| “ | Why do we think grandpa turned himself into a pickle? |
| — Dr. Wong, Pickle Rick |
Dr. Helen Wong is a family therapist who the Smith Family visited after the events of Beth and Jerry's divorce. She has since become the family's regular therapist, with even Rick going to her for help beginning with "Analyze Piss" after years of avoiding it. She first appeared in "Pickle Rick".
Appearance[]
Dr. Wong is a tall and slender Chinese-American woman with a fair complexion, black hair worn in a bobbed style, and gray thick-rimmed glasses. She wears a yellow long-sleeved shirt, a beige wool jacket, a white necklace, and black pants, belt, and shoes.
Personality[]
Dr. Wong is a perceptive, even-tempered and intelligent woman, who displays a calm and disarming personality, to put people like her clients (dysfunctional families and coprophagia addicts) at ease so that she can help them with their problems. She tends to ask very simple, leading questions and responds to challenges to her profession with insightful monologues. She makes it her mission not to judge, so much so that she doesn't even bat an eye when Pickle Rick staggers into her office and takes a seat on the couch. She takes no offense to Rick's attempts to belittle her job, instead gently but thoroughly deconstructing the truth of why he avoided therapy. Though Rick predictably doesn't take her advice to heart, her takedown and summation of his character is enough to prevent him from making a retort.
Despite her demeanor, the Smith family tests the limits of her patience: she is very blunt in telling Jerry his insistence on bringing a puppet to therapy is crazy. When Rick reveals he installed several voice-activated escape contingencies in the office (which mostly involve methods of killing her), and subsequently destroys it while saving Beth and Jerry from Tammy, Dr. Wong mutters to herself she is better than the job.
Appearances[]
Season 3[]
Season 4[]
Season 5[]
- "Mort Dinner Rick Andre" (mentioned)
Season 6[]
Season 7[]
Trivia[]
- The sign on her door says that, aside from family therapy, she also specialized in "Coprophagia Recovery". Coprophagia literally means the act of eating shit. Apparently, she aids people with feces-consuming addictions and helps them recover the same way one would kick a drug habit.
- Mr. Goldenfold is another one of her patients, who visits her for that very reason.
- One of the motivational posters in her waiting room reads "Courage" and shows a guy eating a hot dog (the other side, which she flips over when the Smiths enter her office, shows a picture of a nuclear family captioned with "Dedication").
- In her office, Morty noticed a coffee table book with pictures of people engaging in coprophagy.
- When saving the family at therapy from Glomfromites in S4 E10, Rick tells his smart guns to whitelist humans before pausing and adding "the therapist", implying she isn't human. Or she is, but Rick has such a low respect to therapists that Rick has delegated them as something else in the smart gun's archives.
- "Pickle Rick" episode writer Jessica Gao wrote Dr. Wong as an opportunity to feature an Asian-American actor in a role, only for Dan Harmon to cast Susan Sarandon. Harmon and Gao later collaborated on a podcast, Whiting Wongs to address this casting.[1]