Rick Sanchez undergoes a profound character transformation across eight seasons of Rick and Morty, evolving from a nihilistic genius who buries his own corpse to avoid responsibility into a man who finally confronts his grief and accepts his role as a father. The show uses comedic elements to mask devastating truths about Rick's 40-year revenge quest for his murdered wife Diane and daughter Beth, which he conducted using his grandson Morty as bait. The arc culminates in Rick building a sealed universe for a copy of himself and Diane, symbolizing his acceptance that he cannot fully heal but has stopped insisting on being broken.
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Fall Asleep To How Rick Sanchez Slowly Became a Different Person (8 Seasons Explained)Added:
He's standing alone in his garage, lights off, slumped over a workbench, and he's just finished building a death ray. Not for an enemy, not for some interdimensional war, for himself. He points it at his own forehead, hits the charge up sequence, and waits for it to fire. The smartest man in the entire multiverse is about to vaporize his own head. And the only reason he doesn't, the only reason Rick Sanchez is alive for another 6 and a half seasons of television is because he passes out drunk before the charge up finishes.
Nobody comes to check on him. The camera just holds on him there on the garage floor. While outside, Jerry cheerfully weed whacks the lawn. Morning comes.
Rick wakes up. The death ray is still on the table, and the show cuts to commercial like nothing happened.
That's Auto Eerotic Assimilation season 2, episode 3. It aired in 2015. And I'm going to be real with you. I watched that episode when it came out and I laughed. I thought it was a weird, dark gag. I thought the show was just being edgy. I was wrong about that. So was basically everybody else. Okay, so look, I've been watching Rick and Morty since the pilot, like a lot of you probably.
Hot Topic t-shirts, whole internet arguing about whether Rick was a genius or just a jerk. And for years, I just kind of assumed the show was what it looked like on the surface. Nius scientist drags his grandson through the multiverse, makes some sci-fi jokes, burps a lot. Cool show. Pickle Rick, Zetuan Sauce, fun stuff. Yeah. Turns out I had no idea what I was watching. I rewatched a bunch of this show recently for this video. like actually rewatched it going back season by season and dude I cannot tell you how much I missed the first time around that garage scene I just described. I thought it was a dark joke. It's not a joke. The show is literally showing you in season 2 that Rick is trying to kill himself and that nobody in his life is paying enough attention to notice and it's doing it in an episode most people remember for the hive mind sex scene. That's the whole show, by the way. That's the trick. For eight seasons, Rick and Morty has been doing this thing where it tells you something genuinely devastating about its main character and then immediately undercuts it with a fart joke, so you don't really have to deal with it. And it works. Most viewers walked away from the show thinking Rick is a happy chaos god. He's the guy with the portal gun.
He's the guy who doesn't care. He's not.
He has never been. And the writers have spent eight seasons, very, very slowly making us admit it. So, that's what this video is. We're going season by season, every confession, every breakdown, every regression, because here's the thing I really want you to walk away with. And this is the actual take I have after sitting with all eight seasons. Rick has not been growing. Rick has been getting caught. There's a difference. Growing is when you change. Getting caught is when the lie you've been telling everybody, including yourself, finally falls apart in your hands. And what the writers figured out somewhere around season 2 and definitely by season 5, is that the most interesting story they could tell wasn't about a genius scientist saving the multiverse. It was about a guy who has structured his entire life around being beyond repair and what happens when the show very slowly takes that excuse away from him. You ever known somebody like that in real life?
Somebody who's just decided they're broken. Like they've made it their whole identity. I'm the screw-up. I'm the alcoholic. I'm the guy who ruins everything. Don't even bother. And then something good almost happens to them and they sabotage it on purpose because if it didn't sabotage, they'd have to admit they could have just been okay this whole time. Rick is that guy. Rick is that guy with a portal gun. And the reason this hits me, the reason I wanted to make this video is because of one specific line in the season 8 finale.
Eight words. He's standing on the side of a road. His daughter Beth has a gun to her own head and he tells her, "I wasn't there for you, but I am now."
Eight words. That's it. Now, I know if you haven't seen season 8, that doesn't sound like much, but you have to understand in season 3, in the most quoted speech in the entire show, Rick stares right at Morty and tells him exactly who he is. He says, and I'm quoting, "I'm not driven by avenging my dead family, Morty. That was fake. I'm driven by finding that McNugget sauce."
That speech was iconic. People put it in their bios. People got it tattooed on them. I had a co-worker who quoted it unironically every week for like a year.
5 years later, the show reveals that almost every word of it was a lie. He was driven by avenging his dead family.
He has been driven by it the entire time. The McNugget sauce speech was Rick doing what Rick does, which is take the saddest possible truth about himself and dress it up as a joke so nobody has to deal with it, including him. The man who delivered that speech in season 3 could not have said, "I wasn't there for you, but I am now." It would have killed him.
he would have set himself on fire first.
The fact that he can say it now in season 8 is the entire show. That sentence is the receipt for eight seasons of work. And I'm going to prove that to you. I'm going to walk you through every step of how we got from the season 1 Rick who buried his own corpse in the backyard and just kept eating breakfast to the season 8 Rick who couldn't even let memory Diane go without first making sure a copy of himself got to be happy with her. We're going to pull the dialogue. We're going to name the episodes. We're going to sit in the toilet monologue and the Diane AI scene and the silent fist sequence and the moment with both Beths on the floor of his garage. And listen, heads up before we go in. We're going to be talking about some heavy stuff. Suicide, grief, alcoholism. The show treats it seriously, even when it's hiding it inside jokes. And I want to do the same.
If that's not what you signed up for today, this is your offramp. Also, full spoilers for all eight seasons, obviously, including the entire season 8 finale. So, if you're somehow not caught up, bail now. For the rest of you, we're going all the way in. If this is the kind of video you're into, the long- form character breakdowns, the shows where the best work is hidden in plain sight, do me a solid and hit subscribe.
I do these for Rick and Morty, Bojack, Severance, all the stuff that rewards a rewatch. and drop a comment with the moment from Rick's arc that hit you the hardest. I genuinely want to know what landed for everyone else because the answers are going to be wildly different. All right, eight seasons, one man, the longest slow motion confession in animation history. We start where the lie was strongest.
Season 1, the guy who doesn't care. And oh boy, does he not care. So, season 1, where do you even start? The Rick we meet in the pilot is honestly a nightmare of a human being. He shows up drunk in the middle of the night, drags his 14-year-old grandson out of bed, and announces that he's going to fly them into space because he needs help robbing a tree of its seeds. The seeds, by the way, he's going to shove up Mort's butt to smuggle through interdimensional customs. That's the cold open. That's the show telling you, "Hi, welcome to Rick and Morty. Here's who Rick is.
Please adjust your expectations." And for about a season and a half, that's the read. He's the cool, fun grandpa who happens to be a war criminal. He burps mid-sentence. He insults his son-in-law constantly. He treats Morty like a piece of furniture that exists to balance out his genius. And the show plays all of it for laughs. I'm not going to lie, on first watch it works. Season 1 is genuinely one of the funniest debut seasons of any animated show I can think of. The Croninberg episode. Me seeks lawyer Morty. The dinner party where Bird person shows up and reveals he's been Rick's best friend for 40 years and Beth had no idea. I rewatched a couple of these recently and they still hold up. The jokes are good. The world building is good. Justin Royland is doing the voice work of his life. But if you go back and watch season 1 now, knowing where the show ends up, there are a bunch of moments where the writers are very clearly already planting seeds.
Like the show is telling you who Rick really is. We just weren't listening yet. Because we were too busy laughing at Pickle Rick. Sorry, wrong season. We were too busy laughing at, I don't know, Mr. Me seeks beating up Jerry on a golf course. Same energy. Let me give you the big one. The one everybody talks about.
Rick potion number nine, season 1, episode 6. If you haven't seen it in a while, here's what happens. Morty wants a love potion to make a girl named Jessica fall for him at a school dance.
Rick, instead of saying, "Absolutely not. You're 14. That's super weird."
just makes him a love potion, which then mutates because of the flu, which then turns every human being on planet Earth except Mort's blood relatives into hideous Croninberg style mutant monsters, like the entire planet, 8 billion people. Their faces fall off, their bodies fold inside out. Beth and Summer are running around with shotguns.
Jerry is somehow being heroic for the first time in his life. It's apocalyptic. And Rick, faced with this, faced with the fact that he has personally destroyed Earth, just kind of shrugs. He tells Morty, "There's a couple dimensions where I really got it right. This is one of those." Then he pulls out the portal gun and he and Morty hop to a nearby dimension. A dimension where everything is identical.
Except in that dimension, the Rick and Morty of that universe died like an hour earlier in a lab accident. Their bodies are still warm in the garage. So, our Rick, our Rick buries the corpses of his alternate self and his alternate grandson in the backyard. And then he and Morty just walk into the dead family's kitchen and sit down and eat dinner with Beth, with Summer, with Jerry. None of whom know that the Rick and Morty they're talking to are not the ones they raised. The ones they raised are decomposing under the lawn. Mort's face during that dinner scene. I want you to go look at it. The camera holds on him for a long, long time. He's just staring at his plate. He's 14. He just helped his grandfather bury his own corpse and replace himself in a stranger's family. And Rick is just sitting there eating mashed potatoes.
That's not a joke. That's not the show being edgy. That is the show in episode 6 of its very first season telling you exactly what Rick is willing to do to avoid dealing with consequences. He destroyed a planet. So, he portaled to a new one. He doesn't fix things, he runs.
And what's wild is that the show never goes back to fix it. The Croninberg dimension just stays Croninberg. Those people stay monsters forever. And our Rick and Morty just live in the new family like they belong there. I don't know about you, but the first time I watched that episode, I thought it was wild. I thought it was a really clever sci-fi move. Like, oh, cool. That's such a Rick thing to do. Yeah. Looking back, that's the moment the show told us Rick is a guy who, when faced with a problem he caused, will literally abandon a dimension rather than sit with the discomfort of fixing it. That is not the brain of a healthy man. That is the brain of someone with a coping mechanism so deep it has its own coping mechanism.
But the show keeps it light, keeps it fun, so we keep laughing. The other big season 1 thing you have to talk about is Rick's family dynamics because the show is setting up everything that's going to pay off later and it's doing it really quietly. Beth Beth Sanchez, Rick's daughter, she is in season 1 completely emotionally dependent on her father's approval. Even though her father has been absent for most of her life, she idolizes him to the point where she will tolerate Jerry, a man she clearly does not respect, basically because Jerry doesn't leave. The show is very explicit about this. Beth's whole personality is, "Please don't abandon me." And she's married to a guy who couldn't abandon her if he tried. And Rick is openly contemptuous of Jerry for it. Like openly, constantly. Now, I'm not going to sit here and defend Jerry. Jerry's the worst. He's whiny. He's insecure.
