Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 3 dials up martial arts chaos and Jerry’s pool disaster

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 3! The series’ third episode, “Rick Fu Hustle,” doesn’t just add another skirmish to Rick’s orbit. It turns a martial arts premise into a full-throttle headache of contraptions, reversals, and spite, then follows it with Jerry’s subplot that makes “clean the pool” feel like a high-risk compliance event.

Here’s the core of the episode’s promise: the “Rick Fu Hustle” setup is basically “What if Rick encountered the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill and found a way to reverse-engineer it?” From there, the show sort of, kind of, sorta stumbles into a send-up of the martial arts movie genre. The catch is that it never fully commits to being a pure parody, which is part of why the pacing can feel scatterbrained. Still, the throughline is loud and clear: Rick is going to explore the incredible lengths he will go to when he does not want to apologize to someone he wronged. Not a brand new theme, but it is one the episode leans on hard.

Why does that matter to a viewer who usually just wants jokes and action? Because it’s also what makes the episode watchable when other elements wobble. Rick spends entire scenes walking backwards and then escalates from movement gag to engineering project. The show uses those contraptions like narrative proof that Rick cannot just “move on.” He has to win, on his own terms, even if that means turning a personal feud into a mechanical spectacle. The episode’s fun is less about the martial arts parody clicking perfectly and more about the stubborn, ego-fueled physics of Rick doing whatever it takes.

The biggest character-driven payoff comes through Rick’s latest feud with Morty and the over-the-top efforts to beat Lin Su at his own game. Morty briefly befriends Lin Su, which adds a thin emotional thread under the silliness, but it doesn’t last. Morty ends up returning with his own death punch problems, basically resetting the episode back to its core engine: relationships wobble, then snap back into chaos. Meanwhile, the show keeps nudging the viewer toward that recurring question: how much of this is genre comedy, and how much is Rick refusing to process guilt like a normal person?

Even when “Rick Fu Hustle” is working, there are parts that feel undercooked. The entire subplot involving Lin Su and his estranged sifu is described as somewhat underfed, and the review notes that the episode may not have needed both characters or the tangent involving the polycule. From an executive-story perspective, that’s the classic version of a scope problem: you add side characters and subplots for texture, but you pay for it in focus. The episode could have used more streamlining and more emphasis on lampooning martial arts tropes, according to the review. It is an uneven balance, and you can feel it in how the parody elements don’t fully land.

But then the episode flips the script and cashes out where the show tends to have leverage: the duel. The story pays off in a nice way when Rick and Morty duel Lin Su in the ultimate martial arts showdown. The review draws a direct comparison to the epic spectacle from the Season 9 premiere, saying the series is impressing with bombastic, over-the-top action scenes. The battle scope is called out as great, and there is a steady escalation into increasingly ridiculous special moves unleashed by the three characters against each other.

The spectacle reaches another gear once their fight draws the wrath of the martial arts god Punchy and his massive enforcer, Punchenheimer. The episode uses these named power-ups to turn “martial arts showdown” into “cartoon physics meltdown,” and the review frames it as a laughable intensification. In other words, even if “Rick Fu Hustle” is scatterbrained at the genre level, it is hitting the series’ sweet spot at the action level: maximal, ridiculous set-pieces that feel like they were designed to be paused just so you can process what you just saw.

The second half of Episode 3 also delivers a different kind of entertainment by shifting attention to Jerry, giving viewers their first Jerry-centric subplot of Season 9. The review treats that as a welcome development, especially for a fan who generally believes that when Jerry is not on screen, the other characters should be asking “Where's Jerry?” It is not framed as the smartest or most clever Jerry subplot the show has ever done, but it still works enough, mostly because it is so on-brand. Jerry bungle-manages something as simple as cleaning the pool and ends up in a violent sexual affair with the pool cleaner robot. “Textbook Jerry,” the review says, and it lands because the episode is using the series’ established comedic pattern: ordinary domestic tasks become catastrophes the instant Jerry gets involved.

There is also a meta-structural point. The review calls out that it has been a nice novelty having a serialized storyline this season, even if only for something as minor as the family pool, and this is one way of building on that element. So for decision-makers in the attention economy, the takeaway is not just “the episode is fun.” It is that serialized continuity, even for small objects like a pool, creates compounding narrative stakes. By making Jerry’s pool subplot part of a continuing setup rather than a one-off bit, the show increases viewer stickiness. Similar to how Rick’s feud keeps tightening into bigger set pieces, the pool problem keeps becoming a system, not a gag.

Bottom line: “Rick Fu Hustle” may be uneven and a little unfocused in its martial arts parody ambition, but it closes strong with an over-the-top duel and an instantly memorable Jerry disaster. For anyone tracking what makes this series keep momentum in Season 9, the episode offers a clear pattern: when the writing wanders, the spectacle and character obsession pull it back toward must-watch territory.