Rick and Morty Season 3 Episode 9: “The ABC’s of Beth”
Grade: B+
A dialogue-heavy episode allows for a whole lot of zingers. I’m going to need to watch this again soon to get the entirety of it- there’s a lot to parse here. Jerry and Beth’s relationship has gotten a lot of flack from fans over ‘not going anywhere,’ but I’ve always loved how changes in one episode have carried over in series canon (in this case a newly empowered Jerry and Earth’s trade relations with alien civilizations).
How much you like all this is probably heavily dependent on how you thought the emotional beats worked or rang true. They were effective to me- this split the middle on the ‘breaking the 4th wall’ stuff there’d been too much of recently, and got the balance right, I thought.