Did a ‘Rick and Morty’ episode cleverly hint at issues with Justin Roiland?

To listen to some of the biggest fans of Rick and Morty, the show’s co-creator Justin Roiland was the whole show and it wouldn’t be able to move on without him. Of course, he was the voice of both Rick and Morty, which would seem to make it impossible to slip creative content past him that alluded to issues behind the scenes, or would it?

In early January, Roiland was charged with domestic violence stemming from an incident that originally took place back in 2020. Fans had already started to turn on the animator, but diehard fans held strong until the story broke about his outrageous DMs. Ironically, he didn’t think he could get fired if he took on both voice acting roles of Rick and Morty, a notion he soon found to be untrue as Adult Swim decided rather quickly to part ways with the downward spiraling Emmy-award winner.

Season four began on Nov.10, 2019, and the last episode aired on May 31, 2020. According to the Rick and Morty IMDb, Roiland had little to do with that season other than voicing his characters and he had very little to do with the entire show except for directing one episode and writing six, the last of which was season three episode eight, “Morty’s Mind Blowers.” It has been established that Roiland had no real meaningful contribution to the show in years, which would make it seem that there had been issues for years.

Were there meta moments throughout the show?

Being banned from the writer’s room is not a meta moment in an episode, but it is a clear sign that the entire staff was having problems with him.

This scene hits the nail on the head pretty hard.

When fans look back on it now, they’ll see it in a whole new light.

Imagine being kicked out of the writer’s room after season three and the first episode of season four is a reference to a character getting kicked out of the garage for being disgusting. Is that meta enough?

It’s a great question that has fans going back and looking everything over with a different perspective now that all the news has surfaced, or at least all anyone knows at this point.

What an observation! From thinking he was the whole show to being let go from it is a huge turnaround in just a few short years and there is very clear imagery to demonstrate that point.

There is probably so much meta in the show that it’s too much to cover in one sitting. That’s the genius of the show and now fans know that it will go on just fine because it wasn’t entirely in his hands to begin with.