Another Sunday, another episode of Rick and Morty. Our titular heroes return in Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender.

Maybe it’s just coming down from the series high that was Pickle Rick but Vindicators felt a little hollow. The episode opens with a literal call to action from the Vindicators to save the universe from the villainous Worldender.

Rick refuses to answer, forever planting his feet in the dirt, maintaining that he will save reality only when and if he feels like it, that’s when Morty invokes the right to choose one of every ten adventures, producing a punch card which Rick stamps with little fanfare.

The duo arrive on an intergalactic station and are greeted by a team of unlikely heroes who are a shallow skewering of the superhero genre that’s taken over Hollywood.

We’re given Supernova, the apparent leader of the Vindicators with the power of a collapsing star, CrocuBot who is exactly what he sounds like, Million Ants, also exactly what it sounds like, and Alan Rails with the ability to control a ghost train and a tragic dead-parents backstory. The crew is rounded out by Maximus Renegade Star-Soldier, a wise cracking Star Lord type and Rick’s opposite.

Morty sees the Vindicators as more than just superheroes, they are his personal heroes, and something that he sorely needs as his faith in Rick fades with every episode after his break out from prison.

Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender has all of the trappings of what makes Rick and Morty great, clever jokes and animated violence, but it lacks all but a little of the substance that usually elevates the show above shock humor for its own sake. It’s wearing Rick and Morty’s clothes but is really three dogs in mech suits beneath a lab coat.

That isn’t to say there aren’t some noteworthy moments. When Star-Soldier first arrives, he calls Morty by name, to Morty’s delight, and follows it up by saying “I never forget a kid.” Perhaps a not-so-subtle callback to the darker moments of the last time Morty chose an adventure and encountered King Jellybean in a seedy bathroom.

Perhaps the episode’s most memorable moment is toward the end, after Rick has defeated Worldender before the Vindicators ever get the chance and, in a drunken fit, puts them through a series of Saw-like puzzles in order to prove beyond any doubt that he doesn’t respect them.

Morty spends the episode solving the puzzles with little effort, he has Rick figured out, at one point lamenting that the point of a particular puzzle was that none of them are special. “That’s kind of always his point,” Morty says.

The final puzzle demands that the Vindicators place the only part of them that Rick values onto a pedestal. Morty believes it’s a cruel joke, that there is nothing they could place there that would save them because Rick doesn’t believe they have anything of value.

This is when we see that rare glimpse of emotion and humanity in Rick, he suggests, rather sheepishly (not remembering anything he’d created in the previous night’s blackout) that they put Morty on the pedestal. That perhaps, while he was drunk, he became sentimental and that Morty might be the one person within the Vindicators that he values.

Morty steps onto the dais and is treated to a macabre, theme-park ride ending with a video from Rick which appears to confirm his love for Morty, only to have the rug pulled out when it’s revealed he is talking about a throwaway character the Vindicators left behind at HQ.

Overall, Vindicators 3 sits somewhere at the bottom of the barrel, somewhere near Get Schwifty. While both episodes may have some meme-worthy moments, they’re mostly forgettable among the larger grouping of stellar outings the show has had.

If anything, the show serves to cement the theme that while Beth has doubled down on her adoration of her father, Morty and Summer are beginning to see the holes in his facade. Their relationships are eroding.

Maybe this means that sometime, before season three ends, Rick might have to face his most difficult challenge to date, his own flaws.

It’s been hours since I finished watching this week’s episode of Rick and Morty and my mind is still settling. Oh look, there goes my hippocampus, whirling past the brainstem for the forty-third time, holding up its middle finger.

I should have been prepared, it’s not as if the show is typically grounded, but I wasn’t. I’d spent months wondering at the adventures Pickle Rick might get into during his tenure as a briny, shrivelled cucumber, but I couldn’t have imagined.

