Season 5, episode 3.
There is only one solution for Earth’s pollution!
– Planetina in “A Rickconvenient Mort”
The Netflix serial Rick and Morty is a comedy sci-fi animated show portraying a young teenage boy named Morty Smith and his nihilistic scientist grandfather Rick Sanchez whom travel through dystopian galaxies together. Every episode contains a different story with dark humour intertwined. One of the most recently produced episodes, called “A Rickconvenient Mort”, features an ecological superhero named Planetina. Planetina is made from the combination of four elemental rings which her ‘children’, the Tina-Teers, own. At first Planetina is shown as a pure hero archetype. She saves the planet without earning anything. Although her ‘children’ are earning money, because of her. Plantina is used by the Tina-Teers as a business commodity, which is clearly seen by the way they interact with her. Especially when they attempted to sell her to an Arab oversees.
One of the shows protagonists, Morty Smith, fell in love with the ecological hero Planetina and disrupts the business meeting. Morty kills the Tina-Teers and steals the rings. Planetina is now free of her ‘owners’. This change of state, also develops a change in Planetina’s position in the climate crisis fight. She becomes a less pure hero archetype when some of the actions, which she is taking for the planet, seem to hurt other people. The line between the hero and the villian become thinner and it becomes less obvious for the viewer (and Morty) to recognize the hero.
Planetina kills innocent mineworkers out of frustration of not being able to stop them from working in the mines. Hereby Rick and Morty shows its viewers that solving the climate issues is not that onesided and easy at all. There are regular people involved in actions which pollute, who do not intent to hurt the planet. They just need the jobs. Planetina also frames the broken system as the main issue of the difficulty in which climate activists are positioned.