‘Rick and Morty’ Team Dishes on That Major Character Death, Its New Supervillain and What’s Next for Rick (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers from “Unmortricken,” the fifth episode of “Rick and Morty” Season 7.

Dan Harmon is, by his own admission, “allergic to serialized, canonical stuff.” But the “Rick and Morty” co-creator told Variety that he resisted that impulse for “Unmortricken,” the episode that brought Season 7 of the Adult Swim animated sitcom to its halfway point on Sunday night.

Not only does “Unmortricken” check in on the series’ overarching story for the first time since the Season 6 premiere (which aired over a year ago); it also sees the grisly death of a character once built up as the show’s arch-antagonist, even as it gives another an unprecedented level of power within the “Rick and Morty” universe.

Co-written by Albro Lundy and James Siciliano and directed by Jacob Hair, “Unmortricken” opens with what appears to be a standard “Rick and Morty” adventure — until Morty goes on a rampage, dons an eyepatch and becomes the figure fans know as Evil Morty, a super-intelligent version of the 14-year-old protagonist who reverses the typical dynamic of Rick domineering his more docile sidekick.