Morty gatecrashes his own funeral. Then he does it a second time. Then a third.
That’s the motor driving “Field of Dreams,” the Season 9 finale, and it explains why the episode ranks as the second-strongest thing the season delivered. “Ricks Days, Seven Nights” remains the peak. This one gets within reach of it, and it manages that by pulling off something the series doesn’t always attempt: fusing the gag and the wound into a single object.
Full spoilers ahead for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 10.
The estate sale is the setup, not the story
Rick (Ian Cardoni) dies, and his counterparts from across the multiverse swoop in to paw through his possessions like opportunistic vultures. Welcome to the Rick estate sale, a fresh piece of world-building that the episode introduces and then largely treats as a doorway.
Alternate Ricks and Mortys (Harry Belden) are dependably entertaining, particularly during this post-Citadel stretch of the show. The estate sale, though, is scaffolding. What matters is the use Morty puts it to.
He goes funeral-hopping.
Why the premise curdles so fast
His curiosity makes sense. How are all these other families coping with his death? Is he missed? And it makes equal sense that the voyeurism hardens into a habit almost instantly, since grief staged for an audience of one is about the most flattering thing anybody can sit and watch.
Inevitably, he’s caught. That tracks too, because the family that catches him hands him something resembling love and appreciation. Toxic and ruinous for everyone in the room, yes. But legible.
Morty’s relatively harmless hunger for affection curdles into a weight that drags everyone around him under. That’s the episode’s entire architecture, and it holds up.
The Jerry problem
This particular Jerry (Chris Parnell) is a near-abusive parent wrapped in an agreeable exterior, and the prospect of recovering his son is what finally severs his grip on reality.
Parnell earns pointed credit for this. The assorted Jerrys come across as genuinely separate characters in a way the rest of the Smith family never quite does across these alternate-universe outings. Part of that is on the page. Plenty of it isn’t.
Set this Jerry, or the late Jerry Prime, against the familiar sad sack, who turns up in a couple of scenes here singing about his stupid fedora. Same actor. Different species.
Rick throws it away on purpose
There’s something grim and oddly hypnotic about watching Rick take his own life apart. Helping Morty isn’t the reason. He does it because the man he once was holds more appeal than the man he turned into, which is a far uglier motive.
He begins as a recovering addict whose home life actually functions. He finishes as the drunken, spiralling wreck everyone knows by heart. The Russian janitor turns into a dog with an impossibly long neck. Nobody comes out ahead.
Malin Ackerman’s character is deployed sparingly and effectively, serving as a constant reminder of precisely what Rick is setting alight in the name of science. The finale orbits the same notion as “Ricks Days, Seven Nights” — Rick running from the hollowness of his life, then charging straight back into it — but the angle of attack shifts enough that it never reads as a repeat.
Nothing mattered, and that’s the punchline
Episode 10 signs off bleak. Rick dies. Jerry dies. Morty’s counterfeit family dies to the last member. Rick’s whole crusade to construct a portal gun amounted to a colossal failure.
No matter, though, because another Rick estate sale hands Morty a simple ride home.
The season shuts down on existential angst, exactly as it should. What’s changed is whose angst it is. This time around, the grandfather isn’t the one hauling it.