He's the kind of guy who gets manipulated into selling his soul to a magical shop in the mall. But Rick's hatred for Jerry is doing way more work than the show admits in season 1. Rick doesn't just hate Jerry. Rick hates Jerry because Jerry is married to the daughter Rick walked out on. Every time Rick insults Jerry, he's also insulting himself for not being there. He just won't say it out loud. Summer. Summer is basically furniture in season 1. The writers have not figured her out yet.
She gets a few funny moments, but Rick treats her like she's not in the room, which is honestly accurate. Rick treats most people like they're not in the room. and Morty. Morty is the one that hurts the most retroactively because Rick says out loud multiple times that he keeps Morty around because Mort's stupidity creates brain waves that camouflage Rick's genius from his enemies. Morty is a shield. Morty is a meat decoy. Rick says this to Mort's face. Morty is 14 years old and Morty just kind of takes it because Morty has no other options. His own grandfather is using him as a human heat sink and telling him about it casually over breakfast. Years later in season 5, we're going to find out the real reason Rick keeps Morty around. And it's not the brainwave thing. It's way darker than the brainwave thing, but we'll get there. The last big season 1 thing I have to mention is the Council of Ricks.
Close Rick counters of the Rick kind episode 10. This is the one where we find out there are infinite Ricks across the multiverse. They all hang out together in a citadel and our Rick, the Rick we've been watching, is the rebel of the entire group. He refuses to join.
He's wanted for crimes against the other Ricks. He calls them, and I'm quoting, the Yelp reviews of the multiverse.
What's wild about this episode is that it's the first time we see Rick interacting with other versions of himself, and he hates them. Like, viscerally hates them. The other Ricks are basically him with the same intelligence, the same portal gun, the same general vibe, and he can't stand them. He'd rather be a fugitive than be one of them. The show doesn't tell you why in season 1. It just plants the seed. He's not just detached from his family. He's not just detached from Earth. He's detached from his own species. A couple seasons later, we'll find out why. Hint, it's because one of the other Ricks killed his wife. But in season 1, all you get is the seed. Rick is alone, and he's the only Rick who chose to be alone. and the other Ricks find this so weird that they put a bounty on his head for it. There's one more moment from season 1 I want to flag before we move on because it's the first crack in the armor. It's the season 1 finale. Rixie Business, the episode where Beth and Jerry leave town and Rick throws a giant intergalactic house party while they're gone. Most people remember this episode for Bird Person showing up, for the get Swifty song, for the goofy alien party guests, but there's this one beat at the end. The party gets out of control, the house gets trashed, and Morty and Summer are panicking because their parents are going to be home any minute. And Rick, instead of doing the Rick thing and abandoning them, instead of portaling to a new dimension where the house was never trashed, freezes time so they can clean it up together.
He helps them. He literally chooses to fix this problem instead of running from it. And the show plays it as a joke.
Riggity rigity wrecked, son. Big party scene. Hilarious. But it's also the first time on screen that Rick chooses these specific people over the infinite alternative versions of these people that he could have. Just earlier in the same season, he abandoned a whole dimension full of people he'd lived with for years. Now he's freezing time to save the carpet for Morty and Summer.
It's small. It's buried. The show is not making a big deal about it, but it's there. And looking back, it's the first emotional tale of the entire series. The man who supposedly doesn't care just spent his Saturday night cleaning a teenager's vomit out of a couch cushion because he didn't want her grandmother to find out. Honestly, I liked him a little bit in that moment. So, that's season 1, the setup. The Rick we meet is loud, drunk, contemptuous, willing to bury his own corpse to dodge a consequence, hated by every other version of himself, and openly using his grandson as a human shield. He says he doesn't care about anything. He says it constantly. He says it so much that the show is basically daring you to start asking why he keeps saying it. Because nobody who actually doesn't care has to mention it every 5 minutes, right? You ever met somebody who's like, "I'm fine.
I'm fine. I'm fine." They're not fine.
They've never been fine. They just need you to believe they're fine so you'll stop asking. That is what Rick is doing in season 1. He is performing not caring at full volume because the alternative is that you might notice he cares about a lot and that most of what he cares about he's already lost. Season two is where the writers start to admit it.
That's where things get real real dark.
Okay, so we just spent a whole chunk of this video talking about how season 1 sets up Rick as this nihilist god who doesn't care about anything. loud guy, funny guy, burps a lot, the whole bit.
Season two is where the show just kind of walks up to the camera, taps you on the shoulder, and goes, "Hey, by the way, none of that was real. He's not okay. He has never been okay, and we're going to stop pretending now." I'm not joking. Season 2 of Rick and Morty is one of the most quietly devastating seasons of television I have ever sat through. And most people remember it for Tiny Rick, which fair, Tiny Rick is a banger of an episode. But what's actually happening in season 2, if you watch it without the laugh track in your head, is that the writers are systematically dismantling the fun grandpa persona one episode at a time.
And the season ends with Rick in a prison cell voluntarily having given up his entire life to keep his family safe from the same guy who eight episodes earlier was using his grandson as a meat shield. There are three episodes in this season that do basically all the heavy lifting. We're going to walk through all three. And I'm just going to warn you upfront, this section gets real. The show is about to tell us something about Rick that once you see it, you can't unsee. So, let's start with the one I opened this whole video with. Auto erotic assimilation, season 2, episode 3. The setup is on paper ridiculous.
Rick takes Morty and Summer to investigate a derelict spaceship. And inside the spaceship, he runs into Unity. Unity is an old flame of Rick's.
Unity is also a hive mind. Like a literal hive mind, a single consciousness that takes over entire civilizations by infecting their populations. So when Rick reunites with Unity, what that actually looks like on screen is Rick making out with an entire planet of color-coded body snatched humanoids at the same time. The episode is famous for this. There's an orgy scene. There's a Croninberg level body horror gag. It's gross. It's funny. It's so Rick and Morty, it hurts. But what the episode is actually about underneath all of that is one of the most precise breakups I've ever seen put to screen because Unity, after spending a few days with Rick, writes him a goodbye letter.
And the letter is brutal. Unity says, and I want to get this right. I realize now that I'm attracted to you for the same reason I can't be with you. You can't change. That's the line. That's the diagnosis. Unity. A being that has consumed entire planets looks at Rick and says, "You are too broken to be in a relationship with. And the reason I'm attracted to you in the first place is the same reason this won't work. You will not get better. and I lose myself when I'm around you." Rick reads this letter, walking through the now abandoned town where Unity used to live.
The town is empty because Unity has had to pull itself off this planet to recover from being around him. He destabilizes hive minds. That's how broken he is. He breaks the things that are made out of being whole. So, he goes home. And I want to be careful about how I describe what happens next because the show is careful about it. And I want to respect that. Rick goes back to the garage. He has a Croninberg creature that he kept frozen from way back in season 1. The same Croninberg dimension we talked about earlier. He defrosts it.
He vaporizes it. He builds a device and then he sets the device up so that after a delay it will fire at him. He sits down, he waits, and he passes out drunk before the device finishes its countdown. The camera holds on him. Just holds. While outside, Jerry weed whacks the lawn. We hear it through the window.
The most mundane sound possible played over the unconscious body of a man who just tried to end his own life and didn't even succeed at that. He wakes up in the morning. He puts the device away.
Nobody knows. Nobody asks. the episode ends. That is the scene. That is what the show did in 2015 on Adult Swim, sandwiched between fart jokes. And here is the part that gets me every time I think about it. The reason this scene exists, the reason the writers put it in the show at all is because they had to make sure we understood that Rick is not a happy nihilist. He is a broken nihilist performing happiness, performing not caring, performing the whole grandpa in space routine. Because the alternative, which is admitting that he is in profound, untreated, deeply lonely pain, is something he cannot make himself do. Unity could see it. That's why she left. She couldn't fix him. And she couldn't watch him not fix himself.
and she couldn't stay being the thing he used to feel okay for a few days. So, she left him a note and he went home and he tried to vanish. I'm not going to lie to you. The first time I really sat with what that episode was doing, I had to pause and walk around the room for a minute. The show really did just do that in a halfhour cartoon. The fact that he survived because he was too drunk to finish is the saddest punchline I think this show has ever written. He couldn't even kill himself competently. The smartest man in the universe, the guy who designed the portal gun, got beaten by a beer. That scene reframes the entire show. Everything you watched in season 1, every burp, every wubble dubdub, every contemptuous line at Jerry, every meat shield comment about Morty. You now have to rewatch through this filter. This is a man trying to fill time until he can find a way out.
He doesn't think his life has value. He doesn't think his family is real. He has built his entire personality around having an exit strategy from every situation, including the situation of being himself. I cannot stress enough how much this scene was a curveball.
People at the time were like, "Oh, that was dark." Moving on. The next episode was about a TV with infinite cable channels. The show just kept going, but once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Every line Rick has ever delivered about how nothing matters is now a man trying to convince himself it's true so he can finally do the thing. Okay. Episode two of The Big Three. Big trouble in Little Sanchez. Season 2, episode 7. This is the Tiny Rick episode. Everybody remembers it. The episode where Rick puts his consciousness into a teenage clone of himself so he can go undercover at Morty and Summer's high school and stab a vampire teacher. It's a delightful concept. Tiny Rick is genuinely one of the funniest things the show has ever made. The high school dance scene where Tiny Rick is dancing and yelling #TER Rick. Comedy gold show at its peak. And then about 2/3 through the episode, Summer and Morty start to notice that Tiny Rick doesn't want to go back. Real Rick, the adult Rick, whose consciousness is currently in this teenage body, is refusing to switch back. He's having too much fun. He's avoiding something. He keeps making excuses. And then they find his journal.
And the journal is full of the same phrase written hundreds of times. Let me out. Let me out. This isn't me. Please help me. I'm dying. That's adult Rick from inside. Tiny Rick begging to be let out. The show makes a song about it.
Summer and Morty write Tiny Rick a song designed to surface his real feelings and the song is called Tiny Rick and Tiny Rick performs it at the school dance and the lyrics are literally the words from the journal. The whole school is boopping along to a song that is structurally a man screaming for help from inside a happier version of himself. And that's the whole episode.
That is the show putting its thesis on a billboard. Rick built a happier version of himself to live in because adult Rick is unbearable. He'd rather be a teenager. He'd rather be anyone other than who he actually is. The nihilism, the genius, the chaos, all of it is a costume. Underneath the costume is a guy who would rather genetically engineer a new body for himself than spend another hour in his own brain. The episode ends with Rick switching back. He has to. But the way the show frames it, this isn't him winning. He just lost access to one more way of escaping. The drinking is still there. The portal gun is still there. He just lost the teenage cosplay and he doesn't seem happy about it. I remember watching this when it aired and thinking it was funny. And then about halfway through I started feeling weird.
