Name: Rick and Morty season 6 episode 7
Director: Lucas Gray
Released: 2022-11-21T09:30:00

Rick and Morty season 6 episode 7 sees the titular duo breaking the fourth wall — literally this time — and contending with the self-aware enemies of old while addressing the self-referential nature of their story and shenanigans.

Recap

Rick and Morty starts off this episode not with the intro but a ‘previously on’ recap sequence — one that increasingly becomes more and more absurd as it goes along.

Rick is instantly suspicious of it and finds out that they’re being affected by the “Previous Leon” creature from the meta lands beyond the fourth wall. Rick tries to finish him off but he escapes, so the duo give chase, eventually walking through the fourth wall.

They find him and Rick goes in for the kill but they’re soon confronted with Story Lord, an antagonist that previously appeared on the show in the ‘Never Ricking Morty’ episode of season 4.

He eventually reveals his reason for returning, and it’s to first wipe Rick and Morty off and then go look for motivation.

Thinking they’re done for, Story Lord goes off on a hunt for his creator, while Rick carries Previous Leon to the castle of “The Referential Six” — a group of nerds who are the embodiments of plot devices and literary techniques.

Getting beat up after they release Brett Conn (Retcon) from captivity, they’re left for dead in dire circumstances. However, Joseph Campbell’s spirit comes and saves them. He later teaches them how to contend with Story Lord.

Meanwhile, Story Lord meets his creator, and the writer tells him his motivation would be motivation itself. So the antagonist forces the writer to create a machine that sucks the motivation out of everyone else and siphons it all into him.

The titular duo arrive and deal with the antagonist, with Morty eventually succeeding in stopping the machine (with Campbell’s help), and Rick beating Story Lord an inch to death.

Morty then tells the writer that in the course of writing antagonists he’d become the antagonist himself and that he must stop creating to end this misery.

The writer puts the lights out of Story Lord himself but at the end of the episode, returns home and begins working on another story because of his erroneous takeaway from the whole affair, much to Campbell’s spirit’s chagrin.

Review

Rick and Morty season 6 returns after the hiatus and continues its anti-meta theme. A show so rife and jaded with breaking the fourth wall, has made a concentrated effort to not indulge the meta anymore.
However, that changes again in this episode, which finally addresses the show creators’ and writers’ proclivities for the self-referential and fourth-wall-breaking content.
The episode doesn’t denounce this much talked about and often derided form of storytelling, though, arguing that all characters are meta and making a case that it’s impossible to not be meta.
However, there’s a solution to this incredibly tiring and annoying style of storytelling, and it’s to just stop being self-referential and recognising the meta — to stop creating, at all.
However, much to the chagrin of Joseph Campbell, and of those not fond of meta storytelling, Harmon’s self-insert conveys his incapablity to stop creating and taking a break, immediately entertaining another meta story.
Even though Harmon’s self-awareness and vulnerability is something to praise, it’s hard to empathize with the aforementioned qualities when the shtick has been going on for so long and there seems to be no end for it in sight.