If you're already in love with Rick and Morty, it won't surprise you to read this: It's not a dumb show. A dumb show, in its third season, might have been content to do just a dumb Mad Max tribute episode. Rick and Morty, of course, did something better.
Don't misinterpret this; Rick and Morty Season 3 episode 2, "Rickmancing the Stone," is absolutely a great Mad Max parody. It's just that, unsurprisingly, it does the smart show thing, and uses that joke to say something more.
The season 3 premiere--which, don't forget, aired earlier this year on April 1--established one very important plot point: that Beth and Jerry are getting a divorce. It's a long time coming, considering what happened when they tried couples counseling.
The show couldn't just leave it at that--Beth and Jerry are divorced, life goes on, cue hijinks. Back in Season 1, Rick and Morty might have briefly seemed like the kind of show where the world could end in one episode and everything would be back to normal in the next. But over the course of Seasons 1 and 2 it gradually became clear that Rick and Morty takes its continuity seriously. Just look at the way the show has regularly addressed the fact that the original Rick and Morty of the world in which our protagonists currently reside are buried in the backyard, a humdinger of a gag from Season 1 that seems to have scarred our Morty for life.
This show deals not just with a persistent narrative, but with emotional continuity as well. So of course it had to really deal with Beth and Jerry's divorce before we could move on.
The third season's second episode saw Rick, Morty, and Summer venture to an alternate world in which Mad Max-like gangs of mutant bandits roam the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic earth. They quickly dispatch the bandits' Immortan Joe-like leader and take up residence, all mainly to avoid Jerry, whose earnest fretting over divorce-related issues like "who gets custody" has begun to annoy everyone involved.
Summer is all too eager to get away. Morty is a little more sympathetic to his father's sad feelings, but he follows them through the portal nonetheless. Beth has nothing but disdain for her estranged husband. And Rick, as always, is actively rooting against him. But there's more to this episode than just getting away from Jerry. As "Rickmancing the Stone" continues, it becomes clear that the kids are using their time in the post-apocalyptic wasteland to work through their parents' divorce.
"Stop standing in the driveway talking about custody, and either tell her you want to stay married, or get on with your life!" Morty yells, as his enormous, roided-up arm punches a man's head clean off in the Blood Dome. "But whatever you do, stop being a baby, and act like a man!"
As Morty expresses his frustration, the wasteland allows Summer to embrace her newfound nihilism. Nothing matters to her anymore, so this mutant society's kill-or-be-killed rules suit her just fine. She throws herself in headlong by hooking up with Hemorrhage, making sure she'll never have to return to the real world (not accounting for Rick's interference, of course).
Morty isn't quite as committed, although he'd be fine spending weekends there, or visiting home once in a while to do a load of laundry, as he tells Rick.
Good things can't last, of course. Morty, who's grown unnaturally attached to his gigantic ghost arm, eventually faces that truth.
"Maybe the lesson we've learned is that, whether it's our parents' marriage, a glowing green rock, or an awesome giant arm, sooner or later we've got to let it go," he realizes, before Rick helps him finish off the guy his arm had been drowning in a bathtub.
Summer, a little closer to adulthood than her brother Morty, is meanwhile forced to view her parents' separation in a different light as her relationship with poor old Hemorrhage falls apart. (Well done there, Rick.)
Throughout it all demented mutants scream that their blood is made of gasoline, dousing their faces with spraypaint and blowing themselves up on the backs of spiked cars. Hemorrhage wonders dreamily about the before-fore time, before the boom-boom, when he might have been a child. The Mad Max jokes are on point. But they're not the point. And with "Rickmancing the Stone," Rick and Morty proved once again that, in spite of itself, it's one of the most intelligent and emotionally rich shows on the air.
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