YMMV / Rick And Morty S 3 E 4 Vindicators 3 The Return Of World Ender

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: While the episode rather transparently wants to be a Genre Deconstruction of the Superhero genre (specifically the MCU films), as Moviebob points out, it actually reads more like a massive Take That! of Rick himself; while the Vindicators are presented as out of their depth when confronted with Rick's traps, the traps themselves are clearly impossible to solve as they rely on intimate of knowledge of Rick as a person, leaving Morty (who's supposed to be as dumb as Rick is smart) to figure out or dismantle them effortlessly. This shows that Rick himself is a very shallow person - if not more so than the Vindicators - who will drunkenly ramble about the same topics with the same points and that there's nothing new or unique about him. Rather than the Take That! that fans were expecting, it's more Self-Deprecation. Then again, Dan Harmon considers this the worst episode they've ever done, so who knows?
• Broken Base: Fans were divided over whether the episode was a funny and well-done deconstruction of the superhero genre or a mean-spirited Shallow Parody whose story left a bad taste.
• Designated Villain:
  • Crocubot doesn't do anything morally unscrupulous that makes him deserve his death, in fact, with what little lines he had he doesn't actually seem to be that bad of a person from what little we see.
  • Million Ants is also one of the few voices of reason in the episode; the only thing he does is kill someone in self-defense. At least he wasn't killed by Rick - he was killed by Supernova.
• I Knew It!: When the creators talked about the Vindicators in a promotional video, more than a few people guessed that World-Ender wasn't going to be as dangerous as the creators were supposedly hyping him up to be. He's already in his death throes by the time the episode starts, thanks to Rick.
• Moral Event Horizon: While Supernova seemed to be a decent person before, she definitely crossed this when she killed Million Ants, who was merely trying to reason with her.
• Shallow Parody: While it does know the basics, the show has very little to say about superheroes beyond just showing them as assholes; audiences probably wouldn't be as annoyed by this as they were if it weren't for the fact that the superhero genre is already one of the most heavily-deconstructed out there, which gives this episode a lot to measure up to.