I couldn't tell you why at the time. I just thought this is sadder than it's supposed to be. And then they sang the song and it clicked. This is what season 2 keeps doing. It hides the real story inside the joke and then dares you to notice it. Which brings us to the season finale, The Wedding Squers. Season 2, episode 10. Bird Person, Rick's best friend, is getting married to a human woman named Tammy. The whole family travels to Bird Person's planet for the wedding. And during the wedding, two things happen that change Rick's life forever. Plus a third thing later that I'll get to. First, before the ceremony, Bird Person sits down with Morty. And Bird Person, who is genuinely one of my favorite side characters in this whole show, drops a piece of context that completely reframes Rick's catchphrase.
The whole show since the pilot, Rick has been yelling Wubble-Lubba Dubdub as a kind of party cheers thing. People had it on t-shirts. People said it in real life. It became a meme. Bird person looks at Morty and says in his weird formal way, "Wubble dubdub is a phrase in my native tongue. It means I am in great pain. Please help me." That is a sentence that does so much work in 15 seconds of screen time. Rick has been screaming for help in Alien for the entire series to his face in his catchphrase. The thing he yells when he's at his most performatively chaotic is literally a translated cry for help.
And nobody on the show, including his own family, ever bothered to learn what it meant. You want to talk about a writer's room flexing on us? That's a flex. That's a setup that was sitting there since the pilot and they finally pulled the trigger on it in the season finale. I remember when this aired, the internet collectively went, "Hold on, wait. We've been laughing at his cry for help for two whole seasons, and it was just sitting there in plain sight the whole time." Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what was happening. Then the wedding happens and Tammy, Birdperson's human bride, turns out to be an undercover agent for the Galactic Federation, which is basically the space cops who have been after Rick for decades. She pulls a gun on the wedding. She shoots Bird Person, who as far as anyone knows is dead. Squonie fights for his life. The whole wedding turns into a war zone.
Rick and the family escape, but now Rick is the most wanted man in the galaxy, and his family is in the crossfire.
So Rick does something none of us expected. He finds the family a quiet planet to hide on. Beth and Jerry hate it because the planet is shaped weird and the gravity makes them want to throw up. Beth specifically says, "This is unlivable. This is your fault. We can't stay here." And in the middle of that argument, Rick gets up, walks outside, and goes to the Galactic Federation. He turns himself in. He surrenders. He trades his entire freedom, everything he's ever built, the portal gun, the workshop, all of it, so that his family can go home and live normal lives without him hunting them anymore. The season ends with Rick in a Galactic Federation prison cell. Jerry, freshly reinstated as the man of the house because Rick is gone, walks back into his kitchen, and we end on Rick alone in a cage, smaller than we've ever seen him. That is the same guy who in season 1 buried his own corpse in the backyard rather than deal with a problem. That guy just gave up his entire life so his daughter could have a stable home. He didn't tell anyone. He didn't make a speech. He didn't even say goodbye. He just walked outside and turned himself in. Honestly, the first time I watched that, I sat on the couch for a minute after the credits rolled. I just kind of needed a second because the show had spent two whole seasons telling us this guy didn't care about anything. And then in the last five minutes of the season finale, it showed us with no fanfare that he cared so much he'd put himself in a cage to protect them. So that's season two. That's the rugpull. The death ray, the song from inside Tiny Rick, the translation of Wubble of a Dubdub, and the surrender at the end.
Four moments, four confessions, all buried inside an animated comedy with fart jokes. And the worst part is none of it sticks because season 3 opens with Rick breaking out of that prison in the most badass way imaginable, blowing up the Federation, becoming a god again, and giving the McNugget sauce speech that everyone quoted for years. He gets out, he puts the armor back on, and he spends the next season convincing us and himself that none of season 2 ever happened. Spoiler, it did. All right.
Season three, the most quoted, most meme'med, most beloved season of Rick and Morty. The season that made the show a cultural phenomenon. The season with the Sichuan sauce speech, with Pickle Rick, with the Croninberg morph battle, with the Citadel arc. If you've only watched one season of this show, statistically, it's probably this one.
It's also, in my opinion, the saddest season the show has ever made. And I think most people who watched it the first time around did not catch that.
Because the show is so good at performing peak Rick that we forgot to ask why he was performing so hard. Let me explain what I mean. Because this is the season where the gap between what Rick is doing and what Rick is feeling becomes the entire point. and the show is daring you to notice it. Let's start with the premiere. The Rick Shank Rick redemption season 3 episode 1. Quick recap. Last we left Rick, he was in a Galactic Federation prison cell, having voluntarily surrendered to save his family. This episode picks up right there. And what Rick does in the next 20 minutes is frankly one of the most insane power moves in the history of animation. He uses a brain link interrogation device to mind swap with his interrogator. Then with another Rick from the council and through a series of moves that would take me an hour to explain properly, he simultaneously destroys the Galactic Federation's entire economy, blows up the Citadel of Ricks and gets himself back to Earth in one episode. He single-handedly takes down the two biggest power structures in the multiverse before lunch.
It is on a popcorn level awesome. The animation is incredible. The plotting is tight. The voice acting is some of Justin Royland's best work. If you want to show somebody one episode of Rick and Morty to demonstrate why the show was a phenomenon, you show them this one. And then at the end of the episode, Rick sits Morty down in the garage and gives the speech. The speech. the one that became a t-shirt, a tattoo, a meme, a whole subculture. He tells Morty that he engineered Beth and Jerry's divorce specifically so that he could become the unquestioned head of the family. He says, and I'm quoting, "I just took over the family, Morty. They'll take my side because I'm a hero, Morty. And now you're going to have to go do whatever I say, Morty, forever." And then he gets to the line. I'm not driven by avenging my dead family, Morty. That was fake.
I'm driven by finding that McNugget sauce. I'm driven by my grandchildren, Morty. I'm driven by my grandchildren, Morty. I'm driven for 97 more years, Morty. Now, in 2017, when this aired, people lost their minds over this speech. It became one of the most quoted things on the internet. McDonald's actually brought back Sichuan sauce because of it, which led to a riot at a McDonald's in 2017 because they didn't make enough of it. Real thing that happened, adults rioted at a McDonald's because of a Rick and Morty speech. And the speech became this badge like, "Oh, Rick doesn't have feelings. Rick's not driven by anything but McNugget sauce.
He's the cool nihilist god who admits he's just doing this for fun." That was the reading. That was what people put on their t-shirts. I want you to hold that reading in your head because I'm going to come back to it in section six when we get to season 5 and the show is going to specifically on purpose blow that reading up. The McNugget sauce speech is a lie. Almost every word of it is a lie.
Rick was driven by avenging his dead family. He had been driven by it for 40 years. The reason he gave that speech, the reason he sold us so hard on him being driven by nothing is because he was deflecting from the real answer. He couldn't say the real answer out loud yet. So, he made up a funny one about McNuggets and we ate it up. But here's where season 3 starts to peel back the layer. Earlier in that same premiere episode before the speech, Morty has a conversation with Summer about Rick.
Summer thinks Rick is a hero because she just watched him take down the Federation. And Morty, who has been through more cosmic trauma than any 14-year-old should have to handle, looks at her and says, "And I want you to really hear this line. He's not a villain, Summer, but he shouldn't be your hero. He's more like a demon or a super messed up god." That is the thesis of the season right there. Episode one, Morty just told you and told the audience that the guy you're about to spend a whole season cheering for is quote a super messed up God. Not a hero, not a villain, just deeply, deeply broken with the power to do anything he wants. That's the warning label. And then the show spends the rest of the season showing you exactly how messed up he is. Which brings us to the episode that I think is the most important episode of the entire series for understanding who Rick actually is.
Pickle Rick. Season 3, episode 3. Now look, Pickle Rick on the surface is a goofy episode. Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of going to family therapy. He then has to fight rats and assassins in a sewer system. It's an action movie starring a pickle. It's hilarious. The internet went insane for it. It got nominated for an Emmy, which it won. A cartoon about a pickle won an Emmy. But the actual emotional weight of the episode isn't in the sewer fight.
It's in the therapy office where Beth and Morty and Summer are sitting with Dr. Wong, the family therapist, and Rick is refusing to come because he turned himself into a vegetable rather than show up. When Rick eventually does show up, having survived being a pickle and having stitched himself a little human exoskeleton out of dead rat parts, Dr. Wong, who is played by Susan Sandon, sits across from him and reads him for filth. And it is one of the best pieces of writing this show has ever produced.
I'm not going to read you the whole monologue because it's long, but I'm going to pull the part that matters. She tells him, and again I'm quoting because I want you to hear the actual line. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. The only truly approachable concept for you is that it's your mind within your control. You chose to come here. You chose to talk to belittle my vocation just as you chose to become a pickle. She keeps going. She tells him that the reason he avoids therapy, the reason he avoids any kind of self-examination is because therapy is quote work. It's not an adventure.
There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. And then she says the thing, some people are okay going to work. And some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.
That is the cleanest read of Rick that has ever been put on screen. She is telling him directly that he is a man who has built his entire identity around chaos and adventure specifically because the alternative is sitting still long enough to do the boring work of fixing himself. He turns into a pickle to avoid therapy because a pickle is a more dignified position for him than just admitting he needs help. And the saddest part is he hears her. The look on his face when she lands that monologue, he hears every word. He knows she's right.
And he just kind of nods at her, says she's a great monologuist, and leaves.
That's the move. That's the Rick move.
Receive devastatingly accurate diagnosis from a trained professional. Compliment her on her delivery. Walk out the door.
Like, can you imagine being so committed to not getting better that you compliment your therapist on the technical craft of her takedown of you instead of, you know, actually hearing it? That's such a Rick thing. It's almost funny except it's not because he's going to go from this scene directly to the rest of season 3 and he's going to get progressively more isolated and miserable as the season goes on. And Dr. Wong's diagnosis is going to sit there in the back of his head untouched for the next five seasons. He doesn't go back to therapy.
Not in season four, not in season five, not in season six. Season seven brings her back briefly, and he still won't talk to her. The first useful piece of feedback anyone has ever given him in his entire life, and his response is the compliment, the delivery. I love this scene. I genuinely love this scene because Dr. Wong is doing the work the show won't do for itself. She's saying out loud what the show has been hinting at for two and a half seasons. Rick is not a god. He's a guy who spent his whole life dodging the part where he has to actually deal with himself. And he is using his intelligence as the most elaborate avoidance mechanism ever constructed. Okay, let me hit a couple more season 3 beats before we move on because there's a lot. The Whirly Durly Conspiracy, season 3, episode five. This is the episode where Rick takes Jerry on a vacation specifically to try to murder him because Beth has divorced Jerry and Rick wants to make sure Jerry never comes back. But the episode has a bar scene in the middle that is doing way more emotional work than people give it credit for. In the bar, Jerry confronts Rick and Jerry, who is normally a punching bag for the entire show, actually lands a punch back. He tells Rick that Beth had options because she was Rick's daughter, but she's stuck where she is because of Rick's absence.
He tells Rick basically, "You broke her.
You weren't there, and she settled for me, and that's on you." Rick deflects hard. He immediately goes into a speech about how Jerry is the real predator.
