Highlights

"Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie" is the most disappointing episode of Rick and Morty season 7 so far.
The episode lacks deeper meaning and an emotional core, and only offers a couple of laughs.
The absence of Rick and the other Smiths, as well as the overuse of wordplay and recycled jokes, make this episode one-note and underwhelming.

After a steady run of great episodes, Rick and Morty season 7 falters with a one-note storyline stretching out a post-credits scene to a full half-hour. In “Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie,” Morty gets swept up in a war between letter-shaped aliens and number-shaped aliens. This might be the most disappointing episode of season 7 so far. There’s no deeper meaning, there’s no emotional core, and there’s only a couple of laughs. The other Smiths are nowhere to be seen – including Rick, one of the title characters – as the episode bombards viewers with grammatical and numerical puns that elicit more eye-rolls than chuckles.

Way back in season 2’s “Get Schwifty,” after rapper Ice-T helped Rick and Morty write a hit song to save Earth in a deadly intergalactic version of the Eurovision Song Contest, he returned to his home planet, Alphabetrium. Alphabetrium is populated with element-based beings shaped like letters of the alphabet, including Hydrogen-F, Magnesium-J, Sulfur-P, and Ice-T’s true form, Water-T. It was a great little absurdist gag to tag onto the end of “Get Schwifty,” but it’s not substantial enough to support a whole episode – especially an episode that has no Rick. Ice-T commits wholeheartedly to the bit, but that’s not enough to save an episode that takes a familiar post-credits scene and makes it 10 times longer (and 10 times less funny).

The return to Alphabetrium starts out as a fun callback to a memorable gag from a classic previous episode. But it quickly becomes clear that the episode has nowhere else to go and it’ll spend its entire runtime rehashing that same gag, and it ends up dragging out the joke for way too long. It worked really well as an absurdist post-credits sequence introducing Ice-T’s homeworld, whose entire culture is extrapolated from the rapper’s stage name, but it’s stretched razor-thin as a full half-hour episode. It focuses too much on the minutiae of the letters-versus-numbers conflict and the lore of their respective planets.

Mr Goldenfold talks to Morty in Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty works best when it takes a surreal, ludicrous sci-fi concept and packs in a surprisingly devastating emotional gut-punch. An episode in which Morty asks Rick for a love potion ends with a harrowing existential crisis. An episode in which Rick turns himself into a pickle becomes a meditation on the merits of therapy. But “Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie” has absolutely no emotional substance whatsoever. It’s just a series of random wordplay, like replacing the word “catastrophe” with “apostrophe.” There is some funny stuff buried in this wordplay – like referring to the children of the letter society as “lower-case letters” and a devastated number lamenting the loss of her brethren: “He’s killing every one... and every two... and every three...” – but it’s not enough to make up for a completely one-note episode.

“Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie” falls into some of the same issues as the season’s early episodes. There’s too much reliance on familiar gags and not enough original ideas. The storytelling is much too straightforward and simplistic; it doesn’t have any of the show’s signature unexpected twists. Above all, those early episodes suffered from splitting up Rick and Morty. Whereas season 7’s first installments sidelined Morty in favor of Rick solo adventures, this one sidelines Rick for a Morty solo adventure. The writers seem to have forgotten that the core of the entire series is their relationship. They’re nowhere near as compelling as individuals as they are as a pair sharing the screen together. At least Morty made blink-and-miss-it cameo appearances in the Rick-centric episodes; Rick doesn’t appear in this episode for a second (and neither do Summer, Beth, or Jerry, for that matter).

Mr Goldenfold talks to Water-T in Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty usually makes fun of trope-heavy sci-fi storytelling with meaningless MacGuffins and magic systems, but “Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie” just indulges in all those mind-numbing tropes. It has a pointless MacGuffin, the Eye of Harmony, that all the characters are fighting over. It has an omnipotent big bad, Emperor Dreadnaught, who becomes a common enemy for both the heroes and villains. A lack of imagination and outside-the-box thinking has made Rick and Morty become the very thing that it typically parodies.

After a rocky start, Rick and Morty season 7 finally returned to form with a string of great episodes. “That’s Amorte” was a delightfully dark satire of the ethics of meat consumption, “Unmortricken” provided a shocking conclusion to the long-running Rick Prime revenge storyline, “Rickfending Your Mort” was another slyly self-aware subversion of the clip show format, and “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” was an unpredictable joy from start to finish. Sadly, that winning streak has been broken this week with a painfully underwhelming episode that recycles old jokes, doesn’t have a single shred of emotional substance, and completely misses what usually makes this show work so well.