The message to me was plain and simple: stop telling them how to tell their story. Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have in the past made meta jokes and broke the fourth wall, but this episode took things to an entirely new level right from the start. Morty even mentions that they are getting too meta and Rick tells him “You’re 14. You watch videos of people on YouTube reacting to f***ing YouTube. I’ll be the judge of when we get too meta”.

In this episode, Rick and Morty are on a train, trying to get to the engine room. As Rick not so clearly explains, the train is both literally and metaphorically representing storytelling, with this train being a story train. Because this is Rick and Morty, so of course it is. Rick says, “Its not a real train. Its a story device. Literally. A literal literary device quite literally metaphorically containing us”. That has to be one of my favorite lines of the episode, just for how convoluted, yet self-aware it is. Rick and Morty are trying to get to the engine room to shut down this anthology, telling tickets please guy “If we wanted one-offs, we’d do Interdimensional Cable”. This again, is not the first time Rick has broken the fourth wall acknowledging he is aware of the show. This isn’t even the first time he has referenced interdimensional cable episodes in doing so. After mocking continuity errors with Rick and Morty appearing at a police training session showing a video of the previous scene, Rick soon discovers that the train is circular. This is a reference to Dan Harmon’s circular method of story telling rather than the more typical and more boring linear way of storytelling. The “Story Circle” involves characters going out and completing their journeys and then returning to where they originally set out from, but changed upon their return from what they have gathered and learned from the journey. This is often seen on Rick and Morty and differs from the typical plot line of going from point A to point B.

Rick and Morty continue their journey through the story train, eventually defeating the antagonist of this episode, Story Lord. There are a bunch of awesome jokes and moments throughout their fight with Story Lord that I won’t spoil and discuss here, you should watch the episode and enjoy them for yourself. Seriously, this was one of my favorite episodes of Rick and Morty. The only disappointing part of the episode is that all of the cool payoff moments that I thought we were going to get such as the return of Tammy, Phoenix-Person, Evil Morty and especially Snowball are now not going to happen at least in the near future. The trailer featured many of these moments and I should have known it was too good to be true. Rick and Morty would not have given so much away in the trailer, even if it were brief clips of only a few seconds. However, I believe this is exactly what Harmon and Roiland wanted. The fans won’t tell them how to write their show. They so brutally teased us with all of these cool moments in the trailer, getting many fans so hyped for a second half of a season that would deal with many payoffs that were so eager to be seen. However, they were all just moments created by Story Lord and officially dubbed by Rick, breaking the fourth wall again, as “not canon”.

The end of the episode actually confused me a bit, so please let me know in the comments if I missed something. But after Rick and Morty escape the train, they find out that the engine room was faked and it flashes to what I’m assuming to be the Rick and Morty that at least most of the episodes follow in the living room, with the story train being a toy train that Morty bought for Rick. I’m not sure if the interpretation is supposed to be that the whole episode was following a different Rick and Morty who are now stuck on the train, or if that is just overthinking the episode. Either way, the Rick outside the train goes on a spiel about promoting capitalism and how the most important thing in life is to simply buy things. This is obviously poking fun at how much merchandise the show has. They can sell literally anything with the Rick and Morty brand and turn a profit on it. Again, continuing to pile on the fact that the fans will not influence them as how to write their show. Because they can do things their way, and then take a shit load of our money from us while doing it. This reiterates their message of it being their show, and the fans will not have control of it. They want us to stop asking for payoffs and plot resolutions, just let them do their thing and sit back and enjoy all the great moments and jokes that made all of us fall in love with Rick and Morty in the first place. And more importantly, buy their merchandise.