Hawk Ripjaw
The following recap contains spoilers for Rick and Morty S7E2, “The Jerrick Trap” (written by Albro Lundy & James Siciliano and directed by Kyounghee Lim).
Editor’s Note: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Two things I got excited for right off the bat when I saw the title for Rick and Morty S7E2, “The Jerrick Trap:” One, from the title I can probably surmise what the plot of the episode is; and two, it looks like we’re getting another Rick and Jerry episode, which are almost always completely solid gold. As it turns out, I was right on both counts, and to boot, “The Jerrick Trap” is pure mayhem in the best way. I loved it.
As they are wont to do, Rick and Jerry are at each other’s throats again: Jerry thinks the rake he lent to next door neighbor Gene still hasn’t been returned, and when Rick’s solution is to slide Jerry a gun, the ever-emboldened son-in-law tells Rick: “All that brain, and you just waste it,” and begins to imply what would happen if he had Rick’s brain. This touches a nerve for Rick, who firstly takes offense to the semantics of brain versus mind, and secondly immediately assembles a device that will implant his mind into Jerry, and vice versa. The result: Rick’s mind in Jerry results in Jerry’s death by suicide almost right away, and Jerry’s mind in Rick causes Rick’s cybernetic enhancements to go haywire, killing Rick. “There goes my Thursday,” sighs the medical robot, as it scans the mess of assorted brain matter splattered across the garage.
So this episode gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, which just preps for the chaos to come. The medical robot patches up Rick and Jerry quite nicely, but seems to have accidentally mixed up some brain matter: rather than the binary Rick and Jerry mind swap, each of them has a little bit of both inside their noggins. They’re completely scrambled, and the initial argument over whose mind did what to whose body inside the other’s body is just…hilarious, but also something I had to pause for a second to parse out.
From a writing perspective, this is one of the most interesting Rick and Morty episodes in a very long time. With Rick and Jerry scrambled, each of them say and do things that could come from either one of them, and early on, just to make things even spicier, Rick’s body has his hair down and Jerry’s body has Rick’s blown out hairdo (even with a bald patch, from the reconstruction surgery).
Meanwhile, Morty has been caught off-world trading Crystals (they’re drugs), but crime boss Chuxly is desperate to remain in Rick’s good graces. That is, until the scrambled Rick and Jerry show up and it’s clear that there is a very confusing situation going on here, and Chuxly grows a pair and decides to turn on Rick.
It takes a mutual care for Morty for the two to finally start working together, and when they finally click, they lay waste to the mobsters and their restaurant in perfect synergy, set to “We’re Going to Be Friends,” and culminating in them working together to blast Rick with a Conehead enhancement right through Chuxly. And just like that, the scrambled Rick and Jerry are best buds.
Towards the beginning of their newfound friendship, Rick remarks that his hurtful comments towards Jerry once they’re back to normal might not always be intentional, and Jerry replies that Rick is the closest thing he has to a friend. Is it a genuine moment, or were each of them speaking for “the other?” In any case, both acknowledge that it took this mishap for them to become happy.
As the machine they built together to restore them to normal fires up, they look at each other, and in the next scene we learn that they opted not to restore their minds and have instead set off on more misadventures as Crystal bandits.
With the Smiths in the clutches of Chuxly and his gang, things seem dire, until the family is rescued by the Jerrick final form, Jerricky: Jerry’s head stacked on Rick’s head stacked on Rick’s torso stacked on Jerry’s torso melded to both sets of legs in an unholy abomination, Rick and Jerry speaking in unison. Chuxly and his goons open fire, but Jerricky is unfathomably agile and everything in the room is flammable, so we get the yet another creatively bombastic action sequence that just escalates hilariously for several minutes.
With Chuxly and the mob dead, Jerricky prepares to leave the Smith family forever, having assimilated to a higher plane of consciousness (or something).The family’s protests do nothing to dissuade Jerricky, and neither does Gene returning the rake. However, Jerricky accidentally stepping on the rake causing the handle to snap up and crack both noses finally causes the latent Memory Rick to rise to the surface, giving the family enough time to pin Jerricky down and separate the two.
The episode ends where it began, with Rick and Jerry back to absolutely hating each others’ guts, despite spending some time sharing said guts. As they argue bitterly, Morty points out that they might love each other more than either would care to admit, and I’d like to believe that’s the case. There has to be some residual affection from this adventure that ties father- and son-in-law together. The family leaves the table, and as “We’re Going to Be Friends” lightly kicks back on and the camera pans out of the window, Rick and Jerry continue yelling at each other. Maybe things won’t change that much.
This recap took longer than normal to write up, mostly because of how hilariously convoluted the concept of the plot was. “The Jerrick Trap” feels very classic Rick and Morty, and the action and weirdness were hilarious. I have no idea what we’re in store for in the coming weeks, but if we’re looking at this level of quality, I can start looking forward to Sundays again.
