In Rick and Morty, Rick Sanchez (Ian Cardoni) is the smartest man in the universe. He’s also an alcoholic, constantly drinking from a flask, slurring his words, and belching — an aspect of his character that showrunners Dan Harmon and Scott Marder alternate between playing for laughs and taking very seriously. Season 9 episode 4, “A Ricker Runs Through It,” grapples with the darker side of Rick’s substance abuse, opening with Rick getting so drunk he wets his pants.
“You write what you know,” Harmon told Polygon in a virtual interview. “I think that the balance is struck by mythologizing something that is important about substance abuse, which is that it takes all forms.”
Harmon, who has been open about his own struggles with alcohol, said he takes a similar approach to depicting Rick as Robert Zemeckis did in the 2012 Oscar-nominated drama Flight. In it, Denzel Washington plays an alcoholic pilot who pulls off a miraculous crash landing.
“The whole point of the story is that it’s up to Denzel’s character when he fixes this issue, and that makes it more important, more dramatic, but you don’t really feel that bad for him, and you don’t feel like you’re watching a person die in an aquarium,” Harmon says. “You’re watching Macbeth. You’re watching someone struggle, and they better fix themselves, or they’re going to die.”
Cartoons have a long history of depicting alcohol abuse as a joke, going back to a 1939 Merrie Melodies short by Chuck Jones where a mouse gets drunk on cold medicine and wanders around singing the Prohibition-era drinking song “How Dry I Am.”
“If we were doing that version of drunkenness, I think we would be alienating people or getting out of touch,” Harmon says. “Rick’s alcoholism doesn’t look like a superpower. The guy wets his pants on a regular basis.”
Marder says Rick’s drinking is always in the background, but it really comes into focus in “A Ricker Runs Through It,” where it’s revealed that Rick’s flask is itself a portal leading to a world that supplies him with endless vodka. Rick gets so drunk he forgets his computer password. After too many failed login attempts, his whole garage goes into lockdown and Rick has to use a very high-tech authenticator to regain access again.
“He had these really complicated safeguards to get back into his stuff, which are so much more complicated than just stopping drinking and not needing any of that stuff,” Marder says. “It was cool to have Morty ride that roller coaster with him.”
Episode 4 of Rick and Morty season 9 airs at 11 p.m. ET June 14 on Adult Swim. The episode will be available to buy digitally the following day.