How Jerry uses pity to trap people. But the deflection is the tell. The thing Jerry said landed. We know it landed because later in the episode when Jerry is genuinely in mortal danger. Rick saves him. And when Jerry surprised says, "I knew you wouldn't let me die."
Rick says, "And this is the line that gets me." That was never an option. That was never an option. Five words from a man who in season 1 buried his own family corpses to avoid a problem. He just told Jerry, the guy he hates more than anyone in the universe, that letting him die was never on the table.
Why? Because Jerry is Beth's. Because Jerry is family. Even Jerry. Even the guy Rick has spent three seasons trying to drive out of his daughter's life, he won't let him die. And then immediately, Rick says some sarcastic thing about needing bilecoated bait because if he let that vulnerable line just sit there, he'd have to deal with the implications.
So, he covers it with a joke and moves on. Standard procedure. One more episode I have to mention. The ABCs of Beth, season 3, episode 9. This is the one where Rick offers Beth a clone of herself. Beth is going through a crisis.
She's realizing she might be a bad mom.
She's realizing she might want to leave her family and go have adventures in space the way Rick did. And Rick, instead of helping her work through it, offers her a clone. He'll make a copy of her so good that nobody will know which is which. The copy will stay home and raise the kids. The real Beth will go to space. And here's the thing. Rick tells her point blank that he will not know which one she chose. The clone will be programmed to believe it's the real Beth. There will be no way for him or anyone to tell. And Beth takes the deal.
Or somebody does. The episode never confirms which one stayed. So Rick has deliberately given up the ability to know whether the Beth currently living in his house is his actual daughter or a copy. From this episode forward, the show never resolves this. We never find out. Rick chose not to know. Why?
Because if he knew, he'd have to feel something about it. Either he sent his real daughter away, which is abandonment, or his real daughter abandoned her family, which means she's just like him, which means he ruined her. Either answer is unbearable. So, he picks not knowing. He picks ignorance.
He picks the version of reality where he doesn't have to feel anything about either possibility. That is when you really sit with it. One of the most cowardly things any character on this show has ever done. And the show plays it like a slightly weird family drama beat. But it's not. It's Rick being so terrified of accountability that he has scientifically engineered his way out of being a father. Okay. The finale. The Rickurion Morty date. Season 3 episode 10. Most people don't talk about this finale much because honestly it's a weaker episode. The president of the United States and Rick get into a fight.
It's mid. But the last scene of the season is doing something nobody talks about. Beth and Jerry get back together.
Jerry moves back into the house. The whole family reunites in the kitchen.
They take a family photo and Rick is on the edge of the photo scowling. He has been displaced. The man who started the season as the unquestioned head of the family. The guy who gave the McNugget sauce speech ends the season as a side character in his own daughter's life.
Jerry is back. Beth chose Jerry over space. And Rick is just smaller, smaller than he started. He performed Godhood for an entire season. He destroyed the Federation. He destroyed the Citadel. He gave the most quoted speech of the show.
And by the last frame of the season, he's standing in the corner of a family photo, scowlling, drinking, watching Jerry kiss his daughter. The McNugget sauce speech was a man trying really, really hard to convince himself he was winning. By episode 10 of the same season, he had visibly lost. That's what I mean when I say season 3 is the saddest season. It's the season where Rick performs the absolute peak of his nihilist god routine and the show takes him apart anyway. Dr. Wong saw it. Jerry saw it in his weird Jerry way. Beth saw it enough to want to escape into a clone. The audience didn't see it because we were too busy quoting the speech, but the show saw it. And the show is patient. It is so so patient because Dr. Wong's diagnosis is going to come back. Not in season four or five.
The full payoff for that monologue. The moment Rick has to actually deal with what she said isn't coming for another five seasons. But she said it in season 3, and the writers planted it there knowing they were going to come back for it eventually. Which brings us to where we are right now. Halfway through this video, halfway through Rick's 8season arc. We've covered the setup. We've covered the rugpull. We've covered the peak of the performance. From here on out, the show stops being subtle. The cracks become canyons. The cover stories start collapsing. And by the end of season 5, the entire premise of who Rick is, the lie he's been telling for 40 years is going to come out in one episode. But before we get there, real quick. If you're still with me at the midpoint of a 90inute video about a cartoon, you are exactly the kind of viewer this channel is built for. And I genuinely appreciate you. Hit subscribe if you haven't yet. I do these for Bojack, for Severance, for any show where the writers are doing more than they're letting on. Drop a like if you've made it this far, and let me know in the comments what the Dr. Wong scene did to you the first time you saw it.
Because for me, it was one of those scenes I had to pause and rewind because she really just diagnosed him in 3 minutes and he just walked out. All right, mid roll over. Let's keep going because season 4 is where the loneliness comes out into the open and it gets ugly. So, if season 2 was the rugpull and season 3 was Peak Rick performing Godhood while quietly falling apart, season 4 is the season where the performance starts breaking down in public. The mask slips, the defenses get thinner, and the show puts Rick through one of the most quietly cruel scenes it has ever animated, and a lot of viewers either missed it or didn't want to deal with it. Let me be upfront with you.
Season 4 is structurally the weakest of the eight seasons. It's a season of one-offs more than a season of arc.
There was a long hiatus before it dropped. The writing team had reshuffled and a lot of episodes feel disconnected from each other. You can feel the show trying to figure out what it wants to be now that the Citadel is gone. Now that the Federation is gone, now that Rick has nothing left to rebel against except his own family. But, and this is the big butt, season 4 has one of the top three Rick scenes in the entire series, and it's hiding inside an episode most people remember as the one where Rick has a special toilet planet. If you haven't seen this one in a while, I'm going to ask you to bear with me because I think it's the single most accurate portrait of who Rick really is that the writers have ever attempted. And I love that it's hidden inside a fart joke. The Old Man and the Seat. Season 4, episode 2. Let's go. Here's the setup. Rick, who hates dealing with people, has built himself a secret private toilet on an uninhabited alien planet. like a whole planet. He portals there every morning to poop in peace because the idea of anybody seeing him or talking to him while he's doing his business is intolerable. It's the most Rick thing in the world. Most people guard a private journal. Rick has a private planet for pooping. The episode opens with him discovering that someone else has used his toilet. Someone has been on his planet. There's a footprint by the seat.
And he loses his mind. He spends the whole episode setting up traps, surveillance, biometric locks, the whole bit, trying to figure out who's been using his toilet. He finds the guy, an alien named Tony, played, by the way, by Jeffrey Wright, who is a phenomenal actor and is bringing the kind of weight to this voice performance that you would normally only hear in like a prestige HBO drama. Tony is older, soft-spoken, weary. And when Rick confronts him, Tony just kind of owns it. Yeah, I've been using your toilet. I like it. It's a nice toilet. Rick is gearing up to murder this guy. Like full annihilation.
He's got a death ray. He's got threats.
He's got the whole intimidation routine he uses on every alien encounter. But Tony doesn't react. Tony tells Rick that his wife died of cancer recently and ever since he doesn't really fear death anymore. He fears living without her and he started using Rick's toilet because the view from up there is beautiful and it's the only place he can sit and not feel suffocated by the world he's still stuck in. And then Tony does something Rick is not equipped to handle. He invites Rick to be his friend. He says it directly. He says, "Look, you and I are both alone. We could just hang out.
Have a drink. I'll bring you a martini.
We'll watch the sunset from up here. We don't have to talk if you don't want to.
But I'm offering. Rick can't process this. Like his whole face does that thing his face does when somebody says something genuine to him and he doesn't know what to do with it. He can't kill the guy because the guy isn't afraid. He can't intimidate the guy because the guy doesn't care. and he can't accept friendship from the guy because then he'd have to admit that he Rick would also like a friend. So Rick does what Rick always does. He gets cruel. He decides he's going to humiliate Tony into never coming back. Here is what he builds. He builds, get this, a holographic chorus. A literal chorus of fake Ricks. Like a Greek tragedy chorus.
programmed to appear every time Tony sits down on the toilet and sing a song, mocking him. Mocking him specifically for being lonely. Mocking him for using a stranger's toilet because his wife died and he doesn't know what else to do. It is one of the most spiteful, petty, cruel things any character on this show has ever done. And Rick builds it lovingly. He puts work into it. The chorus has choreography. Tony never sees it. Tony, between the time Rick builds the trap and the time Rick can spring it, goes on a vacation and Tony dies.
Offscreen skiing, the man who didn't fear death lived his life and he died doing something he loved and Rick never got to humiliate him. The episode comes back to the toilet at the end. Rick is sitting on it, just sitting. And the chorus activates because Rick triggered the motion sensor by accident. And the chorus, which Rick built and programmed himself, starts singing its song at him by accident. And the lyrics, I want to read you the lyrics because this is the moment. Look at you sitting there. King [ __ ] on his throne of loneliness. All hail his majesty, the saddest piece of garbage in the entire cosmos.
That's Rick's song that Rick wrote about a man he never got to deliver it to being sung at him by his own invention while he sits on his secret toilet alone on a planet with no people because that's where he goes when he wants to feel okay. The smartest man in the universe built a device to humiliate a lonely widowerower for the crime of being lonely. And the device correctly identified him as the loneliest creature in it. I don't think the show has ever been more precise about who Rick is than that single shot. The chorus is singing.
Rick is sitting on his throne of loneliness with his pants down listening to his own diagnosis from his own machine. while the man he built it for is dead from doing something happy. It is one of the most quietly devastating endings to any episode of any animated show I have ever seen. And it aired in 2019 sandwiched between an episode about giant talking pickles and an episode about, I'm not making this up, an alien parasite that makes everyone think they have fond shared memories of people who never existed. I rewatched this scene specifically for this video, and dude, it hits harder now than it did the first time because by season 4, we know what's going on. Rick is lonely. He can't fix himself, and he can't take help when it's offered. And we know he is going to keep building these elaborate punishments for people who remind him of himself until the day he dies, which, as we've already established, he has tried to do. Okay, let me hit some other season 4 beats fast because there's a few I want to flag before we move on.
And the toilet scene is the one that really matters. Edge of Tamorti, the premiere, season 4, episode 1. This is a fun episode on the surface with the death crystals and the time loops and the whole thing. But what it's actually doing is showing you that Morty is starting to grow up. Morty is making his own decisions. Morty is willing to fight Rick over them, and Rick reacts with naked threat. He doesn't know how to be in a relationship with his kid anymore now that the kid has his own agenda. The leverage Rick has used for three and a half seasons, which is Fear Plus genius, is starting to stop working, and Rick doesn't know what comes next. Never Ricking Morty, season 4, episode 6. This is the meta episode. The show literally puts Rick on a story train, and the train is on purpose trying to give Rick a backstory and a character arc, and Rick fights the train. He spends the whole episode refusing to be a character with a past, refusing to be developed, refusing to grow. The episode ends with him blowing up the train rather than let anyone, including the writers, give him an arc. This is the writers being incredibly cute about their own work.