It opens, as most episodes of Rick and Morty do, with the insanity already dialed up. Rick is a pickle right out of the gate. Morty has questions, and for good reason, Rick rarely does anything that isn’t part of some larger plan. The rest of the family joins the titular characters in the garage and it becomes evident that Rick has turned himself into a vegetable in order to get out of family counseling.

You might ask yourself why Rick didn’t just jaunt off to another dimension, making himself scarce at the preordained time, if he didn’t want to go to therapy. The answer, dear viewer, is the same for Rick as it is for all the rest of us, where would be the fun in that?

Rick’s plan is simple, or as simple as a Rick plan can be. Just above his slender green frame, he’s rigged a needle filled with a serum that will turn him human once again. The string is near scissors, rigged to a timer, set to go off just after the family leaves the house.

The timer goes off, the scissors cut the string, and gravity does the rest… or, it would have gone that way, but Beth takes the needle, takes the kids, and leaves Rick to his own devices.

“You should just stay here and figure out how to stop being a pickle.”

Words that will haunt me for the remainder of my days.

Rick does figure out how to stop being a pickle in what amounts to one of the most experimental and enthralling half-hour’s of television I’ve ever seen.

There are cats, flash floods, roaches, rats, and foreign dignitaries, all of whom fall beneath the iron mind of Rick Sanchez on his quest to become human once again.

Rick is backed into a corner, you might say he’s literally in a pickle, and that’s when he’s at his best. You haven’t seen genius and cunning like this since Rick took down the galactic government.

Somehow, Harmon and Roiland found a way to up the stakes for Rick, even when they are smaller, both figuratively and literally.

This is the Rick Sanchez we’ve come to love, the Rick who will burn the world around him, and everyone in it, just for a little excitement.

Rick, don’t ever change.

Rick and Morty Season Three is streaming on Adult Swim.

At the beginning of this new year, one of the geeky things I’m most excited about is where “Arrow” and “The Flash” are headed. CW’s two superhero series are usually the television highlight of my week, and watching them with my sons has become a nerd ritual. With that in mind, here’s a quick recap of what you need to know if you’re catching up with Season Three of “Arrow.” This will be an overview of episodes 3.2 – 3.7; I reviewed the season premiere here, and the two most recent episodes are big enough they warrant their own reviews, coming in the next few days. 

Instead of doing an episode-by-episode plot breakdown, it’ll probably be better to go through the main characters and update you on what’s happening with them, leading up to the midseason finale. This is already a transformative season for most of them, making this season entertaining and faster-paced than previous seasons. 

Let’s start with Sara Lance, AKA the Canary. 

She’s dead. Comic book dead, or dead-dead, you ask? Dead-dead. Three arrows to the heart on a rooftop, falls ten stories, lands on the pavement, got buried in the cemetery (where she conveniently already had a grave, nice), dead-dead. I liked how they were handling her character, but her death does pave the way for her sister to become Black Canary. Anyway. Sara. Dead.

Next up: the Olicity situation. 

“Olicity” is the fan community “shipping” Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak. Hard. There have been a few kisses here and there, a lot of flirting, in Season 3 they finally go on a date. Which ends with explosions, but has some even more brutal conversations at dinner doing more damage than a bomb ever could. Basically, Oliver chooses being a superhero over being a boyfriend, and their hearts are both breaking for it. Slowly. Over the course of many episodes. I’m not sure if either of them will get over it anytime soon. And if you want an eyeful of fan art and tumblrs and gifs about it all, just do a Google Image Search for “Olicity.” You’re welcome.

And here’s Arsenal. 

Roy Harper has graduated to his big boy hoodie and is now a full time member of Team Arrow. You get a true mentor/sidekick vibe between Ollie and Roy now that I’m enjoying, and one that we really haven’t seen in 21st Century superhero television or movies. It’s an interesting dynamic that’s been sidelined since Tim Burton’s Batman, and I’m liking how it plays out. That often translates into Roy not being quite good enough, becoming a hostage, being sent to dispatch henchmen….but it’s working. He gets a few dramatic moments of his own when he thinks he’s the one who killed Sara in a mirakiru-fueled rage, but it wasn’t him. Really. 

