Sometimes it’s hard to tell smugness from broadmindedness. Even legitimate expertise can bleed over into know-it-all superiority. Something about humanity’s need for conflict means that when someone shows up with all the answers — even if we think they are the correct answers — some of us will recoil at being told what to do.
That’s the theme of the sixth episode of Rick and Morty’s sixth season, “Juricksic Mort,” in which space-faring dinosaurs return to Earth with superior technology, superior ideas on how to live, and superior senses of their own rightness about these things. After some awkward questions about what happened to the dinosaurs they left behind, the new arrivals announce that humanity can take a vacation, that they’ve got it from here. Running a planet really seems to be beyond our skill level, doesn’t it? The dinos have a billion years of experience; why not just let
