Rick & Morty was one of the first shows to address the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, and theirs remains one of the best — and most accurate — satires to date. Beginning in 2013, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s critically acclaimed Rick & Morty has grown across its 4 seasons from a goofy spin on Back to the Future’s formula into a much-loved anarchic animated sitcom in its own right.
Spoofing everything from obsessive Game of Thrones fans to superhero movies, to the critically-adored Mad Max: Fury Road, no pop culture phenomenon is too sacred to escape Rick & Morty’s satirical purview. However, the show’s rushed reference to COVID-19, which aired back in May 2020, could have ended up being disastrously tasteless in hindsight. This makes it all the more impressive that the throwaway joke ended up being a prescient and ingenious gag.
Rick & Morty were historically quick to the draw when they referenced COVID-19 in May during the episode “Never Ricking Morty.” The end of the episode sees Morty apologize for buying Rick a shoddy toy train, only for Rick to zealously praise him for the act of spending money and purchasing products, regardless of what Morty actually bought. Rick notes that due to the COVID-19 lockdown, no one could buy anything, and keeping the economy humming along should clearly be the top priority of himself, his dim-witted but well-meaning grandson, and everyone else on earth. In this brief scene, Rick & Morty offered what remains the best satire of the virus and its attendant lockdowns that media viewers have seen so far, as the vignette picked the right target to poke fun at. Where later satires such as Borat 2 and The South Park Pandemic Special drew laughs from jokes directly about COVID-19 or riffing on the idea of creating art at a time of crisis (and movies like Locked Down outright misrepresented the pandemic), Rick & Morty directed satirical ire at the people claiming that keeping the economy thriving was more important than keeping the population alive.
Rick’s on-the-nose rant about how he, Morty, and everyone else on earth exists solely to purchase and consume in an endless cycle was a pointed and clever jab at the commentators who, at the time of the show’s release, claimed that repairing the economy as soon as possible was more important than safeguarding against the spread of COVID-19. In the months since the episode aired and Rick & Morty episode called out this attitude, the scene has only proven more prescient, with countries that focused on protecting their economies suffering a worse toll from COVID-19 than those that enacted safety measures, and Rick’s monologue remains a sobering (if somewhat easy to laugh at) summation of how dangerously misplaced priorities can hurt communities in times of crisis.
It’s an unusually brutal bit of satire from Rick & Morty given how difficult the intervening year has been, but the scene remains a vital, clever commentary on how irresponsibly some public officials will approach a crisis by focusing on maintaining capitalism above all else. Rick & Morty has never been afraid of using its title characters to critique authority, particularly unearned authority (Rick's greatest enemy on the series so far), but the prescience of this joke remains impressive given how much Rick’s prediction that consumerism would trump survival has proven tragically true for many countries worldwide.