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‘Rick And Morty' Bosses On Pulling Off Another Citadel-Centric Episode — This Time In The Form Of A Western: ‘That Was A Fun Challenge'
A still from 'Rick and Morty' Season 8, Episode 3: "The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly"
It's very hard to recapture lightning in a bottle, but the wild minds behind Rick and Morty hoped to do just that in the third episode of Season 8: 'The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly." Taking the form of a Western-style revenge story, the latest installment was conceived as 'a spiritual sequel' to Season 3's 'The Ricklantis Mixup," series co-creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer Dan Harmon reveals over Zoom.
The highest-rated episode of Rick and Morty to date according to IMDb, 'The Ricklantis Mixup' delivered a clever bait-and-switch, setting up one storyline for the titular duo (then voiced by co-creator Justin Roiland) before switching gears to something else entirely. Per Harmon, it was all about dropping 'the audience into this unexpected meta joke of, 'I bet you didn't know we were going to spend the entire episode focusing on this thing.''
The gimmick turned out to be a number of interconnected stories set against the backdrop of the Citadel, the former inter-dimensional stronghold inhabited by different Ricks and Mortys from across the multiverse prior to its destruction at the hands of "Evil Morty" at the end of Season 5. Written by Albro Lundy, James Siciliano, and Michael Kellner, 'The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly" picks up sometime after the fall of the Citadel and Rick's decision to reset his portal fluid, which caused all Rick and Mortys to return to their realities of origin. As a result, the only people left standing are the many clones who were bred on the Citadel to serve a multitude of purposes — from backup bodies to restaurant chain mascots. Left with almost nothing, these duplicates have built an Old West-style society from the rubble of their former existence.
'We got excited at doing something that was a Western and it felt like it brought out a lot of life when we tapped into the Citadel and all the human shrapnel that came with it,' explains co-showrunner and executive producer Scott Marder. "What is life [like]
A still from 'Rick and Morty' Season 8, Episode 3: "The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly"
The episode opens with the main Rick and Morty (voiced by Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden, respectively) cleaning up Citadel debris when their ship is damaged. They briefly land on the farm of a lone homesteader Rick, who then takes over as the main focus of the episode. After he's left for dead by Morty-kidnapping Rick marauders in the employ of a nefarious, Colonel Sanders-style Rick (he was specifically cloned to be the flamboyantly Southern face of a gumbo franchise), the farmer sets out for revenge alongside a pair of Mortys looking to find their kidnapped friends.
'We had this huge advantage [with 'The Ricklantis Mixup'] where the idea was like, 'Oh, it's life in the city genre, and it's going between all these stories; it's hustle and bustle.' This is almost the opposite in terms of that because it's a frontier story," Harmon concludes. "You're hyper-focused on these small stories and you're not cutting between…it's not Love Actually or Summer of Sam or something. So that became a big challenge because it's, 'We're going to do this again. We're going to drop the audience into a thing that's not our ongoing show, and then we're gonna do Unforgiven?' That was a fun challenge. It's like, 'How do we make this feel right and make the audience feel supported?'
New episodes of Rick and Morty Season 8 air on Adult Swim every Sunday night at 11:00 p.m. ET
