Rick finally achieves his collection of giant robots and starts a mafia.

While Rick and Morty have used a lot of anime references over their run, this is probably the most blatant use of an anime property, doing an entire episode around a thin Voltron parody mixed with a mafia movie. The two aspects occasionally feel like they shouldn’t work together, but the episode manages to mostly pull it off. It literally has a song saying that it’s “a bit of pasta with an anime combined.” It does require a number of seemingly out-of-character moments by the Smith family, including Jerry retreating to being a completely pathetic attention seeker and Summer being willing to endanger Rick’s health in exchange for his affection. The show seems to care less about character development this season, though, so maybe that’s just how it rolls right now. 

The episode starts off with Rick, Morty, and Summer (Justin Roiland and Spencer Grammer) heading to Boob World, an amusement park that Summer only gets invited to because it gets them in for free. This gets interrupted by Rick finding the Blue GoTron Ferret, a giant magical robot that completes Rick’s collection. Rick quickly gets Beth and Jerry (Sarah Chalke and Chris Parnell) to join the trio as pilots of the five ferrets that join together to form the monster-fighting robot GoTron. However, Rick quickly gets bored with this status quo and invites four other Smith-Sanchez families from four other universes to join him with their Gotron Ferrets so that they can join together to form the even bigger “GoGoTron.” Naturally, these five families become a mafia-like organization and while Morty tries to rein Rick in, Summer pushes him to go further. Eventually, Morty is on the outs with his family and is threatened by a group of anime characters to stop using the Ferrets. When he gets back, a rejected Rick attacks a meeting of the families and Morty gets blamed. Summer similarly gets kicked out when she tries to moderate Rick, who has hired the anime characters as pilots. They naturally betray Rick and try to kill him, but the rest of the Smith family save him using Morty and Summer’s incest baby. It’s then revealed that all of the GoTron monsters are actually trying to help spread the cure for AIDS rather than kill humanity, but the portal they use makes them naked and they cannot be understood by humans.

I’m not a huge fan of this episode, but I do admit that the mixing of the giant robot anime and mafia genres is actually pretty damned great. It’s something I would never have considered before now, despite the fact that a lot of anime involve some aspect of organized crime. The biggest problem is that they kind of get mired in the second act and the final fall from grace of Rick isn’t quite set up as well as it should be. I get that it’s supposed to mirror Scarface, with Rick even having a lair like Tony Montana and using the line “say hello to my little me” before revealing a Rick-shaped machine gun, but it still just doesn’t have the same “push it to the limit” feeling before that happens. Also, I’m not a fan of the fact that we keep bringing back the giant incest baby as a character. We had better get a big payout for this in the finale.

Overall, I give this episode a

C+

on the Rick and Morty scale.

Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub, I need a drink. See you next week.

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