Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland tease season 6’s balancing act

What is the best way to pin it down? Rick and Morty? No, reader, I’m asking You, specifically — when you think of the breakout Adult Swim animated comedy, what comes to mind? There’s probably the Szechuan sauce and its associated debacle; Pickle Rick; the wacky multiverse hijinks the show was doing before it was cool; maybe a stray, inescapable Justin Roiland voice that plays on loop.

Based on my personal experience Rick and Morty is like working out: The longer it’s been since I’ve engaged with it, the bigger the mental block is to going back. I genuinely like them both, but I don’t really want to listen to anyone who’s made either their whole life. Ultimately, they always feel good to return to, even (or maybe, especially) when it feels hard; there’s more depth to it than just the routine, everyday stuff, but that everyday stuff also gets the job done.

The fact is a part of this. Rick and MortyThis video dissects sci-fi influences at breakneck speed, going through whole concepts in 22 minutes. You can also see the layers in this particular onion. Pickle Rick seems almost as complicated as Pickle Rick. And as we saw in season 5, Rick C-137 (the show’s main Rick) has a much darker backstory than the Rick of the timeline he finds himself in. C-137 Rick watched his wife get killed by another Rick, and — after some time spent trying to hunt him down, killing various Ricks, and generally getting fucked up — eventually crash-landed himself into a timeline where a Rick had abandoned his grown-up daughter, settling in bitterly.

It was a sort of confirmation of the story Rick told his Galactic Federation captors in season 3 — a SlowThe truth about a man who has been revealed to his darkest secrets throughout the five season of the series. Co-creator Dan Harmon wants to calm those who are concerned about the show’s sixth season.

“It might be a return to a season 3 ratio of canon to one-off energy,” Harmon tells Polygon of season 6’s entries into the canon. “And more importantly, the relationship between [that and the other seasons].

“Maybe if season 5 might have felt a little bit more like almost a compulsive aversion to canon, and then a big episode at the end that promised all of it. That’s what season 6 feels like. Yeah, moving forward, we’re going to continue to try to hit that ratio the right way, as opposed to like, either compulsively avoiding it or indulging in it.”

If you ask Harmon what that perfect ratio is, he will jokingly say “a nice solid 20%,” if he’s going to be “joylessly mathematical about it.” He cites their recent episode schedule shift as providing room to “relax about servicing canon,” and instead sprinkle it in where it feels worthy. The two episodes that Harmon provided to critics are a great example of this. Rick and Morty might balance itself moving forward: The first picks up after the fall of the Citadel of Ricks and Evil Morty’s destruction of Portal Fluid left our Rick and Morty’s fate uncertain. This is the action-packed, classic madcap version of Action-Packed. Rick and MortyEpisode with a star guest

“We’ve always seen the show being able to live in both [worlds] if we’re careful,” Justin Roiland, co-creator and star, says. “We could say, Fuck it, let’s go full serialized, fuck it. […] But I just feel like it would — I don’t know if it would be good. It’s almost like an Oreo cookie. And you’re just eating the shit in the middle and then you’re throwing away [the rest]. You kind of need both things.”

Image Credit: Adult Swim

Image Credit: Adult Swim

Image Credit: Adult Swim

Image Credit: Adult Swim

It’s a good sign that season 6 will continue with the same promise. This comes as multiverses are becoming more and more popular. It’s a reminder that Rick and Morty has been doing that shit for a while — so long, in fact, that it’s sort of superseded the usual discussion about how to grow their characters. Like many animated casts, the Smith-Sanchez family isn’t aging up, even after a few years of adventures.

“You want to have the consequences and the realism that we have with our characters. But then, because it’s animated, you want to keep them the same,” Roiland says. He notes that it’s not a new problem for cartoons: The SimpsonsThe comic strip has been updated many times, and its story is still relevant. You can have it both better and worseThe characters could age in real-time. You can find out more about Rick and MortyRoiland says that they can conjure up their own take on any character in the multiverse for as long or short as it takes. “With sci-fi, and also multiverse, you can get away with almost anything.”

Still, that doesn’t mean season 6 doesn’t promise big changes. After the season 5 finale blew up the foundation of Rick’s world as we know it, Roiland and Harmon are focusing on setting up new challenges for the titular duo and their loved ones. While Morty isn’t going to hit his 15th birthday (at least not without the usual time hijinks to get him right back to where he started), he’ll still be growing as a character.

Image Credit: Adult Swim

Image Credit: Adult Swim

“What Morty needs to do — and this is actually really difficult — Morty needs to continually have his relationship with Rick become respected,” Harmon says. “We can’t really write that Morty’s mind is blown by the insinuation that nothing matters in episode 80; he has to have gotten used to that by now. So it’s like he’s growing, he’s aging in terms of his exposure to the universe. But at the same time, even though there’s been multiple Thanksgiving and Christmases, apparently this is just less than a year in the life of this poor kid (that’s spanned multiple presidential administrations).”

You can count on seeing more after six seasons. Rick and Morty’s “lore,” the poignancy and depth that has been haunting Rick Sanchez’s every move. But you’ll also see some more film homages, Cronenberg monsters, immature squabbles, fart jokes and meta humor, sci-fi shenanigans, and potshots at things like Avengers: Endgame. Rick and Morty will be facing another Big Bad soon, but it is possible that they won’t get there. There’s an interactive “episode” of the show called “Wormageddon.” Meanwhile there’s an anime spinoff in the works, and the duo is popping up in MultiVersus. You can’t easily pin down a show like this — every audience member has a different relationship with it. Any reputation Rick and Morty has in your heart, it’ll probably deliver on that in the sixth season, with laughs and alien guts galore.

Rick and MortySeason 6 will premiere on Adult Swim Sunday, September 4, 2011, at 11:59 p.m.