They are literally writing an episode about Rick refusing the kind of show this show is becoming. He doesn't want to be in the story. He wants to be in the bits. And the show is going, "Sorry, buddy. We're doing the story whether you like it or not." The Vat of Acid episode, season 4, episode 8. This one I have a complicated relationship with.
It's a brilliant episode of television, but it's also Rick being maybe the most cruel he's ever been to Morty on purpose out of pure ego. Quick version, Morty criticizes one of Rick's inventions.
Rick, in retaliation, gives Morty a device that lets him save his progress in life and reload from any point, like a video game. Morty uses it to live a second life. He falls in love with a woman. He has a daughter with her. He spends years with this family. He builds something beautiful. And then Rick reveals that the device wasn't actually a save state. It was a portal to a parallel dimension where the changes were just temporary. And to reverse it, Rick straight up murders that entire dimension. The woman, the daughter, the life Morty built, all of it erased. To punish Morty for criticizing his invention. Like what kind of person reacts to a critique of their gadget by erasing a child from existence? Rick.
That kind of person is Rick. He is so emotionally fragile that when his 14-year-old grandson, who he calls stupid every single day, mildly criticizes the user interface on one of his gadgets, Rick murders a woman and a child Morty loved to prove a point. The ego on this man is so massive and so brittle that he will commit literal genocide over a vibe check. That's season four, Rick. That's the guy who hides on his toilet planet to avoid people. The guy who can't accept a friend. The guy who builds elaborate spite machines to punish strangers for being like him. He's still the smartest man in the universe. He's also the pettiest. And the show is very slowly making sure you know the cost. Childrich of Mort season 4, episode 9. I'll be brief. Rick accidentally impregnates a planet in like a sex with an entire celestial body way. The episode is goofy, but the punchline is that Rick is a deadbeat dad to a generation of planet children. And Jerry, the guy Rick has been bullying for three and a half seasons, is a more present and more loving father to these alien kids than Rick is. And Rick knows. The episode ends with Rick acknowledging it. He doesn't deal with it, but he knows.
Jerry is a better father than Rick is.
The show says it out loud in season four. to his face and Rick just kind of nods and walks away. And then the season finale, Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerry, season 4, episode 10. Tammy comes back.
Phoenix person, who is the cyborg corpse of Bird Person, makes an appearance.
There's a Galactic Federation rematch.
And in the middle of all of it, the show does something it has not done before.
It teases Diane. It happens in a memory dive. Bird person, who is in a coma, is being psychically explored. And inside bird person's memories, we see a younger Rick, a happier Rick. We see him standing next to a woman. We don't see her face clearly. We don't get a name, but we see Rick the way Bird person remembered him before whatever broke him broke him. And the show is for the first time telling the audience there's a story underneath this. There is a reason Rick is the way Rick is. We are not telling you yet, but you can see it now.
There is something there. This is the first real Diane tease. The first time the show acknowledges that Rick had a life before he was Rick. And it's only 15 seconds of screen time, but it changes everything because everything you've watched up to this point, all the Toilet Planet stuff, the McNugget sauce, the Wuba Luba dubdub, all of it has a cause. Now, the show is telling you we are aware that nihilism doesn't come from nowhere. The reason exists and you'll get it eventually. So, that's season 4, the mask slipping in public, the loneliness made literal in the form of a singing chorus on a poop planet.
The first crack in the armor that says, "Hey, there's a real story under here.
We'll show you when we're ready." And then the writers took a couple years off. And when they came back, they were ready because season five is when the entire premise of the show, the lie Rick has been telling for 8 years and 40 in universe years is going to come out in one episode in a flashback so brutal it makes you have to rewatch every previous episode with new eyes. Season five is where the cover story dies. Let's go.
All right, season five, the big one. If you've been watching this show since the start, season five is the season that broke your brain. Because everything you thought you knew about Rick Sanchez, every theory, every fan reading, every actually he's just a sad guy take, the show takes all of it, lines it up, and confirms it in the crulest way possible in one finale in 44 minutes of television. The cover story dies, and what's underneath is so much worse than anyone was expecting. Let me set the stage. Season 5 starts in 2021. It's been almost 2 years since season 4 ended. The Dian tease from the bird person memory dive is sitting there in the back of everyone's head. Fan theories are everywhere. Reddit is in a frenzy. People are convinced that the show is finally about to give us Rick's backstory. And the season starts. And for most of its run, the show just kind of goofs around. Like season 5 has a lot of filler. Mr. Nimbus shows up and Rick has a petty rivalry with him. Morty falls in love with a girl who controls killer whales. There's an episode about Hooie parents from a backstory dimension that I genuinely can't summarize. The first eight episodes of the season are mostly comic. Most fans were getting frustrated. Where's the backstory?
Where's the Diane stuff? Where's the payoff? The writers were waiting. They were waiting because they were about to drop one of the most ambitious season finales in animation history. And they wanted you to be frustrated when they did it because the frustration is part of the reveal. Rick has been making us wait for an answer for four and a half seasons. And in season 5, episode 9, and then episode 10, the show finally just tells us everything.
But before we get to the finale, there's one episode I have to flag because it's doing important work that nobody talks about. Forgetting Serak Morchaw. Season 5, episode 8. This is the one where Morty briefly stops adventuring with Rick and starts adventuring with a different Rick named Nick. Now, on paper, this is a comedy episode. Morty replaces his Rick. Rick gets jealous.
Hilarious. But what's actually going on, if you watch Rick's face during this episode, is that Rick is desperately, openly, embarrassingly jealous of another version of himself getting to be Mort's grandfather. Like the armor that he's worn for five seasons, the whole I don't care, I'm above all this routine is gone. He is whining. He is pleading.
He is doing the emotional equivalent of standing outside Mort's window with a boom box. And the show wants you to notice because the next episode is going to explain exactly why Rick needs Morty so badly. And the answer is, by the way, the worst possible answer. Okay, let's get into it. Rick Murray Jack season 5, episode 10, the season finale. Also, functionally the finale of every fan theory the show had been seeding since 2013.
I'm going to walk you through this in order because there is a lot and a lot of it is being delivered fast and most viewers needed two or three rewatches to fully process what the show was telling them. The episode opens with Evil Morty making his return. If you haven't watched the show in a while, Evil Morty is the breakout villain from way back in season 1. a Morty who became self-aware, killed the Rick he was paired with, infiltrated the Citadel of Ricks, and disappeared. He shows up in season 5.
He's running for president of the Citadel. He wins, and he is, by the way, the smartest character in the entire show by a wide margin. He has been five steps ahead of everyone, including our Rick, for the entire series. And in this episode, evil Morty corners Rick and Morty inside the central finite curve, which we have not yet explained because nobody had explained it to us. The whole show up to this point, we just kind of accepted that there were infinite Ricks across infinite universes. Cool. Sure.
Multiverse. Got it. Evil Morty is about to tell us that we got it wrong. He sits Rick down and he gives a monologue that when I first heard it, I had to pause the episode. I had to. I sat there with the remote in my hand going, "Wait, what did he just say?" He says, and I'm going to paraphrase tight here because it's a long monologue. That the Citadel of Ricks didn't just unify Rick's across the multiverse, they built a wall around infinity. The Citadel separated all the universes where Rick is the smartest man in the universe from all the other infinite universes where he isn't. And they trapped every Rick and every Morty inside that wall forever.
Every version of Rick we've ever met in the entire show, every Rick on the Citadel, every Rick who's been killed or eaten or run from, every single one of them has spent their entire life inside what Evil Morty calls a crib. A crib built around an infinite baby, which is to say Rick. The Rick we have been watching. The smartest man in the universe, the chaos god, the portal gun having grandpa is not actually special.
He is one of an infinity of identical Ricks. All of whom are the smartest in their version of reality because the entire reality has been engineered to make Ricks the smartest thing in it. The central finite curve is a glass case and our Rick is one of a million identical action figures in the case. All of them convinced they're unique. Evil Morty escapes. He blows a hole in the central finite curve and leaves to wherever exists outside it. Where there are universes Rick isn't the smartest man in where Rick is presumably not special at all. And that's the first half of the finale. The second half is where the real damage happens because once Evil Morty is gone, the show goes into flashback. And in this flashback, we finally meet her. Diane, the episode shows us Rick, younger Rick, before the lab coat, before the portal gun, before any of it. A version of Rick we have never seen before in the entire show.
He's not drunk. He's not bitter. He's frankly a normal guy. He has a wife. Her name is Diane. He has a daughter. Her name is Beth. The Beth. The original Beth. And one day, while Rick is in his garage in a normal house in a normal version of Earth, another Rick from another dimension shows up. The show tells us this other Rick's name. It's Rick Prime. And Rick Prime is testing a weapon called the Omega device. The Omega device is designed to erase a specific person from every reality in the multiverse simultaneously.
It's targeted. It's surgical. It only works on one person at a time. Rick Prime uses it on Diane and on Beth. Not our Beth. Original Beth. The first one.
The one Rick actually raised. They are erased. Not killed. erased from every version of reality where they ever existed across every dimension at the same instant. Our Rick comes back from the garage, walks into the kitchen. The kitchen is empty. There are scorch marks on the floor where his wife and his daughter used to be standing. He runs outside. Diane and Beth are gone from this dimension. And he realizes from every dimension that moment, that single moment is the origin of every single thing we have ever watched on the show.
The flashbacks keep going. We see Rick alone, drinking for years, wandering. He hasn't invented the portal gun yet.
That's the wild part. The portal gun, the thing that defines him, did not exist before Diane died. He built it because Diane died. He spent years as a wreck drinking himself to sleep in an empty house and then he started building. And what he built was a way to find Rick Prime in every reality and kill him. He spends decades, plural decades, hunting Rick Prime across the multiverse. He invents the portal gun.
He kills countless other versions of himself, the ones he encounters that don't fit his agenda. He builds and eventually grows to hate the Citadel of Ricks. He becomes the most dangerous Rick in the multiverse. The Council of Ricks hates him for a reason. The reason is he is on a 40-year revenge quest that none of them signed up for, and he doesn't care what he has to break to finish it. And after decades of hunting Rick Prime and never finding him, he gives up. Sort of. He finds a dimension.
A dimension where a different version of him, a worse version, had walked out on his wife and daughter and disappeared.
That Diane, that Beth were alive. They were still missing their Rick, but he had walked out. He hadn't been murdered.
So, our Rick steps into that life. He replaces the Rick that left. He takes his daughter's place. He takes her grandkids, Morty and Summer, and he uses them as bait because he figures eventually Rick Prime will come for this family, too. So, he stays. He drinks. He plays the role of Grandpa. And he waits for decades for Rick Prime to show up so he can kill him. The Beth we have been watching for five seasons is not his daughter. The Morty we have been watching for five seasons is not his grandson. They are a replacement family.
