Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for Rick and Morty S9E3 “Rick Fu Hustle” (written by Rob Schrab and directed by Daniel Cole & Fill Marc Sagadraca).
As she often is, Diane is frustrated with Jerry. This time, the reason is that Jerry’s new pool cleaning bot is doing f*ck all for actually cleaning the nasty pool. Diane laments that Jerry didn’t just hire pool cleaner Keith to get the job done. Rick even offers to clean the pool with his cybernetic tools, but Jerry refuses: it’s his pool, and he can handle it himself.
Later, Jerry is still determined to figure out how to clean the pool on his own. He pulls up a YouTube video which is (amusingly on brand for a lot of modern YouTube videos) 90% lead-up before getting to how to upgrade the pool cleaning bot, involving upgrading the bot’s firmware. It works!
Rick doesn’t have a problem with this, as he’s just about to take Morty to Boob World. Morty couldn’t be more excited to go to Boob World, but when Rick is backing out of their parking spot at Trader Joe’s, they bump into another vehicle. An old Chinese man with long white hair and beard steps out, asking to exchange information. Rick is immediately antagonistic and arrogant, but as soon as he get close to the man, the man strikes Rick repeatedly in the chest and informs Rick that he has just hit him with the Five Point Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill, and he cannot walk more than five steps forward without dying. Of course, Rick realizes that “forward” is the operative term, so he begins walking backwards until he can figure out what to do next.
Back at the garage, Rick is having the five holes in his chest analyzed, and can’t figure out what exactly was done to him. He hops into his clone machine, and has the first clone step forward, who indeed perishes after fives steps. Repeated tests confirm that only forward steps will cause the heart to explode. Morty is furious, demanding that Rick just apologize to the man, but Rick refuses. Their argument devolves into yelling over who sucks more, with both of them miming sucking d*ck to emphasize.
Morty returns to Trader Joe’s and encounters the man from earlier in the day, who introduces himself as Liu Sin. He offers to teach Morty martial arts, and at his house later, Morty is pleased by how relaxing it is. Their session is interrupted by a tech coming outside to lament that he didn’t have the right cables to hook up Liu Sin’s flat screen, and that it will cost extra. Sin responds by performing the Five Point Exploding Heart Technique on him. And when Morty calls him out on it, Liu Sin does the same to him. Morty races home in anguish, where Rick has developed a machine to move backwards. His grandfather vows to cure them and defeat Liu Sin.
So…I guess we should have expected this to happen, because, you know, it’s Jerry, but…Jerry f*cks the pool cleaning bot. And it’s quite a bit more graphic than I was expecting, starting with the foreplay and ending with the “climax” of the emojis flashing across the screen of the bot while Jerry thrusts from behind. It’s really something. Afterwards, Jerry is embarrassed and the pool bot is infatuated to the point that it listens in on Jerry planning to hire Keith the pool guy and is immediately jealous. It attempts to drown Keith and, when they retreat into the house, manages to follow them in, close the house’s blast doors, and flood the house with every water source inside. When Jerry yells that they have to swim upstairs, Keith confesses that he cannot swim. Jerry’s finally attempt to stop the pool cleaning robot is under the guise of sexy time, during which they sink to the bottom. As Jerry struggles with the robot, Keith dives in to help him tear the robot apart and defeat it.
Rick and Morty, in their backwards machines, show up at a monastery belonging to Gerd Jergins, Liu Sin’s teacher. “That guy sucks,” Jergins says as soon as Sin’s name is brought up. When Rick and Morty mention that they got “death punched,” Jergins replies that Sin also death punched his cat, Queef Richards, and gestures to a headstone outside the entrance. Rick is eager to get some more kung fu data from Jergins to analyze the punch, but Jergins refuses to meet violence with more violence. At that moment, Jergins takes a troubling call from his daughter about how many guests she’s allowed to bring over for a party, ending abruptly. Morty offers to help him with his relationship with his daughter, if he’ll help him with fixing the death punch.
It takes a little bit, but Jergins does manage to accept his daughter’s polycule lifestyle. In return, he delivers the punch to Rick’s machine for it to analyze it and formulate a cure for them. They celebrate by running around the Jergins apartment in glee, before heading to Liu Sin’s place and triumphantly entering the apartment walking forward with bulging panels protecting their hearts, lining their blood vessels with nanobots and infusing them with Kung Fu Power.
The showdown is a gleefully excessive battle comprised mostly of the combatants yelling out the name of their imminent move before executing whatever gonzo effect it will have, with escalating absurdity, and reaching Man of Steel levels of destruction until Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot, shows up in the sky to scold them for disrespecting the power of the punch. As punishment, Punchy summons his “champion,” an ancient being too powerful and with too many pressure points for them to conquer individually. As the three of them hide behind rubble, Liu admits to Rick that this is all his fault, that he ran into Rick in the Trader Joe’s parking lot on purpose, because that’s the only way he can connect with people is through conflict. Solving their differences, they work together to defeat Punchy’s champion.
Things end on a surprisingly positive note with a party at the Smith household, with pretty much every major character showing up, including Jergins’ daughter and everyone in her circle. Relationships are mended, everyone’s accepted each other, and things are just happy enough to probably be absolutely chaotic come the beginning of next week.
I had an absolute blast with “Rick Fu Hustle.” It was classic Rick and Morty zaniness and a great palate cleanser after last week’s sad (but still great) “Ricks Days, Seven Nights.” I laughed loudly and often, and things just kept escalating in the best way. I have no idea what the next episode will hold, but given the variety (and quality) we’ve seen so far this season, I’m looking forward to it.
