Sherrick and Warty

 Part of the Sherlockian curse is seeing Holmes and Watson combos in every other partnership that comes up. Sometimes that parallel feels weaker than others, and sometimes it just hits you like a giant rat jumping off a ship from Sumatra. 

Take that Back to the Future duo, Doc Brown and Marty McFly . . . genius science guy and normal kid . . . almost . . . maybe . . . but, nawwww. Maybe if you tweaked them a little further, though. If you made Doc Brown a little more narcissistic, gave him an addiction, and then had Marty just trying to live a quiet life with the girl he wanted to be with, but unable to resist the temptation to go on adventures.

Oh, wait, that's Rick and Morty.

The Cartoon Network's late night dark, dark comedy actually might come closer to a Holmes and Watson pairing than a lot of mystery-solving duos. Because what do Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith do? They have strange adventures. The unpredictable genius pulling the normal fellow out of his regular life to deal with things unknown to science, yet always putting order back into the world eventually . . . even if they aren't exactly the same when it's all said and done. There's something to all the madness of the cartoon that sparks a certain Sherlockian flame that many a routine murder mystery misses completely.

Of course, the internet being what it is, I'm not the first to come up with this theory by any means -- Reddit turns up a lengthy digression on Rick-as-Sherlock. And of course there's a YouTube video where they meet. And fic -- every idea ever has been done in fanfic, or will be.

As season five of the obnoxiously over-the-top series kicked into gear this week, it's time again to look at Rick and Morty and see that little bit of Holmes and Watson they evoke if you can catch it out of the corner of your eye. Rick's new arch-nemesis Mr. Nimbus isn't exactly Moriarty, as a Looper article claims (more like Prince Namor, rival of the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards for the love of his eventual wife Sue), but the fact that the Looper writer wanted to make that parallel shows that the Sherlock-ishness of Rick brings such things to mind. 

The Holmes and Watson in Rick and Morty is definitely there, and a part of our old friends that I'd definitely miss, t'were it not.