Rick And Morty has always contained paradoxical multitudes: It’s chaotic but meticulously constructed, cynical yet sentimental, silly and searing in equal measure. But in its eighth season—its second without co-creator and former voice of both leads, Justin Roiland—the show finds itself in a bit of an existential free fall, no longer driven by vengeance or making a comeback post-scandal. Instead, it drifts. It’s clever, imaginative, and hilarious, for sure, but palpably lacking in purpose.
Roiland remains a specter at the proverbial feast. Accused of domestic violence and sexual misconduct, he was let go by Adult Swim in 2023. The controversy was public and ugly, and it left fans wondering if a show literally inseparable from his voice could survive. Season seven answered with a qualified yes. While technically its critically worst-reviewed season, the response from audiences was largely positive. The replacement voices were so accurate they bordered on eerie, and the writing held up. Compared to the Dan Harmon-less “gas leak year” of Community season four, this felt like a near-miraculous success.
While Rick And Morty has always been playing with its own self-awareness—parodying tropes, breaking the fourth wall, referencing its peak-era episodes with almost pathological nostalgia—season eight, which kicked off May 25, arrives at a strange emotional impasse. Rick finally got his revenge in season seven, beating Rick Prime, the multiverse-hopping murderer of every incarnation of his wife Diane, into a puddle of blood, gristle, and closure. And without that vendetta animating him and the beloved show, Rick And Morty is forced to ask: What now?
The answer unfortunately seems to be not a whole lot. Rick is no longer delegating his paternal duties to a robot and is surrounded by his constructed version of family: Morty Prime, Jerry 5126, Summer C-131, and a Beth whose clone status remains unresolved. But for the first time, he’s not using them as pawns in a cosmic revenge plot. He’s here because, of all the houses in all the multiverses, he wants this to be his home. It’s a significant emotional shift, one that ought to open up new territory. But instead it flattens his previously mercurial motivations.
Now, this new season opened strong, with a reality-warping simulation, stolen phone chargers, and Summer transforming into a jaded tech billionaire trapped in the body of a teenager (a solidly absurd and weirdly resonant depiction of confronting the end of childhood’s optimism). But as the season goes on, its bag of tricks starts to feel a little underfilled. Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder, who has been at the helm since season five, promised a return to more self-contained stories and, technically, they deliver. But without a guiding emotional through-line and grander ambition for the characters, the show remains appointment television but feels past its prime.
This has always been a series that wielded bleakness with sharp precision. “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s going to die, come watch TV” wasn’t just a punchline. It’s optimism packaged in nihilism and spoke to how those onscreen and off should find comfort in whatever tiny speck of joy they can grasp. And Rick And Morty once made good on that with moments of raw, painful vulnerability punctuated by dark but profound laughs. Think of the teenage boy coping with seating breakfast 20 yards away from his own rotting corpse by connecting with his sister, or the daughter confronting the existential nightmare that she might be a clone and then later that she might be in love with one in the ultimate act of narcissism, or the old man finally committing to therapy and healing deep wounds. But those cracks in that last character’s armor and the subsequent growth are mostly absent here.
Instead, in season eight, many episodes feel like they could be plucked from any dimension. There’s a return to the fallout from the Citadel, with a world made up of “bio trash” versions of Rick and Morty. But solid zingers aside, it doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting. The only real thrill comes from a meta near-breaking of the fourth wall, when Rick references Roiland’s absence by telling Morty, “You are under the delusion of something called the auteur myth. The truth is, any big project is made in collaboration. Lots of delegating. I sorta gave notes.”
The show’s once-careful balance between serialization and standalone antics has become lopsided. Harmon has admitted to being “allergic to serialized, canonical stuff,” and by the midpoint of this season, you’ll likely wish he’d just pop a Zyrtec and let this all mean something again. The fundamental storytelling difficulty with unparalleled genius and a multiverse is that nothing matters if everything is possible. Any problem can be solved by Rick’s invention skills, a reality can be swapped for another, and death comes with many loopholes. But for Rick And Morty to matter, its characters’ choices have to matter at least to them. We don’t just need them to succeed; we need them to fear and feel their failures.
There is still time for the season to evolve into something more substantial and thrive in Roiland’s continued absence. For both Rick and Morty there are no doubt far more adventures ahead, more enemies to be battled, more tragedies and personal inadequacies to grapple with. We can only hope the show remembers how to find meaning amongst all the madness.
