This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
I'm starting to worry that this is the beginning of the end for this series. With the season finale airing last night, We can look back on this season and ask ourselves weather or not this was really worth the wait, and I'm not sure if I can say it was. Now I'm not a long running fan of the show, I was brought in by the April fools day preview, and I watched the first two seasons in the time it took for adult swim to finish up season three. And while I may not have the longest relationship with this show, I can easily agree with the many people who considered the first two seasons of the show some of the best modern television. But that can't be said about season three. Due to a variety of reasons, this season has been the epitome of all of this series' flaws.
Season three had the set goal of being decidedly darker than the previous two, and yet there is no logical reason for this to be the case. (Mild spoilers in this paragraph.) The first episode ends with Jerry and Beth getting a divorce, and while early episodes deal with this topic, the rest of this season is just edgy and dark for no discernible reason. The design philosophy the writing staff has gone for is to just add an uncomfortable moral in every episode, and usually kill off an unnamed kid every now and then just to make you feel sad for a bit. This series has gone from using dark themes for the sake of story telling, to using dark themes to be edgy and rebellious, which leads me to my next topic.
This series has been praised for being unique, and different, and the folks at adult swim have turned that quality from a feat on behalf of their writers, to a bureaucratic business model, where the story isn't written with the intention of being a good story, it's written with the intention of being different, which leads to all sorts of infuriating, and poorly thrown together plot points. Now, the way the last season ended on a cliffhanger, it seemed like the show was finally gearing up for a much larger scale story, but this seemingly season long arc essentially became a two part episode. But that's not terrible, as long as the series is still able to keep providing a good story, then that is forgivable, but... about that.... That whole "We must be different" philosophy has torn apart every remotely interesting part of the series canon. Plot points which seemed like they would matter are thrown aside and ignored in exchange for meaningless episodes with no substance. The series has always liked trolling the audience a bit, but this season reaches a new milestone, featuring some of the most deceptive, misleading, and downright disappointing moments in franchise history. a few bait and switch moments were more entertaining than what was promised, but most of it just came down to showing you something much better, and then giving you nothing.
An issue that has only been a mild deterrence in the past has become a major problem with season three, and that issue is just how much of an overpowered main character rick is. Now, it has always been part of Ricks character dynamic that he can do anything as long as he wants to, but that has gone from an interesting idea to a drama destroying plot device. Rick always wins, and It gets boring seeing him always know the answer to every question, and never being at a loss. Hell, he is even referred to as a god at some points in this season because of just how unstoppable they made him. And Ricks invulnerability isn't just limited to perilous situations, the writers also make sure that he is never wrong about anything either. Even when committing literal murder the series still insists he was right because the people he murdered were "stupid". as previously mentioned, this season is only different so adult swim can market it as different, and part of this artificial innovation is how morality goes from being questioned to frequently being labeled as wrong. This series has gone from exploring the idea of nihilism to embracing it, and forcing it on you, the viewer, with almost every episode having a moral involving how **** life is, and how you're only a "smart person" if you accept that your actions don't matter. It's essentially just a trip to 4 chan but with animation.
And finally, there's just the quality of the episodes themselves this season. Too much of the season was hit or miss. While on one hand, there are two stand out episodes this season which are just some of the best in the series as a whole, There are three clunkers. Especially "Vindicators 3", which is so abysmal it might just be one of the worst cartoons I've ever seen, in this series or otherwise. The other two bad episodes are just poorly written and flawed, and on top of all that, the episodes which aren't amazing or terrible are just okay. Not nearly the quality of seasons one and two.
Every successful TV show eventually hits a wall where it can't keep on going, and I fear this show has hit it's wall very early.… Expand
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