‘Rick and Morty’ Is Too Immature to Talk About Sex

There’s a lot that Rick and Morty does right. Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s comedy has all but perfected the trope Futurama started, taking wild sci-fi concepts and pushing them until they inevitably break. It excels at the delicate balance of crafting episodes that are both genuinely hilarious and heartbreakingly human. But there’s one thing this masterful show truly can’t handle. As “Rickdependence Spray” too accurately proves, almost every time sex is a plot point, Rick and Morty becomes too distracted by cheap jokes to be its best self.

It’s this disconnect that’s made Season 5, Episode 4 so hated among fans and critics. It’s not that “Rickdependence Spray” was too gross or too sexualized to be funny. Rick and Morty is always gross and sexualized; it simply doesn’t exist without piles of goo and guts flying everywhere. Likewise, the clear inspirations for most guns, aliens, planets — you name it — can be traced back to penises, balls, boobs, and vaginas. What made this episode so reviled was how basic it was.

“Rickdependence Spray” started with Morty (Justin Roiland) volunteering at his mom’s horse hospital so he could shamelessly use its breeding mount. That wouldn’t have been a problem if Rick (Roiland) didn’t need a ton of horse sperm to create a weapon against a race of ground-dwelling cannibalistic horse people, known as the Chud. The rest of the episode followed the Smith family and the President (Keith David) as they fought against a race of giant, super-powered, super-intelligent sperm. It’s a premise that feels like classic Rick and Morty. What made it cringeworthy was its execution.

Rick and Morty has a talent for twisting the expected into something original, in the process uncovering new jokes and perspectives. None of that nuance existed in “Rickdependence Spray.” The countless masturbation jokes were just that: masturbation jokes, and ones you might expect not from Rick and Morty, but from a raunchier episode of Family Guy. The episode’s parade of sexual taboos, from animated ponies to incest, was so wide and unfocused it ultimately amounted to nothing. Even the Beth (Sarah Chalke) and Summer (Spencer Grammer) B-plot about men never listening to women fell flat. When they weren’t complaining about no one hearing them, Beth and Summer had next to nothing to say, confirming the very action movie trope the show was attempting to mock.

The whole thing was frustrating for fans who have come to expect more from this often insightful comedy. It also cemented a trend. Some of Rick and Morty‘s weakest episodes have all revolved around the subject of sex.

The most obvious example is Season 4’s “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty.” The episode, which starts as a cool take on fantasy versus science, quickly devolved into a lot of people screaming the phrase “Slut dragon!” The mockery of Game of Thrones‘ and the fantasy genre’s reliance on excessive sex were there. But by the episode’s end it was a takeaway too buried under lube, dildos, and soul orgies to matter. Similarly, the B-plot in “A Rickconvenient Mort”, which revolved around Rick and Summer (Spencer Grammer) sleeping and partying their way through planets on the edge of the apocalypse, felt flat. It also felt a bit too sexualized for a story about a grandfather and a granddaughter. Going all the way back to Season 2, the most predictable points of “Auto Erotic Assimilation” happened when Rick was actually hooking up with Unity (Christina Hendricks). The only thing that saved those particular moments were the hyper-specific requests Rick made during his sex marathons (Why the giraffe?).

All of these episodes and plots offer an interesting perspective in their own way. “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty” has the aforementioned fantasy critique. “A Rickconvenient Mort” showed the little-explored depraved side of the the world ending. It also paired that narrative with everyone’s least favorite night out story: the friend who picks up an annoying rando at the bar. Through Rick and Unity’s exuberant sex life, “Auto Erotic Assimilation” examined the draws of a toxic relationship. Even “Rickdependence Spray” seems to grasp at some higher theme. Repeatedly, characters are told not to be ashamed of their sexuality only to immediately be shamed about their specific quirks and fetishes, moments later. On the surface, that’s an interesting look at our culture’s hypocritical relationship with sex and how confusing that is to teenagers. But all of that nuance is lost once Morty and Summer’s incest baby enters the picture.

Granted, not every episode has fallen to Rick and Morty‘s sex-fueled disease. Typically, when sex ties back to a relationship instead of as just fuel for jokes, it works. And Rick and Morty excels when it comes to stories about relationships, romantic or otherwise. That’s true of Beth and Jerry’s (Chris Parnell) budding threesome in “Mort Dinner Rick Andre.” It’s also true of “Raising Gazorpazorp”, another Morty masturbation story that turns into a saga about the responsibility that comes with sex. That Season 1 episode morphed into a surprisingly complicated story about fatherhood. But more and more these fleeting moments feel like the exceptions that prove the rule.

It’s possible to make funny yet genuinely thoughtful jokes about sex and masturbation. Tuca and Bertie, the show that immediately follows Rick and Morty, has been doing it for two seasons. Big Mouth, Broad City, and Close Enough have also managed that tricky balancing act. But it’s starting to feel like Rick and Morty may be too immature to hold its insightful lens to this particular topic. If it could stop having the giggles, maybe that can one day change.

Where to stream Rick and Morty