Highlights
- "Wet Kuat Amortican Summer" is a hilarious and original episode that puts the spotlight on Summer for the first time this season.
- The episode features a clever sci-fi concept with an "attribute slider" gadget that leads to a mind-meld psychic transformation of Morty and Summer.
- The episode includes deep-cut references to Total Recall, while also delivering big laughs and a satisfying conclusion tied back to the initial story setup.
Warning! This review contains spoilers for Rick and Morty season 7, episode 7.
Rick and Morty puts the spotlight on Summer for the first time this season in “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer,” a parody of Taken by way of a parody of Total Recall. After a malfunctioning gadget turns Morty into a psychic mutant inside Summer’s stomach, Summer has to team up with Rick to save her brother from Kuato traffickers. This episode is gleefully goofy, refreshingly original, and very, very funny.
Seven seasons in, it can’t be easy for the Rick and Morty writers to come up with new gadgets that are cool, imaginative, and ripe for storytelling, but “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” kicks off with a great new gadget: an “attribute slider” that allows Morty and Summer to dial up their strength, intelligence, and dexterity like a modded video game. The conflict of the episode arises naturally from this concept, because there’s only one attribute slider and Morty and Summer both want to use it to raise their social profile at a big high school frolf party. They fight over the device, tumble into the pool, and the ensuing malfunction turns them into a mind-meld psychic being with entangled spines pushing Morty’s face out of Summer’s stomach, where he repeats the phrase, “Open your mind!” – in other words, they morph into Kuato from Total Recall.
At first, the Kuato premise is used to introduce a community of outsiders. Morty and Summer are ostracized from the party when they merge into a Kuato, but then Summer starts getting targeted ads on social media for an alien nightclub called “Mind Openerz” that welcomes Kuatos. There, she meets fellow Kuatos and suddenly feels a lot less alone and more accepted. It’s a poignant metaphor for niche fandoms and alienated groups who find a kinship and camaraderie with one another – but that doesn’t last long. The episode quickly takes a dark turn when the Kuato-filled nightclub turns out to be a ruse to lure new victims into a Kuato trafficking operation.
Turning Morty and Summer into Kuato from Total Recall is one of the greatest deep-cut sci-fi references in the show’s history. The episode turns into a hilarious spoof of Taken when Morty’s Kuato form is abducted and Rick and Summer shoot their way through a trafficking ring onto a nice yacht to find him. Initially, Morty’s repetition of the line “Open your mind!” is a fun nod to Total Recall. Then, as he repeats it again and again, it starts to become annoying (that’s the point) and Summer tunes it out. Then, when she needs to connect to Morty to figure out where he is so she can save him, the phrase “Open your mind!” is the key to their psychic bond – it was right under her nose the whole time.
Rick and Morty is available to stream on Hulu
This episode has some of the biggest laughs of the season so far. As Rick is lounging on the couch, watching interdimensional cable on his “emotional cheat day,” there’s a great throwaway parody of Is It Cake? with sentient cakes that beg for their lives as the contestants approach them with knives. This spoof even has a better title for that ridiculous game show premise: Cake or Fake? There’s a hilarious moment as Summer is chained up and being sent down a conveyor belt into a furnace as she desperately tries to remember the activation phrase for the magical self-defense ponytail that Rick installed – “Ponytail assemble...?,” “Go, ponytail, go!” – before guessing the right answer when she predicts what its maker would’ve come up with: “I’m not grateful enough to my grandpa.”
Usually, much like in The Simpsons, Rick and Morty episodes forget about the first-act storylines that set up the main plot and just focus on the main plot until the end credits. But Alex Song-Xia’s “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” script comes full circle in the final scene. The first act sets up the immense popularity of the frolf team at Morty and Summer’s school, and the importance of their upcoming game. At the end of the episode, after Rick and Summer have saved Kuato Morty from the Kuato traffickers and stolen the Kuato big bad’s robotic walker, Morty takes the robotic walker for himself, figures out how to use the jump function, and becomes the star of the frolf team. He scores the winning point in the big game and the team carries him away on their shoulders. It’s a delightfully absurdist way to end the episode, but it also ties back to how the story started, with Morty’s initial goal to get in with the popular kids (the frolf jocks).
After the lore-heavy Rick Prime revenge episode and the subversive anthology-style episode, “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” is a welcome return to the classic Rick and Morty formula. This episode doesn’t need a gimmick to stand out; just a quirky sci-fi premise, a high-stakes story that keeps evolving, and lots and lots of laughs.
Rick and Morty
"Wet Kuat Amortican Summer" - After a malfunctioning gadget turns Morty into a psychic mutant inside Summer’s stomach, Summer has to team up with Rick to save her brother from Kuato traffickers.
