Rick and Morty has featured Summer more in season 5, suggesting the teenage girl is being set up to take on a more significant role going forward.
Season 5 of Rick and Morty is starting to look like "Rick and Summer" with all the prominent storylines featuring the Smith family's elder sister. The hit Adult Swim series famously spawned from co-creator Justin Roiland's parodic take on the aged inventor and young man pairing established by Doc and Marty in Back to the Future (1985). But as the show nears its 50th episode, there's only so much it can do with its titular companions before repeating old Rick and Morty storylines. The solution: increase the involvement of other characters — namely Summer.
Rick and Morty is a science fiction comedy series, through and through, but just as essential to the show's DNA is its function as a sitcom. The Smith family — grandpa Rick, mother Beth, father Jerry, daughter Summer, and son Morty — each have distinct personalities and recurring roles in, as Jerry once put it, the show's "high-concept sci-fi rigamarole." While the bulk of early episodes relegated the non-title family members to the B or C plots, later seasons have featured all Smith family members in central episode storylines. Season 5 in particular has given Summer so much screen time, she's beginning to rival Morty for the title of grandpa's favorite.
After the first two episodes, which possess a somewhat self-contained spec-script feel, Summer begins her campaign for Rick's chief sidekick by sharing the B plot of "A Rickconvenient Mort," in which she and grandpa travel between planetary apocalyptic parties. Next, in "Rickdependence Spray," Summer factors heavily into the B plot, inadvertently creating an incest baby with Morty's mutated sperm. Morty and Summer split the B plot in "Amortycan Grickfitti" as they try to prove their social prowess to the school's new cool kid Bruce Chutback. But the Morty vs. Summer sidekick battle comes to a head in "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion," where Morty and Summer explicitly compete for Rick's right hand.
But jockeying for Rick's approval is a futile endeavor, as outlined in the season 2 opener "A Rickle in Time." After having frozen time in the season 1 finale, Summer and Morty spend an indefinite amount of time having fun in the completely-paused world with their grandpa, but when their competition for his affection begins to annoy him, he sits them down and explains how he sees things. It doesn't matter to him at all who his sidekick is, because they are both equally worthless to him, and ultimately a pain — functionally identical to one another.
Morty understands well this tough love, having witnessed on countless daring and criminal adventures Rick's apparent indifference to him, like in "Morty's Mind Blowers" for example. Towards the end of "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion," he tries to get Summer to understand that Rick's approval is not worth sacrificing any of her emotional bandwidth, and that they should hold close their unique bond as siblings, illustrated by their mutual cooperation in "Amortycan Grickfitti." Summer is certainly becoming a more frequently occurring and important character as Rick and Morty progresses through season 5. While she shares a lot of characteristics with her brother, including her desire for Rick's approval, let's hope she can actualize in the way Morty has after his many misadventures with his titular companion.
