Rick and Morty’s Season 7 recast is the least of its problems

Cartoons have been changing voice actors for decades, but few of them are a lightning rod for culture wars.

Image credit:Adult Swim

I wrote about Lower Decks last week, about how its reputation as essentially the Rick and Mortification of Star Trek still puts a lot of Trekkies off, despite the fact that it’s the best Trek show since the mid-nineties. Rick and Morty itself is subject to a similar issue: it’s one of the best adult animations around, and yet, it’s almost embarrassing to bring it up in polite company.

That some people see Lower Decks’ clear debt to Rick and Morty as an inherent Bad Thing is incongruous with the fact that both shows are doing pretty well. LD’s fifth season, currently in development, was greenlit months before season 4 premiered. Rick and Morty started off as a ratings smash, and retained impressive numbers for years thereafter. Not many shows get to their seventh season, let alone with a healthy portion of their peak audience still sticking around.

I never met any of my grannddads, so I don’t know if this is relatable or not. |Image credit:Adult Swim

And it hasn’t been an easy road for Rick and Morty. It survived both the 2020 covid pandemic, the 2023 writers strike, and the subsequent actors strike. And it has survived having to recast its titular characters following the original voice actor’s dismissal from the show in the wake of several sexual abuse and impropriety scandals. Any one of these things could kill a show stone dead. The pandemic alone axed more projects than a team of Hollywood execs could in their wildest dreams.

We’re now halfway through Season 7, and though the premiere did seem to prove the naysayers right (Morty was barely in it, Rick’s new voice didn’t quite hit the mark, and fan-favourite Mister Poopybutthole didn’t sound remotely like his original incarnation), the show has found its groove again. S07E05 delivers on several long-running plot threads in typically bombastic fashion, and one of the show’s most foundational conflicts comes to a violent close. It took a few half-hours to settle back into itself, but it’s safe to say that Rick and Morty is back. At this point, it doesn’t even occur to me that the voices are being delivered by different people. Many are determined to see this as the worst season yet, but it just isn’t the case as yet. Though we do have the back half to go.

High concept science fiction but where an evil clone gets his bum out for a cheap gag: Rick and Morty in a nutshell. |Image credit:Adult Swim

Having to recast the titular roles has barely been an issue, as it turns out. Yes, certain tones and inflections don’t hit in the same way if you really listen for it, but if you’re really listening for it, you’re kinda going out of the way to spoil it for yourself. And that, in a nutshell, is Rick and Morty’s major problem: a vocal minority of its fans are awful, and a lot of them are practically willing the show to fail in a show of support for Justin Roiland (a questionable prospect, given what he’s been accused of and how it led to his exit from almost everything he was working on, including Solar Opposites and and his video game company Squanch Games).

The suicide spaghetti episode is another season 7 highlight. |Image credit:Adult Swim

See, Rick and Morty has been a guilty pleasure for a long time. Admitting you watch it is almost as much of a social leprosy as admitting you collect Funko Pops. And that’s more or less because of its more dipshit fans, whose rap sheet includes such delights as doxxing the show’s female writers, causing the police to be called to McDonald’s outlets following their meme-crusade for Szechuan Sauce, and including among their number Elon Musk, who wasn’t involved in any of those other incidents, but who is king of the dipshits. He even waded into Roiland’s sacking, describing him as “the heart of the show” on X Formerly Twitter. And the show didn’t do itself any favours when it included him as a guest star.

It’s one of the most spectacular genre shows around, despite being a cartoon where an alcoholic grandad has a permanent sick stain on his chin.. |Image credit:Adult Swim

But despite all this, the show continues to be a blistering, brilliant odyssey of life, death, and reality set across a fantastic and intricate multi-verse. With dick jokes, and sight gags, and often impenetrable serialisation which at this point serves as a gift to those of us who’ve stuck around. Though the show operates perfectly well for the most part as an episodic monster/gadget/reality-of-the-week comedy, it is at its best when it embraces its rats-nest of interdimensional continuity that leaves intermittent viewers to ask questions like “why are there two Beths?” and “So is he a robot or what?”. Season 7 has shown adeptness at both sides of this coin.

