected our families for nothing. By now, Rick and Morty has us trained to look forward to at least one "mythology episode" per season - those episodes that advance a larger narrative, dig more into Rick's tragic past, and involve characters like Rick Prime and Evil Morty. It happens that Season 9 kicks off with one such episode. Evil Morty is back, but as flashy and bombastic as this episode is, the results are a little underwhelming. I'll just get right to my core complaint with "There's Something About Morty." I'm not a huge fan of how Evil Morty is handled here. He's long been one of the show's more fascinating characters. He's not just a Morty who has the intelligence and confidence of a Rick; he's a Morty who desperately wants to be free of the toxic, destructive Rick/Morty dynamic as a whole. But with the character having more or less achieved what he set out to do (and helped Rick take down Rick Prime, for good measure), it's as though the writers don't really know what to do with him anymore. Maybe the answer should have been to simply retire Evil Morty? Regardless, casting Evil Morty as Rick's clingy new partner-in-crime doesn't seem like the right angle. For a guy who went to such great lengths to free himself from a multiverse of Ricks, it just seems odd to see Evil Morty now portrayed as a rival for Rick's affections. It rings hollow and works against the core conflict of this episode. I'm all for seeing Rick and Evil Morty duke it out, but I'd rather they have a more compelling reason to come to blows. Verdict Rick and Morty's ninth season gets off to a mostly entertaining start. "There's Something About Morty" has scope and spectacle to spare, showing us what happens when Rick and Evil Morty first combine their awesome powers and then declare all-out war on each other. The kinetic action scenes really push the show to its visual limits. But that's not quite enough to make up for the fact that Evil Morty feels mischaracterized in this episode. A formerly complex and tragic character is reduced to being Rick's possessive mad science buddy, and that doesn't quite sit right.