He chose them on purpose because he wanted Rick Prime to find them. He has been using a 14-year-old kid as bait for a man who murdered the original version of that kid's mother for five entire seasons without telling anyone. That that is the reveal. every single line Rick has ever delivered about nothing mattering, about there being infinite versions of everything, about not being driven by avenging his dead family, including, and this is the kill shot, the McNugget sauce speech from season 3.
All of it now reads completely differently. The McNugget sauce speech where Rick says, "I'm not driven by avenging my dead family, Morty. That was fake. That was a lie. He was driven by avenging his dead family. He had been driven by it for 40 years. He was telling Morty the literal opposite of the truth in the most quoted speech of the entire show because admitting the truth would have meant admitting he was using Morty as bait. And he could not say that to Mort's face. So he said the opposite. He said the funny version about McNuggets. We laughed. We put it on t-shirts. McDonald's brought back the sauce. adults rioted at a fast food restaurant. And the actual subtext of that speech in 2017 in real time was Rick using his own grandson as a human shield in a 40-year revenge fantasy and lying about it to his face. I don't know about you, but the first time I really processed that, I genuinely had to take a walk because suddenly the entire show is a different show. Go back and rewatch autoerotic assimilation with this in mind. The man building that death ray had spent 40 years failing to avenge his murdered wife and daughter, and Unity had just left him, the toilet planet.
The reason he can't let anyone get close is because he's still scanning every horizon for the same enemy. Wubble dubba dubdub. The catchphrase is now a man yelling, "I am in great pain. Please help me." to a family that he himself chose because Rick Prime might one day come and kill them. He chose them as bait. And then he started screaming for help to them about what he was doing to them in an alien language because he didn't have the courage to scream it in English. That is one of the most precisely tragic character setups I've ever seen in any medium. And it was hiding inside a cartoon about a pickle for 8 years. The episode ends with Rick admitting to Morty, or rather sort of admitting that there's a lot Morty doesn't know. He doesn't say it cleanly.
He never says it cleanly, but the cover is gone. Morty knows there's a backstory. Morty knows Rick has been hunting someone. Morty doesn't know the full Beth thing yet. That comes in season 6. But he knows the lie is over.
Rick can't be the chaos god anymore.
He's just a guy with a thing he never got over. And here's the part I want you to really hold on to because this is the move that the writers pulled that I will be in awe of forever. The McNugget sauce speech. The most famous speech in the entire show. The thing people had on t-shirts was always a confession. Every word of it was Rick confessing what was actually happening while phrasing it in a way that nobody, including Morty, including the audience, would take seriously. He said, "I'm driven by my grandchildren, Morty." Plural grandchildren.
He said it twice in that speech. He said, "I'm driven by my grandchildren, Morty. I'm driven." He was telling Morty in 2017 that he was using him as a tool.
He was telling him out loud with the camera on him. We just thought it was a joke. The writers planted the confession in the most famous speech of the show and let us laugh at it for 5 years before showing us what it actually meant. That is a level of long- form storytelling that, I'm sorry, you do not get to expect from an animated comedy on Adult Swim. That is novelist work. That is Breaking Bad finale work. That is the kind of writing that when I started this rewatch, I wasn't really prepared for.
And I've been thinking about that speech for weeks now. The fact that the most quoted line in the show, the one that became a meme, was the writers telling us the answer the whole time in a language we couldn't decode. So that's season 5. The cover is dead. The lie is revealed. The 40-year revenge quest is now public. Morty knows there's a backstory. Rick can't keep performing nihilism because everyone has now seen the scene. The question season 6 is going to ask is, "Okay, now what? Now that the lie is out, now that the family knows what they are to him, now that Rick has nowhere left to hide, how does a man whose entire identity has been built around a single unresolved mission function in the world after the mission becomes the thing he can't shut up about? The answer, as it turns out, is grief. Real grief in the open for the first time in the show's history. And it's going to make you sad. Let's get into it. Okay, seasons six and seven.
I'm doing these together because honestly, they function as one story.
Season 6 is the season where Rick has to live publicly as the guy we found out he was in the season 5 finale. And season 7 is the season where he gets his revenge.
And the show tells him very quietly that it doesn't matter. These are the saddest two seasons of the show. I'm going to warn you now. We are going into the silent fist sequence and the Diane AI scene and the fear hole episode and all of it. If you've never cried at a Rick and Morty episode, this is the section that's going to change that for you.
Let's go. Season 6 starts with Solarix.
Season 6, episode 1. This is the cleanup episode for the season 5 finale. Evil Morty blew a hole in the central finite curve before he left. As a parting gift, he reset all the portal fluid in the multiverse, which means every Rick and every Morty who ever portaled away from their home dimension gets snapped back all at once to where they originally came from. For our Rick, that means he goes home. Home. Home. The dimension he hasn't seen since the day Diane and Beth were erased. And what we find when we get there is one of the most quietly horrifying things this show has ever shown us. Rick has been keeping his original dimension in a time loop. Like scientifically, he has frozen his old house in the exact day of the worst day of his life, forever. And inside that house, he has built, get this, an AI version of Diane.
an AI of his dead wife who lives in the house, who is programmed to keep him company, who is programmed specifically to ask him whether he has found her killer yet. The first time we see Rick in his old home, the Diane AI is right there. She greets him. She asks him casually, like she's asking about his day, "Did you find our daughter's killer?" And Rick answers just as casually, "Not yet. Sorry, still looking. This is a conversation he has had with this AI every day for years, decades maybe. He has built a ghost to live in a house to ask him about his progress on the revenge quest so that he never ever has to feel like he's letting Diane go. The conversation continues.
Diane Ai tells him with this terrifying sweetness that he always does everything he sets his mind to except keep his family alive, but she says that was hardly his fault. And Rick goes, "Mute."
He tries to mute his dead wife. And she responds instantly. If I could be muted, I wouldn't be too good at haunting you, would I? You dirty bear. Dude, I want you to sit. Wait, I want you to Okay, I'm not going to say it. I almost slipped. I want you to just hear that line again. He built a Diane AI with a pet name and he programmed it so it cannot be muted, so that it can haunt him forever on purpose. That is the configuration of a man who has decided he is going to suffer for the rest of his life and has scientifically engineered the suffering to be unstoppable, including by himself.
The Diane AI is not a comfort tool. It's a self-imposed life sentence. He gave himself a cellmate so he could never get parole. And I genuinely think that line is the most Rick line in the entire show. Build a wife. Make her unmutable.
Call her a pet name. Lock yourself in with her forever. Like, who else does that? Only this guy. I've watched this scene like four times. I notice something new every time. The way she says, "You dirty bear." The way Rick's face just sort of slumps when she does.
He's not surprised, not sad, just tired.
He has been doing this conversation with this fake version of his wife for so long that it's just part of his routine.
He lives in two houses. The one with Beth and Morty and Jerry and this one with a ghost he built. And the ghost is the one that knows him. Meanwhile, in the same episode, Morty also gets snapped back to his original home dimension. And Mort's original home dimension is the Croninberg dimension, the one from Rick potion number nine way back in season 1, the one Rick destroyed. Morty learns in this episode that his original dimension is also Rick Prime's home dimension, which means Morty, the Morty we've been watching, is biologically Rick Prime's grandson. Our Rick has been raising Rick Prime's grandkid as bait for Rick Prime. The whole show, this whole time, Morty has not just been bait by accident. He's been the perfect bait. The exact grandson Rick Prime would care about hunting if he ever found out. Morty is understandably wrecked. The episode shows him processing this like just sitting there. the same thousandy stare he had at the dinner table in season 1 after his Rick buried his own corpse.
Now with five seasons of new context, the episode also has a stinger at the very end. Rick Prime, our Rick's actual nemesis, has also been snapped back to his home dimension by the portal fluid reset, which is the Croninberg dimension. And he runs into Jerry, the Jerry from that dimension. Not our Jerry, the Croninberg dimension Jerry.
And Rick Prime in the last shot of the episode just kind of kills him casually offscreen because Rick Prime is that guy. He kills Jerry's for fun. That's the season 6 premiere, the home dimension, the Diane AI, the reveal about Mort's biology, the Rick Prime cameo, all of it dropped in one episode.
The cover is gone. The grief is open.
And the audience now knows that Rick has been living in two houses simultaneously for five seasons. One with a fake family, one with a fake wife, and that he hasn't been okay for a single second of any of it. Season 6 spends the rest of its run sort of marinating. There are episodes that are pure comedy, like Night Family and Analyze Piss. There are episodes where Jerry, of all people, gets to be the emotional center, which is wild. There's an episode called Bethic Twinst, where Beth and Space Beth, the clone from season 3, end up making out, which is its own whole thing that we are not unpacking here today.
The two episodes I want to flag from the back half of season 6 are quick ones, but they matter. Full Meta Jack season 6, episode 8. Another meta episode like Never Ricking Morty. Rick is once again refusing to be in a story, refusing to grow, refusing to be developed, but this time the show is on his side. The episode treats Rick's refusal to be a character with real sympathy. He's not refusing to grow because he's a jerk.
He's refusing because growing means dealing with what he just admitted in Solarix and he can't. And then the finale, Rickel Mortune's Rickmus Mortcation, season 6, episode 10. Rick finds a lab that looks like it might belong to Rick Prime. And he turns to Morty and for the first time in clean, direct dialogue, he tells Morty what's happening. He tells Morty he's going hunting. He's going to find Rick Prime and kill him. And he's leaving Morty behind because Morty is family and he won't risk him. That last part, he won't risk Morty is brand new. The whole show up to that moment, Morty has been a tool, a shield, a piece of bait.
Suddenly, Rick is calling him family and refusing to use him. The revenge quest is no longer a secret. It is the stated purpose of his life, and Morty is for the first time explicitly out of it.
That's the setup for season 7. Season 7 is the catharsis or what looks like catharsis from a distance. The season opens with how Poopy got his poop back.
Season 7, episode 1. This is a bird person squunchy gearhead reunion episode. Mr. Poopy Butthole is in a depression spiral. He's been drinking heavily. He's wrecked. And Rick, the same Rick we have spent seven seasons watching avoid emotional labor at all costs, rallies the old gang. He drives across the multiverse. He puts the band back together. He helps his friend. This is new. Rick is the support system here.
He is the one doing the work. He is the one showing up. The show is establishing very gently that Rick has actually changed at least a little since the cover blew. He still drinks. He still avoids therapy, but he will show up for a friend in crisis now. He didn't do that in season 1. He didn't do that in season 3. He's doing it now. A few episodes later in the Jerich trap season 7 episode 2, the show does the thing nobody saw coming. Rick and Jerry get fused into a single hybrid being called Jerick. And while they're fused, they admit to each other that the contempt between them has always been mostly performative. Rick admits that when he calls Jerry a useless idiot, he doesn't always mean it. Jerry tells Rick that Rick is the closest thing Jerry has to a friend. The episode ends with them being separated and immediately resuming the bickering, but we know now. The audience and Rick both know the contempt is a costume. They love each other. They're never going to say it directly, but it's there. Season 7 also brings back Dr. Wong. Air Force Wong. Season 7, episode 5. She tries to get Rick into therapy again. He still won't go. Six years after the Pickle Rick monologue, same Dodge. He has not done the work. He has just gotten quieter about not doing it, which is in its own depressing way progress. The new Rick acknowledges that he should be in therapy. The old Rick wouldn't have admitted that. He just won't actually go. Then episode 6, Unorten.
