‘Rick and Morty’ Season 8 Nailed The Family Drama But Lost Sight of the Family

With no arch nemesis left to occupy his ambitions, Rick Sanchez spent an entire season of Rick and Morty reshaping his identity around his relationship with his emotions and with his family. Now, the family is left to reformat their own psyches just to avoid going insane from Rick’s constant mind-fucks.

Back at the beginning of Season 8, Rick and Morty showrunner Scott Marder promised that this year’s episodes would feature a “return to form” and would focus on familial relationships, following the canon-shaking events of the previous seasons. Now that Rick Prime is no longer a looming un-revenged loose end steering Rick’s every life choice, Marder teased that Rick and Morty Season 8 would delve into Succession-like family drama connected with “a nice light arc that touches on Rick dealing with being home, figuring out what’s next, and what it means in terms of his relationships with (the family).”

And, for Rick’s part, Season 8 stuck the landing on this bold and necessary shift towards family relationships and character growth in a canon that can so easily get lost in its cosmic, multiversal stakes. Following tonight’s finale “Hot Rick,” Rick is leaving Season 8 a more empathetic, caring and open patriarch than he entered it, but was it all worth the rest of the family taking a back seat in their own brains?

In the conclusion of “Hot Rick,” our Rick bids farewell to a pocket universe containing Memory Rick and Memory Diane after resolving to move on from the loss of his wife to become more emotionally open with his loved ones and, possibly, pursue a relationship with Bug Anne, his newly introduced and easily forgettable love interest. Throughout Season 8, Rick grappled with this shift in mindset as he casts away the grief-driven nihilism that set his course for decades, and decided to take an interest his chosen family, despite their disparate dimensional origins.

Back in “Valkyrick,” we saw Rick finally behave like a proud and protective father to Space Beth as they finally brought an end to the Gromflomite conflict. Rick's complicated relationship with the two Beths hit a major milestone when he broke down in tears during “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button” at his recovering-psychotic daughters' immense aptitude at scientific ass-kicking. And, beyond his familial epiphanies, Rick has been experimenting with empathy on sheltered space colonists and fictional Christmas trees as he softens from his previous world-destroying callousness. 

The events of Season 8 have shaped the most powerful mind in the Central Finite Curve into a self-aware and sensitive being who is both capable of and drawn towards true personal growth – but it's not like Rick's family is enjoying the fruits of his emotional labor. As Rick embarked on this arc of empathy, he trapped his grandkids in a matrix that inflicted PTSD upon their developing brains, he accidentally shattered Beth's very psyche through exposure to altered memories and he continued to expose his entire family to the exact same psychological and psychosexual trauma that has typified the past seven seasons of Rick and Morty.

In Rick and Morty Season 8, Rick's growth arc came at the expense of the other Smith Family members' own development. Especially following the mind-fuckery of “Hot Rick,” Beth's mental health has been obliterated by the last ten Rick and Morty episodes. Summer's only significant moment of self-discovery ended with a mind-wipe in the season premiere, and Morty's moment of closure with Morty Jr. felt like an awkward, stilted stand-in for catharsis featuring a side character whom we haven't cared about in a decade in last week's “Morty Daddy.” The only non-Rick character who experienced real, potentially lasting growth in Rick and Morty Season 8 was Jerry, whose standout episode “Nomortland” was mostly Rick-free.

For as much power as Rick wields in the Rick and Morty universe, the last seven seasons have proven that every member of the Smith Family is a necessary variable in the show's winning formula, and a long absence of meaningful plotlines for any one of them will have the entire fandom demanding, “Where the hell is Jerry?!” Despite how the many Ricks of the Central Finite Curve treat their Mortys, Summers, Jerrys and Beths, the Smiths are not auxilliary orbiters who are occasionally blessed to circle Rick's sun – they're vital, three-dimensional characters, most of whom suffered developmental stalls and setbacks this season, thanks to Rick's chaotic self-discovery. 

The Rick and Morty creative team was right to reframe Rick's mindset towards personal growth and relationships in Season 8, but, following the finale, it's hard to see where the Smith Family goes from here, now that Rick has proven that his most mindful, empathetic and introspective self is just as capable of breaking their brains as the a-hole version.