Szechuan sauce was season 3 though, which I also think is pretty bad, hence me referencing season 7 feeling like a return to those lamer episodes from season 3. All of the sauce stuff was long gone by S4

The dragons and incest is fair enough, but those are the worst episodes of their respective seasons. What's left though is pretty much back to back bangers though.

I guess for me I just truly don't care about the lore or any of that stuff, I liked how it was sidelined for standalone stories after S3 ended apart from the once-a-season space Beth cameo.

I didn't care for the sauce stuff in S3 myself and I basically stopped watching for a long time because of the insufferable fandom.

I was also never a fan of the crude/gross out humour of S1-S3, especially all the jokes about rape and molesting like quite a few early in S1 (namely the episode with the giants in it) or the jokes where X is something that goes up someone's butt like the very literal pilot episode.

I just like parodies, spoofs and satire, my favourite comedies of all time are all early ZAZ stuff (Naked Gun, Top Secret) and S4-S6 has some of the funniest sci-fi spoofs ever made.

IMO, if ever irreverent applied to something as a descriptor then the episode with endless terminators sent back into the past to stop other terminators is it, or the dating app episode, the line where the dude says "love is as abundant as water, you know what isn't? Water. That shit runs out." is just so witty and the fact it follows through on it as the motivation for the aliens in that episode is just fantastic.

Or how about the narrative train episode? Admittedly that one is so overwritten it's probably intended as a joke in and of itself which is a a real love it or hate it deal, but it is another great example of what happens when you put together that perfect writing room where everything just flows and bounces like the golden age of Simpsons S5-S8.

Or heck what about the vat of acid episode? The whole silent musical montage of the romance followed by the tragedy of the crash and the absurd gut punch of the remote button being pressed.

I never thought someone could make an entire TV episode centered on that one gamer moment when you hit quickload instead of quicksave and lose hours of progress yet here we are, and it was a riot the first time I saw it, equal parts terrifying and hilarious.

Absolute peak comedy imo, completely without crudeness or gross out humour which was a lot of early R&M.

I also hate saying this but the show unironically got a lot smarter after season 3 too, just from a recent rewatch there are still jokes that go way over my head S4-S6, compared to S1-S3 which just feel very very simple in comparison, it was strange and nice to learn about art/lit stuff from rick and morty of all things, and yes including what a bechdel test is, as embarrassing as it is to admit.

Then for contrast, there's the first episode of S7 which was just really unfunny? I don't think it had a single joke in it, and it really had the zombie simpsons thing in there with "here's a celebrity you're familiar with" being basically the whole episode, apart from self-flagellating self-referencing fanservice/lore stuff, and the very strange tone shift too, it felt kind of Simpsons movie esque, too cheerful? Felt like I went from the UK The Office to the US The Office. I took that as my cue to check out.

The S7 total recall joke episode would be like a one-time gag in some other high concept spoof in S4-S6, and iirc it feels that way because it quite literally was.

Except now that's just the whole episode. It feels like someone in the writing room said "hey remember Total Recall?".

It's like something out of S1 Futurama in terms of just how simple it is, and in this case the pandering to nostalgia feels really jarring, it feels like something R&M would do as a joke before like the 3DS gag from Season 2 (3?), except now it's real.

It's interesting to hear your perspective, but it does also seem to me like you're misremembering some things slightly, because you and I both agree on the sauce, but you misattribute that to later seasons, whereas that was entirely a thing contained in the first episode of Season 3, and Season 4 didn't come out in full until like 3 years later due to the pandemic. The mainstream attention was basically gone by then.

Oh and I'm not fan of Roiland either, I actually quite liked the new Rick actor, he had quite a bit more range overall, not so keen on the Morty voice but I didn't see it as a problem.