According to Reddit user BojacksHorseman, the answer lies in the sixth episode of the fourth season ‘Never Ricking Morty’, a hugely meta episode that makes fun of showrunner Dan Harmon’s Story Circle structure that he famously used on Community and of course Rick & Morty.
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For those who don’t know, Harmon’s Story Circle is a basic structure he uses to write not just episodes but whole season story arcs. Similar to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Harmon’s Story Circle goes thusly:
A character is in a zone of comfort
But they want something
They enter an unfamiliar situation
Adapt to it
Get what they wanted
Pay a heavy price for it
Then return to their familiar situation
Having changed
BojacksHorseman’s post explains his reasoning, reading “Dan Harmon uses his story circle to plot his episode stories but I’ve long suspected he’s writing the full narrative of all the seasons around the story circle. I spotted it in season 3 when I noticed the character arcs were matching the story circle points. This would mean R&M would be 8 seasons long. Now the S4E6 confirms this, even pointing to a diagram of the train (which is in the shape of a circle) he said they’re in carriage 4 (season 4 - he makes a meta joke about carriage 1 being vignettes about R&M which is what the 1st season was) and then makes another meta joke about wanting to return in 7 before getting off at 8.”
To speculate wildly for a second about what this could mean, seasons could be expanded to meet Adult Swim’s 70 episode commission, there could be more shorts like the recent Genocider to make up the numbers or it could mean that Harmon and/or Justin Roiland could leave as showrunners. In any case, with season 5 progressing well and the show quickly being embraced as pop culture royalty by fans, Rick & Morty are here to stay for a while yet.
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Source: Digital Spy
