I hope I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes posting this (and I’m happy to keep doing it for the remaining episodes unless someone else wants to step up, but fair warning, I usually don’t see them until the day after air.)

So.  After a downright Venture-esque hiatus, Rick and Morty returns with the first episode of a half-season.  Rick dies a lot in this episode, while Morty actively avoids dying a lot. It sounds like their two adventures were connected by a theme!

Thoughts in no particular order:

• Wow, I loved this one.  I just wanted to say that up front, this (like most episodes) was just sheer delight from start to finish.
• Fascist Morty holding Rick at gunpoint and angrily demanding classic adventures filled with repeats of stuff they’d already done felt like a commentary on…certain elements of the fanbase.
• Holo-Rick could have been some lazy both-sides “ooh, those dumb SJWs” bullshit, and…he didn’t really come off that way to me?  Like, it’s obviously poking a bit of fun, but it felt more like an insider joke, like they knew and more-or-less agreed with it enough to write convincingly from his perspective. It came off bit like when Bojack Horseman does jokes about Diane’s feminism in a “there are foibles here we’re pointing out, but ultimately she’s right” kind of vein.  (Maybe I’m being too generous because I loved the episode overall, so I want to interpret him in a way that won’t bug me?)
• One thing at which this show absolutely excels is to take some small sci-fi element, like predicting the moment of one’s death, and take it to the absolute extreme.  Of course there would be all sorts of things you could do with a live update of every possible future – to make another cross-show comparison, Morty’s experience when touching the death crystal sounds pretty much like what Garnet from Steven Universe lives with all the time.  And Morty’s journey over this episode – getting better and better at zeroing in on that perfect future at the same time he loses more and more of himself – was the kind of where-the-hell-is-this-going story that only this show can do so well.  (The few mediocre episodes tend to be the ones where you can tell exactly where things are going, including my vote for the all-time worst, “Raising Gazorpazorp”, aka the one about an all-female society envisioned by an all-male writing room which boldly does the same jokes Futurama was doing twenty years ago.)
• We see alternate Ricks and Mortys a lot, but we don’t get to see the rest of the family much, so seeing the wasp versions of Beth, Jerry and Summer was pretty cool.

What did you think about the episode?