Mr. Meeseeks Won't Be Back for 'Rick and Morty' Season 3
"Meeseeks don't usually have to exist for this long. It's gettin' weeeiiird..."
To a Meeseeks, existence is pain, so maybe it’s for the best that the bizarre, blue humanoid creatures won’t be featured in Season 3 of Rick and Morty.
The news comes via an interview on the Y Combinator podcast with Ryan Ridley, one of the writers on Rick and Morty.
Ridley had a lot to say about the upcoming Pickle Rick episode of the show, but he also let slip some past tense language, implying that Mr. Meeseeks wasn’t written into Season 3:
“We’ve talked about how we’d bring back Meeseeks, and if we were … if we’re gonna bother to do it. We’d want to really explore a different aspect of it. But that’s one way to do it, right there, is to show what the inside of a Meeseeks box looks like. That would have been really cool.”
Saying “would have been really cool” makes it pretty clear that though it was on their minds, the writers of Rick and Morty didn’t include the fan-favorite character in the show’s third season.
Ridley was the writer of the original Mr. Meeseeks episode in Season 1, “Meeseeks and Destroy,” in which Rick gives Beth, Jerry, and Summer a seemingly magic box that summons helpful blue Mr. Meeseeks. Each Mr. Meeseeks is tasked with completing a specific goal, and when it’s achieved, they vanish into a puff of smoke.
When a Mr. Meeseeks fails at improving Jerry’s golf game, that Meeseeks summons another Meeseeks to help, and before you know it there’s a small army of deeply anguished Meeseeks who eventually decide the best way to end their misery is to kill Jerry.
A scene in which a large group of Meeseeks argue amongst themselves is a true highlight of Season 1.
"Your failures are your own, old man!"
Previously, Dan Harmon had made a “personal promise” during a 2015 Comic Con that Mr. Meeseeks would be back in Season 3. “I’m going to force Mr. Meeseeks into Season 3,” he said, adding that, “there was a heavy impulse in Season 2 to not call anything back from Season 1.” But now, if Ryan Ridley’s comments are taken at face value, it would appear the Rick and Morty writers have gone back on that promise.
Back in 2015, the plan was to take a different approach to Season 3 and include more callbacks, which included Mr. Meeseeks. But now Ridley is saying something very different, even asking, “Eyepatch Morty — who’s the Evil Morty — is that character going to come back?” He’s referring to an evil version of Morty, from an alternate dimension, who was the villainous architect behind the conflict in the Season 1 episode, “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind.”
In the interview, Ridley mentions that in a universe filled with “consequences,” Rick and Morty will explore the implication of what’s happened in the past, explaining that “some of the stuff that you’ve seen already is gonna play out more in Season 3.” That will include showing how Jerry and Beth’s divorce will play out over the rest of the season, and who knows what else.
It seems like Season 3 might include further conflict with Evil Morty, but, unfortunately, Mr. Meeseeks won’t be around to solve anybody’s problems.
