Rick & Morty Season 5 Sees Morty Find A New Female Crush

3 years ago

Rick & Morty Season 5 Sees Morty Find A New Female Crush

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon teases a "tender" season 5 storyline that sees Morty moving on from Jessica to a new female crush.

Rick and Morty season 5 sees Morty find a new female crush. Since first arriving on Adult Swim back in 2013, the sci-fi animated show from Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland has gone on to be a winner both in the ratings and with critics. Awards have also followed, including this year’s Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program.

In addition to its biting humor, imaginative storytelling and sometimes very bleak point-of-view on humanity, Rick and Morty is known for being a show that makes fans wait an agonizing amount of time between seasons. The wait between seasons 3 and 4 was indeed the longest of all, but the show’s creators have actually promised that future seasons will arrive more promptly. Currently, fans await the arrival of the show’s fifth season, which was previewed not long ago with an early Rick and Morty animatic teasing a new adversary for the ever-adversarial Rick.

Speaking at the recent digital Paleyfest 2020, Harmon himself teased a few more Rick and Morty season 5 developments, including an interesting one that builds upon something that happened in season 4. As Harmon explained, season 5 sees Morty finding a new female crush to replace Jessica, the previous object of his somewhat obsessive affections (via ComicBook.com):

“There’s an episode in Season 5 where Morty has a relationship with another female character that’s not Jessica. It’s a great little story and my longtime friend and collaborator John Schrab wrote it. [Schrab] has a natural directorial instinct. He also is a tender writer, like a very juvenile John Hughes. He feels heartache on a level that a man his age shouldn’t. There’s an episode in Season 5 that my Emmy is going to.”
The idea of Morty leaving Jessica behind was in fact somewhat set up in season 4 in the acclaimed episode "The Vat of Acid Episode" (which was indeed the episode that snagged the show its Emmy), which saw Morty using Rick’s new “save point” invention to create a perfect future for himself that included falling in love with a girl. In true Rick and Morty fashion however, Morty’s blissfully perfect future was ultimately lost as he forgot to save during his entire adventure with the girl and accidentally over-wrote his last save point which was from before he met her (something gamers can certainly relate to).
Interestingly enough there was also a hint of Morty's evolving relationship with Jessica in the recently released season 5 animatic. In the clip, Morty thinks he and an incapacitated Rick are about to die as their ship is crashing to Earth so he calls Jessica to say goodbye. During their brief and intense conversation, the two actually communicate more honestly than ever and wind up agreeing to a date. This gives Morty the renewed sense of hope that allows him to pull the ship out of its death dive and land in the ocean (which presents its own problems as hitting the ocean summons Rick's old nemesis Mr. Nimbus).
It remains to be seen if the Jessica scene in the animatic takes place in the same episode Harmon referenced in his new remarks, but either way it seems season 5 is set to focus rather heavily on Morty's feelings about Jessica and his relationship with her. It will be interesting to see who Morty's new crush turns out to be, what insane things happen to them and most importantly what awful truths the storyline reveals about human existence when Rick and Morty eventually returns to Adult Swim.