Rick & Morty’s second season 5 trailer has arrived online, and it looks like the Adult Swim series will be upending its usual formula in the coming installments. Beginning in 2013, the Adult Swim hit Rick & Morty has grown from a raunchy spoof of Back to the Future into something, stranger, sillier, and more emotionally involving over its four critically acclaimed seasons.
The anarchic animated sitcom follows the often-violent, always-surreal misadventures of the eponymous duo, tortured super-genius Rick Sanchez and his dim-witted well-intentioned grandson Morty. Rick & Morty regularly parodies sci-fi tropes and sitcom conventions, with individual outings taking aim at everything from Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus to Game of Thrones, to Jurassic Park, to The Avengers.
However, while Rick & Morty has have earned a huge fanbase thanks to its witty send-ups of genre fare, the series is not without its more predictable elements. Although Rick & Morty is always eager to parody TV conventions, the show generally follows a relatively straightforward sitcom formula in its episode structure. Most Rick & Morty episodes focus on the main story starring the titular duo, while a less dramatic B-story centers around the rest of the Smith family. However, the series is quick to avoid cliche, and the arrival of the second trailer for Rick & Morty season 5 shows that the new season may rely on full-family adventures more often to switch up the established routine.
From the action seen in Rick & Morty season 5’s second trailer it is clear that, after the series-shaking season 4 finale, the show is going to be bringing the family together for more adventures in the future as opposed to splitting its episodes into a Rick and Morty-centric A plot and a Summer/Beth/Jerry B-story. The second trailer sees the usually unforgiving Rick admit that the Smith family look cool as they band together to take on some unseen foe, a moment that even he admits is “out of character.” Later in the clip, viewers see the family’s members going on a vacation together prompted by Rick’s suggestion, as well as working together to take down Rick & Morty’s first kaiju (a giant ant) in what looks like part of a Voltron parody.
This new family-centric style could be a welcome change to the established routine, as focusing on one storyline would give the series room to create more ambitious, expansive storylines. Season 4’s “Promortyus” eschewed a Beth and Jerry subplot and instead added Summer to Rick and Morty’s weekly adventure, strengthening the episode’s story in the process. Meanwhile, the events of “The Never-Ricking Morty” and “The Vat of Acid Episode” both cut the B-plot entirely to focus on a more ambitiously weird, silly central story and bringing together the entire Smith family for adventures in season 5 could mean more of these expansive, bigger stories. The change to Rick & Morty’s formula could also see Summer and Morty working together more often, another welcome change that would freshen up the dynamic between the cast. With storylines that involve the entire Smith family at its forefront, Rick & Morty season 5 could potentially prove the most ambitious outing for the Adult Swim series so far.