The fact that Rick & Morty co-creator Dan Harmon voices Mr. Nimbus in the show’s season 5 premiere secretly gives a meta insight into the show runner’s real-life writing style. As creative voices, Rick & Morty co-creator Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland couldn’t be much more different. As noted by YouTuber CJ The X in a video on Rick & Morty, the mercurial Harmon is known to be a perfectionist, while Roiland is an ardent fan of improvisation, random humor, and freewheeling self-expression.
This balance works well for the writing of the show, although it could make a potential Rick & Morty movie a bad idea. Rick & Morty balances Harmon’s love of story structure and clever plotting with Roiland’s anarchic sense of humor, resulting in a show that feels both airtight and chaotic at the same time. Rick & Morty’s season 5 premiere even managed to sneak in a nod to this dynamic when Roiland and Harmon’s characters argued during one pivotal scene.
Rick’s previously-unseen nemesis Mr. Nimbus almost explained Rick’s “dead wife” origin story during Rick & Morty’s season 5 premiere, only for Rick to cut him off and demand that the character didn’t attempt to establish any canonical backstory with the irascible antihero. The conversation was between Nimbus and Rick, but Rick & Morty snuck a meta gag about their real-life actor's divergent creative styles into proceedings. Mr. Nimbus was voiced by Harmon while Rick was voiced by Roiland, so there was a meta-joke in Harmon (famously fond of conventional narrative structure, plants and payoffs, and following the story circle) and Roiland (an anarchic improviser) debating when to deepen Rick’s origins and give him a solid canon backstory now or later.
In the context of the scene, Rick wins out as Nimbus is silenced by the comment. It doesn’t become clear until much later (Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale, to be exact) that the show is eventually going to fill in this missing backstory. However, in reality, the fact that the ending of Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale upended the show’s existing status quo by destroying the Central Finite Curve means that Harmon got his wish and Rick finally got a solid backstory, much to the character’s chagrin.
While Rick & Morty will still need to balance the wild comedic inspiration of Roiland with the measured storytelling style of Harmon going forward, season 6 will likely lean into more solid serialization. After all, the destruction of the Central Finite Curve seemingly means that Rick & Morty can no longer just ignore continuity and bail on entire realities at any given moment. That said, Rick & Morty's season 2 finale seemed to set up a similarly serious reinvention for the show, only for season 3 to return to chaos almost immediately. As such, Rick & Morty season 6 could go either way in terms of tone and canon. After all, as long as the show continues with its original co-creators at the helm, there will always be a Nimbus and a Rick arguing over how seriously Rick & Morty should take things.