Rick and Morty season nine is here to inject some much-needed interdimensional mayhem into our dreary reality. The first episode arrived Sunday on Adult Swim, and io9 got a chance to talk about the season premiere as well as the season as a whole with showrunner/executive producer Scott Marder and executive producer Dan Harmon. Cheryl Eddy, io9: This is probably Rick’s drunkest season ever. What is driving this latest slide into self-destruction, and why did you lean so hard into that in season nine? Scott Marder: It wasn’t like the orders out of the gate when the season began. A few cool episodes started materializing that just had such a nice organic showcase on them […] that had nice organic ways that kind of weave through the alcohol. It’s a big part of his life. It’s in the background of everything. We don’t usually put a spotlight on it. We weren’t trying to get up on a soapbox with it, but it’s something that the whole family deals with. So it ended up becoming like a nice cohesive arc that kind of tied a lot of the season together.
© Adult Swim io9: You just alluded to this, but in every season of Rick and Morty, we meet Rick variants; season nine really emphasizes that Rick’s greatest enemy is Rick himself. He’s always fighting himself. Is that an existential/identity crisis he will ever be able to solve, or is that the point?
