Rick & Morty’s season 5 trailer features a throwaway nod to an unseen vampire-hunting adventure for the pair, in what seems to be a reference to an early trolling misdirect that the show played on viewers. Beginning life as a raunchy spoof of Back to the Future, Adult Swim’s biggest hit series Rick & Morty, has since gone on to become so much more without ever losing sight of its humble, silly origins. Season 5 of the animated sitcom is set to begin in June 2021, with 10 brand new episodes on the way.
The most recent season of Rick & Morty saw the titular duo, an aging super-genius and his well-meaning dim-witted grandson, sent on a string of misadventures that parodied everything from Game of Thrones to the underrated Prometheus. From the first trailer’s evidence, the season 5 will be no different. Rick & Morty’s season 5 trailer showcases a Hellraiser parody, some kaiju action, and even what seems to be a love interest for Morty's sister Summer. All of this while the series looks set to bring more fast-paced genre-subverting comedy than ever.
However, long-time fans of Rick & Morty may reasonably be annoyed to see that the trailer also sees the eponymous pair revisit a moment of trolling that happened way back in the show’s second season. The season 5 trailer shows Rick look into an alternate reality where he and Morty are slick heroes modeled on Marvel’s most famous vampire hunter, saying, “were we Blades in that one? Tight.” It’s a joke that was already shown in Rick & Morty's season 5 animatic trailer released in 2020 and one that will be frustrating for fans who want to see the duo do battle with Dracula’s ilk. After all, fans of Rick & Morty will that season 2’s "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez" also promised a vampire-hunting adventure. Summer’s cold-open comment implied that the episode would center around Rick shrinking himself back to adolescence and engaging in some Buffy The Vampire Slayer-style staking when his granddaughter discovered her school was plagued by the undead bloodsuckers. Of course, this being Rick & Morty, the episode’s adventure ended up taking an entirely unexpected other direction.
Despite the stellar set-up promising Rick, Morty, and Summer fighting vampires, in an extremely trolling move, the episode in question then proceeded to cut around the actual vampire-hunting scenes entirely, with the undead eradication taking place offscreen. The stinger, which sees a vampire reprimanding the now-staked "Coach Feratu" for choosing a cutesy dead giveaway of a name, proves Rick & Morty have the perfect gory/silly tone to spoof vampire conventions, but alas, the episode proper only uses this setup to misdirect viewers.
Now, it seems as though season 5 of Rick & Morty will offer more of the same, as the trailer and earlier animatic both featured the title duo commenting on their lost reality as vampire hunters, then promptly ignoring it after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse. One trolling promise of Buffy-style vampire-hunting from Rick & Morty was funny, but a second nod, this time to Blade-aping antics, is just mean. However, credit where it is due, the Hellraiser spoof that the season 5 trailer features prominently does prove that Rick & Morty will still be parodying horror tropes in the future—just not of the vampiric persuasion.