In Tonight’s ‘Rick and Morty,’ Rick Finally Acts Like A Dad

After tonight’s episode of Rick and Morty, we still don’t know which Beth is the clone, but we have a pretty good idea of which one is Dad’s favorite.

Spoilers ahead for any Rick and Morty fans who missed tonight’s installment, “Valkyrick,” in which the smartest man in the Central Finite Curve spent some long-overdue quality time with his not-daughter Space Beth after so many seasons of estranged, cloned and dimension-hopping family dynamics. When we first met the first Beth of the series, her biggest fear was that her newly returned absentee father (or, at least a version of him) would fly away again before she could repair the emotional damage from her original deadbeat, and while most Beths throughout the multiverse never got the Dad treatment from their own Ricks, an alt-styled, possibly cloned badass Beth finally got the father she needed, and just in the nick of time.

Following through on Rick and Morty show runner Scott Marder's promise that Season Eight will focus on Rick’s relationship with his family, Rick spent the better part of “Valkyrick” saving, defending and sacrificing for the maybe-clone of a different dimension’s version of his daughter who only returned to the show in the first place to try to murder him.

At the top of “Valkyrick,” Rick bails out Space Beth during an assassination gone haywire and embarrasses her in front of The Defiance when they dare to accuse her of being a nepo baby. Throughout the episode, Rick s and advocates for his daughter’s individual accomplishments and deadly abilities, marking arguably the first time in the series when Rick spent an entire episode building up a family member’s self-esteem instead of tearing it down with perfectly phrased and timed burns.

But the real “World’s Best Dad” moment for Rick comes at the beginning of the third act when he willingly infects himself with a mutational fungus that threatens to turn Space Beth into a monstrosity so that he could find a cure for his possible-clone progeny’s affliction. The motif of take-your-mass-murdering-daughter-to-work day only amplifies when Birdperson and Birddaughter in on the payload action to bring an end to the infestation.

So far in Season Eight, the Rick and Morty team’s decision to ease off of the multiverse-shaking arcs and focus on the relationships between beloved characters is keeping the series fresh in a way that few comedy shows accomplish this many seasons into a run. All the way in Season Eight, we’re seeing Rick make choices and express feelings that he’s never been able to it before, and the Smith-Sanchez family is experiencing the kind of growth that most writers’ rooms burn through in their first few seasons.

Unfortunately for some other family desperate for Rick’s approval, it seems unlikely that Rick will ever offer this level of nurturing and to anyone besides his badass space-faring sort-of-daughter. After all, we know how he feels about a Morty getting too cocky.