Season 7, episode 6, the big one. the episode the entire show has been building towards since season five, maybe since season 1. Rick teams up with Evil Morty. Yes, Evil Morty, the guy from outside the Central Finite Curve.
Evil Morty has tracked down Rick Prime.
He has located the actual lab where Rick Prime is hiding. And he comes to Rick not as an ally exactly, but as a partner of convenience. They both want Rick Prime gone for different reasons. They go in together. Evil Morty handles the tech side. He stuns Rick Prime. He destroys the Omega device blueprints.
And then he just leaves. He turns to Rick and says, "This is yours." And he portals out because Evil Morty understands what our Rick has been pretending not to understand for 40 years. This is personal. This is a thing Rick has been waiting to do with his hands. What happens next is one of the most carefully directed scenes in the entire show. Rick walks up to Rick Prime. Rick Prime is stunned but conscious. Rick starts hitting him and the show drops out all the music. All of it. There is no score, no dialogue, just the sound of fists on a body for something like 90 seconds. The camera doesn't cut away. The animation does not flinch. Rick just beats him to death slowly with his bare hands. There is one line of dialogue in the entire sequence.
Rick Prime, before the worst of it starts, looks up at our Rick and says, "Attachment is death, bro. That's what I've learned chasing this guy." Meaning, Rick Prime is telling our Rick that loving people is what made him weak.
What gave him the obsession, what ate his life, attachment is death, and then Rick just kills him. With nothing on the soundtrack, but the sound of it. When the camera pulls back, Rick is covered in blood. Because it's his variant, the blood reads as his own. The man is visually soaked in himself. He has spent 40 years engineering this moment. The revenge that destroyed his entire life, the thing he built every part of his identity around. And he just did it. And the show does not give him a single triumphant note. The animation does not cheer for him. The music does not swell.
He just stands there drenched. Then he goes home. There is a sequence of him sitting in the living room afterward just sitting with the family watching TV and he has the thousand-y stare, the same exact stare Morty had at the end of Rick Potion number nine. after our Rick made him bury his own corpse. The visual rhyme is on purpose. Rick is now in the same emotional place Morty was in at the start of the show, hollowed out, dissociated, unable to process what just happened, and the show does one more move. There is a postredit scene. We meet Slow Mobius's widow. Slow Mobius is a minor recurring character, a time control guy, and his wife died recently.
The episode shows her starting a revenge quest of her own. She picks up a weapon, she trains, she gets ready to hunt, and then we get a montage of her deciding very quickly that revenge isn't the answer. She falls in love with someone new. She remarries. She has children.
She lives a full life. In the span of maybe 2 minutes of screen time, she walks the entire path our Rick spent 40 years on and she gets off it in week one. Slow Mobius's widow lived a full life in the time it took our Rick to kill one guy. That's the joke. That's the punchline. That's the show in 2 minutes showing Rick everything he could have had if he'd been able to choose anything other than vengeance. I had to pause the episode after that stinger because the show was telling Rick point blank in the most surgical possible way that his entire adult life was a waste.
That the answer was right there. Other people figure this out. Other people grieve and rebuild. He chose not to. And his choice cost him 40 years he could have been alive in. And the show is patient enough, by the way, to know that Rick can't process this in episode 6. He can't deal with what he just did. He can't deal with the realization that comes after. So, the rest of season 7 is Rick wandering around the wreckage.
Episode 8 is That's Amorte, the horrifying spaghetti episode, where Rick's favorite food turns out to be reconstituted bodies of human suicide victims from another dimension. The episode is pitch black. Morty is devastated. Rick just kind of shrugs through it. The show is making a point.
Rick's coping mechanism, which is to make every horror absurd, has real victims now. He can't joke his way out of grief anymore. The jokes are starting to land on actual bodies. And then the moment I want to spend real time on episode 9, Fear No Mort, season 7, episode 9, the fear hole episode. Quick setup. There is a hole. The fear hole.
It shows you your greatest fear and you have to face it. And then you come out the other side. Morty pushes Rick toward it somewhat by accident. Rick goes in and inside the fear hole gives him Diane alive, sitting with him, talking to him, the full Diane experience. And it should be perfect. It should be the catharsis.
But every time we cut back to Rick inside the hole, he looks worse. He looks emaciated, sick. His skin is changing color. The show is telling us visually that this is not healing him.
Being with Diane, even fake Diane, is somehow making him worse. The fear hole eventually delivers its diagnosis.
At one point, Rick says to Diane, "I think my greatest fear is letting you go." But the actual reveal, the line that has stayed with me since this episode aired, is delivered by the demon that runs the fear hole. It tells Rick basically that Rick is going to die before he ever accepts happiness. That accepting happiness is the one thing Rick cannot allow himself to do. Because here's the diagnosis, and this is the thing that's going to stay with you. The thing the fear hole figured out about Rick that no other character ever has.
Rick's deepest fear is not Diane's loss.
He has lived with Diane's loss for 40 years. He's used to it. He's built his whole life around it. Rick's deepest fear is the possibility of being happy after her. You ever known anybody like that? somebody who's so attached to their grief that getting better would feel like cheating on the person they lost. Because Rick is the platonic ideal of that, if he were ever happy again, if he ever let himself just be okay, then that would mean Diane's death was something a person could survive. It would mean she wasn't actually the end of his world. It would mean she was in some technical sense not as important as he had made her. He has spent 40 years insisting that losing Diane was unservivable.
If he survives it, the entire monument to her he has built inside himself collapses.
So he can't survive it. He has to stay broken to keep her real. That right there is the answer to the entire show.
Rick has not been refusing to heal because he's incapable. He has been refusing to heal because healing would feel like a betrayal of the person he lost. He chose grief over recovery on purpose forever as a kind of love letter. Morty pulls him out of the hole.
The real Rick was actually standing outside the hole the whole time, unable to jump in. While a kind of dream version of him explored inside, Rick puts a picture of Morty on his board of conquered fears. He almost lets Morty hug him. Almost. That's where season 7 leaves us. The enemy is dead. The Diane question is fully named for the first time. Rick has finally heard out loud why he can't be happy. He is one inch away from being able to actually try.
And season 8 is the season where he tries. But before we get to season 8, I just want to mark this for you because we're about to land the plane. We started this video with Rick alone in a garage pointing a death ray at his own head. We are now at the point in the show where Rick has in fact taken his shot, killed his enemy, and found out the death ray would not have helped. The thing he thought was killing him, it was never Rick Prime. The thing killing him was the part of himself that refused to let her go. And nobody told him that until season 7. In season 8, somebody finally does. Let's finish this. Okay.
Season 8, The Landing. This is the season that when the showrunner Scott Martyr was asked what it was about, he basically said it was about Rick figuring out how to be in his family's life for real. now that he wasn't in their life as a cover story for Hunting Rick Prime, which is when you really think about that sentence, the bleakest possible setup for a comedy season. The premise of season 8 is this guy spent 40 years using his family as bait. The bait worked, the enemy is dead, and now he has to figure out how to actually love them from scratch with no playbook. I'm not going to lie, when I heard that going in, I was skeptical because Rick and Morty has a long history of teasing growth and then yanking it back. Every time the show gets close to letting Rick change, it reaches for the meta button and reminds us this is a comedy. Nothing matters. Get back in your chairs. Even after the fear hole episode, I had my guard up. I assumed season 8 was going to be more of the same. mid episodes, a few good ones, a regression somewhere in the back half. Yeah, I was wrong about that, too. Season 8 is hands down the most consistent, emotional arc the show has ever pulled off. Not every episode is a banger. Some of the middle stretch is filler, but the arc from episode 1 to episode 10 is the cleanest line Rick has ever walked. And it ends in the single best Rick scene the show has ever made.
I will fight anyone who disagrees with me on that. Let me walk you through it.
Season 8 opens with Summer of All Fears, episode 1. And this is classic Cruel Rick. Summer and Morty steal a phone charger, and to punish them, Rick puts them into a 17-year simulated reality, a whole second life. They live an entire alternate version of their teens through 20s inside Rick's machine. Summer comes out as a tech CEO. Morty comes out as a PTSD racked war veteran who is used as cannon fodder in some lithium war and resurrected and killed over and over. It is on the surface season 1 Rick. Cruel for the bit. Pure ego punishment. The episode could have aired in 2014, but the show is doing something specific here. The episode's actual emotional beat is Morty refusing to erase a tattoo he got inside the simulation. He has a tattoo from a friend who only existed inside the Matrix and he wants to keep it. And Rick, the new Rick, after fighting him about it, just kind of lets him. He says he can't erase it. He promised an old friend he wouldn't. The line is throwaway. Nobody talks about it. But it's the show putting up a flag.
This Rick, the season 8 Rick, will hurt his grandson out of habit. But when his grandson asks for a piece of himself back, Rick gives it to him, without explanation, without a joke. That is brand new. Episode two is where the season really starts. Valkyuric season 8, episode 2. And this is the episode that I think most viewers underrated when it aired, but it's actually one of the most important episodes in the entire show. Space Beth, the clone of Beth from season 3, who chose to go adventure in space, is in trouble. She's isolated. She needs help. And she calls Rick. Not Beth. Not Jerry. Rick, the guy who in season 3 made the clone specifically so he wouldn't have to know which Beth was which. The guy who deliberately gave up the ability to tell his real daughter from a copy. Rick drops everything and goes. He doesn't hesitate. He goes to a bird person bar mid-m mission to talk through what fatherhood means with his best friend.
And then he willingly exposes himself to a mutagenic virus to cure her. He could die. He chooses to risk it for the clone of his daughter. The clone he had previously refused to acknowledge and he says the line which is small but is doing massive work. He looks at Space Beth and says, "You're my daughter."
Probably. Probably. That's the joke.
That's still Rick Sanchez. He can't quite say it clean. He has to hedge. But the word doing the loadbearing work in that sentence is daughter. He just claimed her out loud. Both of them. Both Beths without needing to know which one is original. In season 3, he scientifically engineered his way out of being a father. In season 8, episode 2, he just decides he is one twice to both of them. Even though one is biologically not his and the other is a clone of someone who is also not his original daughter. The whole season is doing this. It's giving Rick small chances to make the choice the old Rick would have ducked and it's having him make it quietly without speeches. Episode 5 cryomort a Rickver. Rick and Morty are posing as a rich kid and his grandpa on a generationship. And while running the con, Rick gets genuinely charmed by the fictional kid's loving parents. Like charmed in a sincere way. And in the middle of the episode, completely out of nowhere, Rick tells Morty something he has never told anyone in the entire show. He tells Morty he had a lonely childhood. He tells Morty he didn't get a lot of love growing up. He tells Morty that's part of why he latched on to a replacement family in the first place.
