Last Sunday's episode (#3) "Pickle Rick" was one of the strangest, but also one of the best. I was intrigued enough to go looking for reviews to compare my thoughts on the episode with those of others. Sure enough, I found a couple interesting ones, such as this one and this one.
Here's an interesting excerpt:
...But later, having finally survived the heroic escapades, Rick shows up to the therapy session, tired, beaten, and nearly dead. He's done so because this is the seeming right thing to do, but it's more that he's simply too tired to keep avoiding it and he wants the serum back (a mere band-aid for his current problem). Of course, Rick can't keep up his veil of complacency for long, and his disdain for therapy comes out. And it all manifests in what is perhaps the single most brilliant explanation of therapy I've ever seen from a piece of art (and please know that therapy has become something I've come to hold quite dear)...
Therapist: "Rick, why did you lie to your daughter?"
Rick: "So I wouldn't have to come here."
Therapist: "Why didn't you want to come here?"
Rick: "Because I don't respect therapy. Because I'm a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living. And when I don't like something about the world, I change it. And I don't think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything. I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. I'm not a cow. I'm a pickle - when I feel like it - So... you asked."
Therapist: "Rick. The only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family, is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it's because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it is your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe. And yet, you are dripping with rat's blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy. The same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is - it's NOT an adventure - There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just... work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."
The stunned silence that follows is the kind that exists only when a horrible-yet-potentially-freeing truth has been unveiled, but nothing is so devastating as the scene that follows. As they drive home, Rick and his daughter apologize with niceties, putting the band aids on their relationship, and ignoring the magnitude of what has actually happened. Her children, Morty and Summer, sit in the back, wide-eyed and terrified about the avoidance they see before them. They sheepishly ask, "Are we going to go back?" and say "I liked her," clearly desperate to go back to therapy, to the person who genuinely might be able to help them all. The want to do the work. But their adult models are too scared of doing the work and facing the truth, so they will recede into themselves. They don't even answer the kids' words. Instead, Grandpa Rick and their mother make plans to go to a bar and drink the truth away... cut to credits.
I literally shuddered...
