“Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty” was the most bizarre episode of season 4. SPOILERS
This episode begins with Morty begging Rick for a dragon. After enough prodding, Rick, reluctantly breaks and gets Morty his dragon from a Wizard in a magic realm/planet. Morty quickly realizes that the Dragon is super boring and loses interest. But Morty has already signed a contract in blood, to soul bond with the dragon forever.
The Dragon, Balthromaw, lives under ground and hoards cars, gold, action figures, and anything humans believe holds any significant value. Rick goes down to slay Balthromaw but ends up “soul bonding” this soul bonding is some type of sexual act for the dragons being that in brings them a type of sexual euphoria. Pretty funny at first but it’ll get weirder as the episode goes on.
The wizard who soul bonded the Dragon to Morty finds out that the Dragon had broken its soul bond and condemned Balthromaw to die. In the meantime Balthromaw is only referred to as a “slut dragon” and is banished to live with the other slut dragons who broke their soul bonds. Within this plot line there’s a lot of sexual dragon innuendos implying soul bonding is like sex for dragons, and that if you have more than one soul bond, you’re a slut dragon.
Rick, Morty, & Summer travel to this dragon world where Ricks powers are rendered useless so they essentially need to use magic from Morty’s magic book, that he received when he bonded with the dragon. They finally free Balthromaw by having a soul bond orgy with like 4 other dragons, and kill the wizard. They get back home, and Rick & Morty, now over Balthromaw, basically tells him to kick rocks.
In the secondary plot of the episode, Jerry finds himself with a cat who can talk. Jerry asks where the cats from and why it can talk, but never gives him any good answers. The cat is kind of creepy being that he talks without his mouth moving and that you never find out why he can talk. The cat goes brings Jerry to Florida to party and to show him that people down there don’t care that the cat can talk. Weird story line, didn’t get the premise, until the end!
The episode ends with Rick going to take the cat back where it’s from, but after lack of any good enough answers, Rick decides to scan the cat’s memory to see what it has seen. They don’t show the viewer, but when Rick looks into his goggles and hears what sounds like screaming and horror, the sight caused Jerry to throw up and curl up in fetal position and caused Rick to almost kill himself. Rick then wipes Jerrys memory, with the device from Morty’s mind blowers, stating “Someone has to remember.” The cat scurries off and reconvenes with Balthromaw in the ending credit scene.
I liked the episode as whole. While I was watching it, I didn’t understand the importance of the cat plot but at the end it was made very apparent that this cat will have implications later on in the series. The main plot was underwhelming, there were a couple funny moments and innuendos with the slut dragons, but at times it was actually kind of weird. Not bad weird, but just different weird.
The cat plot made 0 sense, and I had no clue where Roiland was going with it up until he last 30 seconds of the episode. It was apparent that the cat was kind of creepy/ominous but it wasn’t made clear until the end. I’m very curious to see how this cat comes into play moving forward.
Looking ahead, this weekend is the mid season finale, which I’ve heard is supposed to be REALLY good. There hasn’t been any Morty’s Mind Blowers, Interdimensional Cable, Citedel of Rick’s, or Evil Morty yet this season. That being said, next episode should offer some insight into the over plot and character development of the series.
So far this season has been IMO middle of the pack, and can definitely be cleaned up with a strong mid season finale. Was it worth the 2 year wait so far? No tbh, but hey, Roiland is a genius and has 6 episodes to prove me wrong.
Pecks R&M Season 4 Ratings:
- Episode 1: 6.2
- Episode 2: 4.7
- Episode 3: 8.6
- Episode 4: 6.7
Pecks