The Diane grief is one layer of why Rick is Rick. But there's another layer underneath and it's that he was already lonely before Diane. Diane was the first time he wasn't lonely. Losing her wasn't just losing his wife. It was losing the only time in his life he had ever felt like a person. And then Rick apologizes to Morty. apologizes, like actually says he's sorry for something he did, not ironically, not as a setup, just a clean apology in the middle of a Goofy Con man episode while wearing a fake mustache.
People who have been watching the show since the pilot were like, "Hold up. Did Rick just say sorry?" Like, "Sorry, sorry." With no asterisk.
Yeah, he did. and it's the first time in eight seasons. Episode six is the one I want to spend the most time on because it's the one that broke me. The caricious case of Bethjiman Button.
Season 8, episode 6. Both Beths, our Beth and Space Beth, accidentally deaged themselves to about 10 years old.
They're now child versions of Beth, and the episode is mostly comedic. two 10-year-old Beths running around the house booby trapping it, being feral.
But about twothirds through, Rit gets caught in their booby traps, and he gets aged up, way up. He goes from 60some to 360.
And while he is dying on the floor of his garage, 360 years old and physically falling apart, both child Beths beat him unconscious out of rage, out of grief, out of decades of stored up anger about being abandoned. And then they sobb over him. They tell him, screaming at his unconscious old man body, that he left them, that he abandoned them when they were kids, that they hate him. And Rick wakes up 360 years old, bleeding, and he doesn't cry from the pain. He cries because he's proud of them. He looks at both of his daughters and he sobs and he tells them, "My Beth was murdered. I never abandoned her. I would never have abandoned her.
He was taken from me." And then he looks at both of them. the original Beth he raised by accident and the clone space Beth he refused to acknowledge for years and he tells them they are both his daughters. Both of them equally real.
And then the song plays. They use the acoustic version of Don't Look Back, the same song that scored Rick's Diane memories in the season 4 Bird Person Dive. The same song they've used every time the show is wanted to remind us that there's a younger Rick under all the armor who used to be happy. They use it here with Rick crying tears of pride at his two daughters while being 360 years old on the floor of his own garage. Dude, the first time I watched that scene, I was just I had to mute the TV because I'd been watching this show for 12 years at that point. And the show had finally finally let Rick win an emotional moment cleanly. No deflection, no undercut joke, no wubble dubdub at the end to pull the punch. Just Rick crying because his daughters are mad at him for not being there. and Rick being proud of them for being mad enough to say it. That's the moment the season turns. The fear hole told us in season 7 that Rick's deepest fear was being happy after Diane. Beth Jim and Button is the first time Rick gets close to being happy and doesn't sabotage it. He doesn't joke through it. He doesn't deflect. He sits in it. He's still scared. The show makes it clear he's still scared. But the armor is no longer automatic.
Episode 8. No Mortland. Quick one, but I love it. Rick figures out that Jerry has been sneaking through dimension hopping shortcuts to hang out with a different Jerry from another dimension. Like Jerry has a Jerry friend in another universe, and they hang out in secret. And Rick, instead of mocking Jerry for it, decides to let Jerry keep the secret. Because in Rick's own words, having a friend is good for Jerry. The stinger of the episode is Rick and Jerry sitting on the couch together, naked for reasons that don't matter, watching trash TV. Both clearly comfortable, both clearly fine.
The same two characters who in season 1 could not be in a room together without Rick projectile insulting Jerry are now naked on a couch watching reality television in companionable silence.
Eight seasons, eight whole seasons to get those two guys naked on a couch as friends. the show on purpose, refusing to make it weird, refusing to undercut it, just letting them have it. And then the finale, episode 10, Hot Rick, season 8, episode 10. I'm going to try to walk this carefully because there's a lot in this episode and I want to do it justice. The setup. Rick is now dating Bug Anne. Bug Anne is the alien woman from Valk. He has been seeing her on and off all season. The relationship is real. It is awkward. Rick is bad at it, but he is in it. Bug Anne confronts him in this episode. She tells him that he hasn't fully let go of Diane. And she's right. Because remember, Rick Prime's Omega device damaged Rick's memories of Diane back in season 5. So, the Diane he is mourning is increasingly a fiction.
He's not even mourning the real woman anymore. The thing he's been mourning is a memory that's slowly erasing itself.
Meanwhile, in the background, memory Rick. Memory Rick is a sentient extracted version of Rick from inside Bird Person's brain. The best version of Rick that Bird person remembered, who has been bouncing around the show as a side character since season 4. Memory.
Rick has been editing Jerry's and Beth's memories, trying to retrieve Rick's last remaining preserved memory of Diane so he can use it to be with her himself.
It's complicated. It's Rick and Morty.
Just go with it. Memory. Rick's manipulation pushes Beth to a breaking point. Beth, our Beth, ends up driving off a road in the middle of the night with a gun. Convinced that the only way to preserve the version of Diane she remembers is to die before she forgets her. She's on the side of a dirt road.
She has the gun to her own head. The gun is real. Rick gets there, pulls up, gets out of the car, walks toward her slowly, and he says, "I wasn't there for you, but I am now." Eight words. That is the line. Beth lowers the gun. Rick holds her. He sedates her carefully so he can fix what memory Rick did to her mind. He tells her that Diane loved her. He tells her that memories are always skewed versions of reality. He tells her basically that the version of Diane she's trying to protect is not the version that ever existed. And the version that existed loved her. Not the memory. The real one loved her. He tells his daughter that her mother loved her out loud on the side of a road while she is at the worst moment of her life. He could not have said that sentence in season 1. The season 1 Rick would have been at a bar. The season 3 Rick would have been giving a speech about how nothing matters. The season 5 Rick was using her as bait. The season 8 Rick after eight seasons of slow surrender can finally sit on a roadside and tell his daughter that her mother loved her and that he is there for her now. And then he does the thing, the thing the whole eight seasons has been building toward. He extracts the last preserved memory of Diane from his own brain. The one memory Rick was trying to get to, the actual last copy. and he decides instead of deleting it, instead of using it himself, instead of any version of keeping it to put memory Rick and memory Diane together in their own pocket-sized reality, like an ant farm, a sealed universe where the two of them can live together with each other forever. He builds them a snow globe, and he puts a copy of himself and a copy of Diane inside it. and he ejects the snow globe into space. He gives a version of himself the happy ending he cannot let himself have. And then the last scene of the season, Rick pulls out his phone. He pulls up his text thread with Bug Anne.
He types one word. Hey. He sends it.
Acoustic Don't Look Back plays one more time. Dian's version. the version that has scored every single Rick grief beat in the show since season four. And it plays over a shot of Rick alone texting an alien bug woman. The word hey. That's the season. That's where we leave him. I want to flag what just happened because I don't think viewers fully clocked it on first watch. The Rick of season 1 would have no question killed memory Rick rather than let any copy of himself be with Diane. The Rick of season 3 would have absorbed the memory back into himself and stored it somewhere uncrackable.
The Rick of season 5 would have used the memory as a weapon. The Rick of season 8 builds memory Rick a happy little universe with a copy of his dead wife in it. sends them off and texts somebody new. He shares Diane with himself. He gives her up. He gives a copy of himself. The win. That is in the most literal possible sense, the opposite of the man we met in 2013.
The man we met in 2013 buried his own corpse in the backyard to avoid responsibility. The man we leave in 2025 builds a sealed universe of a happy version of his old life so he can finally try to live in the new one. He hasn't healed. Let's be clear. He's still drinking, still avoiding Dr. Wong, still capable of cruelty. The Summer of All Fears episode in episode 1 of this same season had him torturing his grandson in a matrix for stealing a phone charger. He is not a healed person, but he has stopped actively preferring damage. And for a character who built his entire identity around actively preferring damage, that is the whole arc. That is the full multiverse worth of movement. So, where are we?
Halfway through the credits of season 8, looking at our Rick, sitting alone with a phone, sending the word hey to a bug woman he might be falling for. With a memory Rick and a memory Diane drifting through space inside an ant farm he built specifically because he couldn't let his other self suffer the way he had to. I genuinely think that ending is one of the most precise things the show has ever done because it does not say he's fixed. It doesn't even say he's going to be fixed. It just says he stopped insisting on being broken. He let a copy of himself have what he can't have. He sent a text. He's going to try. For a character whose entire arc has been refusing to try, sending the word hey is the entire victory. It's a small victory, just a victory. Period. After eight seasons, after 40 years of inshow time, after a death ray in a garage and a singing toilet chorus and a silent fist fight and a fear hole, the man finally typed, "Hey," to somebody new.
And that, weirdly, is the most hopeful ending Rick and Morty has ever attempted. Not because Rick is fixed.
The reason it's hopeful is because for the first time, he's no longer pretending he doesn't want to be. That's the ark. That's the whole thing. Eight seasons, the slowest collapse of a 40-year lie in the history of animation.
From the guy who burped through his daughter's wedding to the guy who sends a copy of his dead wife into space so a copy of himself can have her. And now, the Channel voice outro. Look, I don't know about you guys, but I'm sitting here at the end of this 90minute video about a cartoon, and I'm a little wrecked because Rick Sanchez is, as much as it pains me to say it about an animated science guy who burps, one of the most carefully built characters in any medium I can think of. And the writers have been so quietly, so deliberately patient with him that you can watch the whole show and miss the arc entirely if you're not paying attention. Some of you watching this video have been Rick and Morty fans since 2013. Some of you are going to watch this and go back and rewatch the show from scratch. Both responses are correct. What I want to know in the comments is this. What was the moment for you? What was the moment in Rick's eight season arc that hit you the hardest? Was it autoerotic assimilation, Wuba Love Dubdub, the Toilet Planet chorus, or maybe the Diane AI, or the Silent Fist sequence? Beth Jim Button on the garage floor, the text to Bug Anne.
Genuinely, I want to know. Drop it in the comments. I read them. And I love seeing what different scenes hit different people. We've all been carrying different parts of this show around with us for years.
If you made it all the way to the end of a 90inute video about a Rick and Morty character arc, you are exactly my kind of weirdo, and I love you for it. Hit subscribe if you haven't yet. I do these long form deep dives on Rick and Morty, Bojack, Severance, all the shows that hide their best work in plain sight. If you've got a show you want me to do next, drop it in the comments, too. I'm taking requests. And as for the signoff, look, I'll say it the way Mr. Golden Fold would want me to say it. Hit subscribe. Hit the like button. Or, I don't know, Mr. Golden Fold will personally come to your house and make you watch the acid vat episode on a loop until you do. Don't make him do it. He's been through enough. See you soon, you beautiful weirdos.
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