Rick And Morty may just be the perfect sci-fi show. It is certainly, with apologies to Westworld, currently TV’s most ambitious, taking a handful of long-running conceits (the infinite-universe theory) and extrapolating a set of narrative forces from them (the Citadel Of Ricks, the Galactic Federation). It occasionally delights in unveiling the power structures of its multiverse, but it also tends, much more, to explore the randomness that such vast scope facilitates. In so doing, it combines the fantastical, parable-filled episodic adventures of the first two Star Trek series, while also indulging the longer arcs of Ronald D. Moore’s Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica. These varying threads haven’t been woven so elegantly since, say, The Prisoner, but showrunners Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have updated their concerns to encompass not just the structure of reality but also the structure of their argument about reality. We are never not aware, in Rick And Morty, that we are watching a sci-fi television show, and that it has been lovingly constructed by sci-fi nerds, with references to Sandman and Dragon Ball Z and Zardoz and Paul Verhoeven flicks packed into every episode. These references do more than buttress the show’s cred—they build its entire cosmology, its intensely self-aware universe of sex-bots, species collectors, purges, and interdimensional reality TV.