With the Arrowcave filling up, someone’s gotta get put on the back burner. 

For right now, it’s Diggle. He’s got a new baby, he’ll be getting married to Lyla…he’s never had a costume, but now he’s even more behind-the-scenes than he was. I like the guy, I hope he gets an increased presence in the second half of the season. 

Thea Queen is looking hotter than ever. 

…by which I mean she’s been on Corto Maltese with her pop Malcolm Merlyn, training in the family art of ninja-assassining. So she’s been learning to fight with swords, holding her hand over candles, getting a more grownup haircut and wearing midriffs that are…well…she looks good. She’s also less annoying and whiny than she’s ever been. Finding out she’s been lied to by everyone in her life, getting her mom impaled to death in front of her, and becoming even more of a billionaire heiress than she was has been good for Thea. She’s the biggest question mark right now–she could become Arrow’s biggest ally or biggest enemy; I’m hoping the producers go someplace bold with her.

At the beginning of Season Two, I wanted Laurel Lance dead.

She was mourning Tommy Merlyn, she was a drunk, she was crying all the time…she wasn’t annoying, she was uninteresting. By the end of Season Two, she was going places. In the season finale, she finds out Oliver is Arrow, she helps defeat the bad guys, and then just as she’s feeling good, her sister is killed in front of her. I was worried that this would return her to her whining, but it’s hardened Laurel. She’s been training with a former boxer named Ted “Wildcat” Grant after Oliver refused to train her. We’ve seen her in promo pics as Black Canary, so we know it’s coming…but she’s not quite there yet. I’m liking her more than I ever have. Black leather will do that. 

Speaking of Wildcat…

He’s only been in a handful of episodes, running a gym. There’s been a hint of an almost-superheroing past when he defended his brother, there was even a cat-shaped black mask on the shelf in the gym. I’m hoping he becomes a full-on hero alongside Laurel for a few Wildcat/Black Canary teamups…but I don’t necessarily see it happening. He’s a fun character and an interesting counterpoint to Oliver. Plus his gym was the site of a fight where Oliver jammed an arrow into a glove and used it as a boxing glove arrow, and a million fanboys laughed and bonered and it was good. 

The other new guy this season is Ray Palmer. 

Ray Palmer is best known to geeks as “Atom,” a scientist who uses “dwarf star matter” in a belt to shrink down to microscopic size…and fight…crime. But like, tiny. Here, Brandon Routh’s character comes to Starling City, takes over as the COO of Queen Industries, and takes over as a potential love interest for Felicity. She’s rebounding, but she’s rebounding nicely. Palmer is funny, he’s likable, he’s smart, he’s handsome, and he’s on the cusp of being a superhero in his own right. We get some pieces of a tragic backstory, we see his inherent goodness…he’s a great guy.

But what we care about is this:

At the end of a single episode, we see Ray looking at the A.T.O.M. suit. We don’t know what the acronym stands for, but he spent the episode working out a business deal that would let him acquire the dwarf star matter he needs to finish the suit. Earlier producers had said “if we see Palmer in the Atom suit, it would probably be on ‘The Flash,’ not ‘Arrow,'” …but they may be rethinking that. At first I thought we’d be getting ripped off if we never saw Ray Palmer as Atom; now I like the guy as a civilian so much, I’m fine either way.

But do it. Totally do it.

All of this leaves Arrow–Oliver Queen–in a transitional period. Some of his allies are dead, some need extensive training, his sister hates him, his girl…who he doesn’t want to be his girl but he loves…is with a super cool guy, his former girlfriend is turning into a superhero, which he doesn’t like…he’s in the middle of a hurricane. Which isn’t as calm as you’ve been led to believe. His life is already shaken up, he doesn’t need a new guy thrown into the mix.

Like the Flash. But here he comes.