Spoilers

I watched the fifth season of Rick and Morty on HBO Max this morning, moving my way through the series.

The last two episodes of the season, “Forgetting Sarick Mortshall” and “Rickmurai Jack,” really flipped the show on its head with a break-up of Rick and Morty, and the revenge of Evil Morty, aka the President of the Citadel.

I have to say, one of the things I love about Rick and Morty is how they use continuity and return to dangling plot lines from previous episodes, even previous seasons. When in episode “Rickdependence Spray” they sent the Giant Incest Baby into space, I knew it was coming back around sooner or later.

It makes sense that they need to shake up the status quo on Rick and Morty as they have gone for five seasons. You have to keep it fresh and much of this season did a decent job of that. There were several episodes that seemed to me to be very complex, maybe even overly complex. The whole “decoy families” in the episode “Mortyplicity” and the whole “Amortycan Grickfitti” episode felt too much.

Lots of obvious parodies of the season including Planetina (Captain Planet), the GoTron ferrets (Power Rangers/Voltron), and Changeformers (Transformers).

The rivalry between Rick and President Curtis is revisited in a weird episode where Rick tries to get the President to pardon him by turning himself into a turkey. They also mentioned that this is not the first thing that Rick pulled this trick. It was weird because during the course of the episode, Morty accidentally opens up the giant robot hidden in the Statue of Liberty. That was a story bit that really was never fully touched on.

I did like Mr. Nimbus, who seemed to be a parody of Prince Namor, the Sub Mariner. This was the first episode, which had a weird storyline with Morty going into a dimension in search of wine and how that affected the creatures of that dimension.

Overall, I liked this season more than I liked season four. I have seen some hints that Space Beth is going to be used in a storyline which is interesting. Maybe she can do something with Giant Incest Baby, which would be her grandson.