The only really good jokes come at the end with the absurd Cold Stone Creamery jokes (“these lights are designed for basic ice cream work”).

It truly feels like filler, like the multiple timelines plot took so much out of the writers that they just dropped in Jerry and Beth doing any old thing. The B-plot is some nonsense about Jerry and Beth trying to save a dying deer after Jerry accidentally hits it while driving. Still, the uncertain timelines A-plot in “Rickle” is at least novel. And it’s another episode of television where Harmon admits the concept got away from him and didn’t, in the end, make for a cohesive, funny half-hour. But in execution, “A Rickle in Time” is actually more like Community’s “Digital Estate Planning.” That episode took on the look of a 16-bit video game, which, there too, meant a lot of flat, static shots at the expense of the comedy.

In terms of writing and concept, there are echoes of the multiple-timelines Community episode “Remedial Chaos Theory,” widely regarded as one of the best Harmon’s other sitcom ever produced. When you’re stuck on a static image of people talking for an extended period, it’s noticeable and a little boring. This might not seem like a big deal, but a lot of television comedy, especially animated comedy, only lands because of how, well, animated it is. Probably the divvied-up image was already disorienting enough, so the angle rarely changes so you’re able to follow the action. Also, the already-complicated visual of the splitscreen gimmick means there aren’t many cuts. I mean, as I said, there are parts, unless you really focus, where you can’t even make out what characters are saying, which means the only joke you really get is “you can’t make out what the characters are saying” (and this joke gets repeated several times). The problem with “A Rickle in Time” is it’s so concept-heavy it doesn’t have much room for comedy. It speaks to Rick and Morty’s always confident, ambitious tone that it starts a season off with a premise that seems designed to overwhelm auditorily and visually (in terms of plot, I don’t think it’s too hard to follow). This is a bizarre, ballsy thing to put on television, especially for a season premiere. All this is amplified when the screen splits again later, into fours, then splits again, and again, and again.Īnd again, I admire it all. Sometimes, the characters in the various timelines don’t say the same things-one Morty says something sheepish while the other makes a confrontational remark-which means (deliberately) you just hear a jumble of incoherent dialogue. This also means you hear each character in each timeline talking at the same time, creating a reverb effect. A significant portion of this episode is told with the screen split in half, showing us two timelines at once, with minor differences in the characters’ actions in each. It makes for some weird audiovisual stuff, too.

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