The humanity of the show is as impactful and poignant as ever, as evidenced in this wonderful flashback sequence set to a haunting cover of Oasis’ Live Forever.Watch on YouTube

The recasting has been relatively seamless. Rick and Morty is as gloriously and grotesquely inventive as it ever was. The writing is showing the usual cracks that afflict a series that goes on long enough for its fans to have favourite “eras” – that impossible dance between trying to keep things fresh while also giving people the things that led them to love the show in the first place. With Roiland’s involvement or not, the show was destined to become more hit and miss as it went on.

But boy can it still hit. Ultimately, the genius of the show remains intact. Rick is the villain of his own story. He’s a prisoner of his own nihilism and toxicity, but they are the engines of his success. And it can only be a good thing if, as a result of the changes brought about in season 7, the toxic elements of the show’s own fanbase decide to clear off, and leave the rest of us to enjoy one of the best cartoons of its generation without having to think about the sort of toilets who might also be watching.

High On Life

PC

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Next week’s big Xbox Box Game Pass game will be detested

Are you ready for a ‘marmite game’? It’s been a long time, but it looks like Xbox Game Pass’ upcoming title will be quite divisive.

The best thing about Xbox Game Pass , for my money, is the way it lets you experiment with things in a relatively consequence-free manner. For example, I always thought I’d love Loot River – it’s exactly my kind of jam; roguelite elements, dark pixel art, unforgiving combat. Thanks to the tite’s arrival on Game Pass, though, I didn’t need to drop the full price on the game only to discover it wasn’t really for me after a few hours. I might have wasted some time, but I didn’t waste any money. Decide for yourselves whether that’s better or worse.

Are you gonna play it on your potato–– err, Xbox Series S?

Next week, I think a lot of people are going to get to see this specific perk of Game Pass rise to the surface. Why? Because Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and Squanch Games are launching High On Life to the service on Day One. The studio’s take on first-person shooters is obnoxious, loud, crude, and irritating – and some of you are going to absolutely detest it. And I can’t wait to see the fallout of it.

And you don’t just have to take my word for it; Alex wrote about this earlier this year, and he came away from the demo with the same outlook as me: High on Life is actually funny, and is funniest when it leans into its very niche gaming humor . The game is self-aware and meta (I can sense that’s already turned more people off), and provides a commentary on quite a lot of gaming tropes in a knowing, smarmy way.

This knife likes to kill. Obviously.

That’s not to say it’s bad, per se: it’s just a lot. Roiland is trying to do what he does best in High on Life, but substituting the fourth-wall-breaking mad scientist of his TV show for the player-referential guns in games. It’s in-your-face adult humor, but delivered by colorful characters that look like they’re intended for kids. But – for the love of God – don’t let your kids play this.

What do you think? Will you like this?

High On Life looks set to continue a rich gaming tradition of being a comedy game that actually has too much comedy in it – it didn’t work for Duke Nuke Em, it didn’t work for Deadpool, and it might not work for this. But hey, maybe it will – Rick and Morty has attracted millions of fans around the world for a reason, and maybe High on Life won’t work without Roiland’s partner in crime (and Community overlord) Dan Harmon, but maybe it will. Maybe this game will be more Double Fine than Gearbox, more Discworld than Saints Row. We’ll have to wait and see. Good job we can play the whole damn thing via Game Pass, ey?

From what I’ve played so far, I think High on Life balances on the comedy tightrope quite well. The unending stream of foul language gets a bit rote – even in an hour-long demo! – but some of the situations the game puts you in or the lines it delivers work well. Alex, in his piece, mentions this guy that has idle dialogue that he cycles through before you actually talk to him, and if you stop and listen, you hear him musing on his life as a video game NPC, destined to wait and hang out, performing a mundane task until finally the player comes to speak to him. It’s a glib, knowing take on gaming conventions that lands well.

I don’t trust this dude.

In that way, High on Life is reminiscent of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, more than anything else: it’s puerile, it’d be hilarious for a 12-year-old, but it also lands its mark on a more adult audience, too.

And that reinforces my point quite elegantly, actually: imagine if Conker’s Bad Fur Day had been on Game Pass, back in the day – it’d have been a hit, this odd little curio that many more people would have discovered, and found joy in.

High On Life

PC

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