Yes, the ‘Rick and Morty’ season 3 finale was anticlimactic. That’s kind of the point.
After all the weird, wild adventures that Rick and Morty took us on this season, that finale couldn't help but feel a little bit ... anticlimactic.
The last scene (not counting Mr. Poopybutthole's post-credits cameo) just sees the Smiths around the dinner table, cracking jokes and sharing Panda Express while Rick looks on in irritation.
It's got none of the drama of Rick's arrest at the end of Season 2, or the time freeze at the end of Season 1. There are no serious cliffhangers, no jaw-dropping reveals, nothing that'll blow your mind or punch your gut. It's cute and sweet, but almost aggressively banal.
And maybe that's the point.
Rick and Morty has always been a show about staring into the void – about the terrifying realization that nothing really "matters" in a universe this vast, and about how we live with that fact. Morty's response is to just "come watch TV." Rick's is to position himself above it all, trying to rid himself of silly illusions like love and happiness.
In Season 3, Rick and Morty meticulously interrogated that worldview. And by giving Rick an anticlimactic ending (at least for now; who knows if we'll get a Season 4), Rick and Morty has turned Rick's own "nothing matters" attitude back around on him.
For as long as we've known him, Rick has believed that his unparalleled intelligence and his toxic cynicism go hand-in-hand. "When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours. And I've never met a universe that was into it," he told his daughter in the penultimate episode. "Smart people get a chance to climb on top, take reality for a ride, but it'll never stop trying to throw you, and eventually it will."
The finale picks up that conversation where the last installment left off, asking Rick the next logical question: And?
So what if Rick is the smartest guy in the universe? Who cares if he believes that nothing matters? What does being smart and skeptical get him, anyway?
We already know it doesn't make Rick happy. This guy's catchphrase is "wubba lubba dub dub," which means "I am in great pain, please help me." But it's at least allowed Rick to tell himself that it made him special, in some way – that it made him better than the mindless grinning idiots around him.
In the finale, though, Rick finally realizes that none of this makes him important. It doesn't make Rick matter – not to the universe, not to his own family. While Rick is engaged in a no-holds-barred fight with the President, Morty quietly slips away to rejoin the rest of his family. When Rick finally tracks them down, he's greeted not with rage or heartbreak, but with relative indifference.
His daughter can't be bothered to care what he does next, snapping, "if you kill me, fine," and suggesting that "instead of doing that, will you just go away?" Morty declines to join him on his next adventure. Jerry takes Rick's insults in stride.
When Rick tries dishing out his usual spiel ("Nothing you think matters, matters. This isn't special. This is happening infinite times across infinite realities"), Summer just farts.
The universe has always revolved around Rick and his whims. Rick's made sure of that. He takes charge on all the adventures that he's dragged his family into (sometimes against their will). He outsmarts interplanetary leaders and powerful villains, reshapes societies and creates new dimensions. He's warped entire realities just because he can.
Now he is, in his own words, "the lowest-status character in my idiot family." It's quite a reversal from the season premiere, in which Rick gloated to Morty that he had "taken over the family" as its new patriarch.
So he huffs and puffs and makes a big show of leaving this timeline ... only to go out of his way to set things right with the President so he can stay in this timeline. Apparently this reality is special to him after all.
Meanwhile, the family has proved that they can get along just fine with or without Rick. Even Beth's over her daddy issues. "The idea that I was motivated by a fear of you leaving can be eschewed!" she announces to her father.
That this is coming from Beth, of all people, feels significant. Rick has always insisted that he can't possibly be happy or caring because he's just too smart to buy into all that bullshit. But Beth's smart, too – Rick acknowledged as much in the previous episode, and reinforces that fact in the finale.
Yet, despite having heard and processed everything her father has told her, despite knowing that, by that standard, this life is beneath her and her vast potential, Beth has decided to find her joy here.
Were Rick and Morty to spring this idea on us in the last two episodes, it might ring false. But in fact, the show's been building to this anticlimax all season.
In that season premiere, Rick found himself on top as a direct result of his elaborate, dramatic manipulations. He got exactly what he wanted: Jerry out, and the rest of his family welcoming him back with open arms.
When the family went to therapy to deal with the emotional fallout, Rick made it clear he didn't approve. "I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking," he sneered, "which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself."
Instead of fighting back, however, the family's therapist calmly acknowledged that Rick probably would be "bored senseless" by therapy.
"The thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is, it's not an adventure," she explained. "There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work and some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."
So, yeah, Season 3 finale doesn't end in some wild adventure. No one's life is at stake (at least, not any more than usual), nothing's about to explode, no shoe's about to drop.
There's just Rick, deciding to do the work. Rick, making the choice to stick around, even though his family has made it abundantly clear that he's no longer the center of their universe, and even though it'd be the easiest thing in the world for him to just portal-gun his way into another universe where he still is.
There's Rick, for once not turning himself into a pickle or whisking his family off to some fantasy land or setting elaborate psychological traps while blackout drunk. It may look anticlimactic. But that doesn't mean it's not momentous.
