Comparing “Doctor Who” and Rick from “Rick and Morty”

Rick Sanchez, the protagonist of Cartoon Network’s new hit series Rick and Morty may be called many things: he’s rude, he’s drunk, and occasionally he’s sexist. But to the fan-base who watches his show, his most interesting feature is his resemblance to a certain beloved science-fiction icon: the Doctor from Doctor Who. While I am certainly not the first person to draw attention to the resemblance between these two characters (Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon the co-creators of Rick and Morty, have themselves made reference to Doctor Who as a vague inspiration when they announced the show at a 2013 Comic Con panel), this article will be the first (thus far) to really compare the two. This is a worthwhile subject to explore given that Rick and Morty seems to be completely encompassed by the discourse of Doctor Who, despite the fact that the creators themselves have admitted they are not really Doctor Who fans. As a matter of fact, Justin Roiland was tongue-tied at Comic Con when trying to remember the name of the classic show. It would then seem that Rick is inspired less by the Doctor than by the cultural archetype of the mad scientist—the crazed genius with a shock of white hair, marvelous gadgets, and intergalactic know-how. Both characters are also grandfathers, and they share the same vocation of traveling through time and space to distant and often dangerous science-fiction vistas.

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