“Why does Rick and Morty have to focus so much on sex?” asked some fan who apparently missed the part in Season One when Morty accidentally destroyed his entire planet with his libido.
In the most recent episode of Rick and Morty, last Sunday night’s “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” we learned that the extraterrestrial progenitors of Christianity in the Rick and Morty universe dislike sex and don’t think it should be allowed in TV, movies or pop songs. With this sacrilegious roast of an increasingly common cultural criticism, the Rick and Morty team made their stance on the growing, neo-Puritanical social media movement to eliminate sex scenes and sexual references from Entertainment perfectly clear — as if the show hasn’t been preposterously pro-sex from the jump.
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Going off of fan reactions, “The Last Temptation of Jerry” has proven to be the most divisive episode of Season Eight thus far, with many critical viewers questioning whether the series really needed to show us a pixelated planetary orgy pile to make the episode work. However, as anyone who has been following Adult Swim’s flagship franchise since its inception in 2013 can attest, “The Last Temptation of Jerry” doesn’t even break the Top Five most disturbingly sexual episodes in series history.
In the live reaction thread to “The Last Temptation of Jerry” in the Rick and Morty subreddit, many fans found the heavily censored depictions of background characters ravenously going to town on each other after a mutated Easter Bunny Jerry spreads sex-inducing brainwashing to be distasteful and hard to stomach. “dont watch this while eating omfg,” one of the top comments reads.
“Terrible episode. It’s just the giant sperm episode part 2,” another user added. “It all boils down to ‘hurr hurr, sex amirite?’ idiotic. If you laugh at the concept of penises, then yeah, you probably enjoyed this. It was pure cringe for me, though.”
Then, in the post-episode discussion thread, criticisms of the over-the-top horniness of “The Last Temptation of Jerry” continued, with many fans dubbing it the worst episode of Season Eight, a common comment in every post-episode discussion thread thus far. “Felt very ‘HAHAAA SEX HAHAA,’” one fan opined. “I feel like the Easter bunny/Space Christians/Butt Engineers would have been enough with the gratuitous sex thrown on top.”
However, many Rick and Morty fans would soon push back on the narrative that “The Last Temptation of Jerry” was too sexual to be a great Rick and Morty episode. One user went viral with their post, “Current Rick and Morty viewers….are you okay?” in which they wrote of the episode, “I heard all the talk about how gross it was, too much sex, etc, and yeah, it had gross parts. Piles of bodies, etc. But I was expecting something much worse, distasteful even.”
“The ‘big pile of bodies’ orgy and other stuff was over-the-top, on purpose. It’s an animated show that heavily leans into exaggeration… for comedy,” the user continued. “I feel like the (new) core audience of Rick and Morty doesn’t really ‘get’ this show anymore.”
Considering how, in just the first season of Rick and Morty, we saw: Rick and Morty accidentally turn the entire population of Earth into “Cronenbergs” in a roofie scheme gone awry, a kink-themed dream layer in Mr. Goldenfold’s subconscious in which Dream Summer tries to have a threesome with her brother and her grandpa, a living Jellybean try to violently molest Morty in a bathroom, Morty accidentally impregnate an alien sex/breeding doll and a bunch of alien boobmonsters shove Abrodolph Lincoler’s entire body in and out of their orifices, it’s safe to say that anyone complaining that a guy giving his motorcycle a rimjob is too obscene for Rick and Morty should probably switch over to a much more sex-averse animated show.
Nothing’s stopping them from watching SpongeBob SquarePants every Sunday.