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I'm sorry, Morty. It's a bummer. In reality, you're as dumb as they come and I needed those seeds real bad, and I had to give them up just to get your parents off my back, so now we're gonna have to go get more. (excitedly looks down upon him, telling him about their future adventures) And then we're gonna go on even more adventures after that, Morty and you're gonna keep your mouth shut about it, Morty, because the world is full of idiots that don't understand what's important, and they'll tear us apart, Morty but if you stick with me, I'm gonna accomplish great things, Morty, and you're gonna be part of them, and together, we're gonna run around, Morty. We're gonna do all kinds of wonderful things, Morty. Just you and me, Morty. The outside world is our enemy, Morty. We're the only friends we've got, Morty. It's just Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty and their adventures, Morty. Rick and Morty forever and forever. Morty's things. Me and Rick and Morty running around, and Rick and Morty time. All day long, forever. All a hundred days. Rick and Morty forever 100 times. Over and over, rickandmortyadventures.com!

"Pilot" is the first episode of the first season of Rick and Morty. It is the first episode of the series overall. It premiered on December 2, 2013. It was written by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, and directed by Justin Roiland. The episode is rated TV-14-DLSV, and has 7.9 stars on IMDB.

Synopsis[]

Rick takes Morty on a trip to another dimension to find seeds for "mega-trees," while Jerry and Beth argue over Rick's influence on their son.

Plot[]

In the middle of the night, an obviously drunk Rick bursts into Morty's room and tells him he has a "surprise" to show him. While driving his newly built flying vehicle, Rick explains that he made a neutrino bomb: he has decided Earth needs a "fresh start," and to that end, he wants to destroy humanity, planning to start over with Morty and Jessica as the new "Adam and Eve." Morty tries to "take control of the situation" by taking the wheel of the vehicle. Rick eventually decides to land the vehicle, and when he does, he says it was all a test to get Morty to act more assertive. He passes out, and the bomb announces that it is armed and (presumably) activates.

The next morning, Morty falls asleep at breakfast. His mother Beth is concerned, and Morty's older sister, Summer, explains that he was out with Grandpa Rick. This causes an argument between Jerry and his father-in-law. Rick points out that he thinks school is an utter waste of time; before leaving the room, he compliments the breakfast which his daughter Beth made, causing her to cry tears of joy and stop being angry with her father, much to her husband Jerry's annoyance.

At school later that day, Mr. Goldenfold administers a math test, and Morty falls asleep, sinking into a dream filled with numbers. The dream quickly, however, evolves into a sexual encounter with Jessica, in which she asks him to play with her exposed breasts. Mr. Goldenfold unwittingly finds himself on the receiving end of Morty's subconscious fantasy. Later, Morty is accosted by a bully named Frank; appearing out of nowhere, Rick uses a freeze-ray to stop him and convinces Morty to skip History because he needs "an extra pair of hands" in another dimension. Rick and Morty then leave school, leaving Frank frozen and teetering in the hallway. Walking by (and not realizing that he is frozen or just doesn't care), Summer tries to impress Frank, but the front of his foot cracks, and he topples, shattering into pieces on the floor as Summer screams.

On his lunch break, Jerry visits his wife Beth while she is performing heart surgery to invite her to lunch, but she declines. He then proposes that they should put Rick in a nursing home, eliciting an aggravated response from Beth who lashes out at a nurse.

In an alleyway, Rick opens a portal in a wall, and Rick and Morty both step into it, emerging onto a hillside in a colorful and oddly shaped world. Rick tells an awestruck Morty that they are in Dimension 35-C and explains that he needs mega-seeds from mega-trees for his research. When Morty expresses his anxiety about the strange situation, Rick tries to calm Morty down with a speech about facing your fears, but he is suddenly interrupted by a strange arachnid-like beast which chases them as Rick openly proclaims that he has never seen anything like it before and that they are going to die. After escaping the monster and passing by several other monsters, Rick interrupts another set of objections by Morty, directing Morty's attention to a grove of mega trees at the bottom of a steeply walled valley. After refusing to answer Morty as to what the nature of the mega seeds is, Rick gives Morty some grappling shoes with which to scale the wall. Morty steps over the edge and falls off the cliff, as Rick neglected to tell Morty to turn the shoes on.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Beth are still arguing about whether or not to put Rick in a retirement home. Beth is upset, believing that her husband Jerry is trying to rob her of her father, who has only recently moved in with them, while Jerry believes that Rick is a terrible influence on their son Morty and needs to go. After a brief interruption by Beth's assistant, Davin, Beth counters her husband's argument, saying that Morty was having trouble in school before Rick moved in with them; the fact that Morty has a friend is more important to her than any potential detriment. The principal of school, Gene Vagina, calls, asking the couple to come to the school and talk to him.

Back in Dimension 35-C, Morty lies on the ground at the bottom of the cliff, his legs terribly broken in more than three places. As Rick lectures Morty on the folly of failing to turn on the shoes, Morty yells at Rick for his indifference, and for his singular focus on the mega-seeds, rather than his injuries. Rick then leaves Morty, disappearing into a portal for a number of seconds before returning and injecting Morty's legs with a serum which cures Morty's broken legs. With his legs fully functional again, Morty uses his grappling shoes to get the mega-fruit, while Rick explains that he traveled to a future dimension in which technology, among other things, has halted the aging process. Unfortunately, he continues, he spent so much time in the alternate dimension that his portal gun has exhausted its charge. As Morty panics, Rick explains that they'll have to go through inter-dimensional customs and that, in order to keep the seeds hidden, Morty will have to smuggle the mega-seeds through customs in his rectum. Morty objects, but Rick persists, as years of smuggling have rendered him unable to do the same.

Meeting with Principal Vagina, Jerry and Beth are informed that their son Morty has attended school for a total of seven hours over a two-month period. In addition, the principal tells them that Rick is the one who has been removing Morty from school.

Having reached customs, Rick and Morty discover that the insect-like security guards have a new machine that "detects stuff all the way up [someone's] butt." Rick yells at Morty to run and pushes the guard to the ground, and they both make a break for it as the guards close in on them, passing by various creatures from other dimensions. Rick destroys several things in the customs to slow security down and also assaults two aliens who are bystanders. Using the grappling shoes and other methods of avoidance, the two manage to get to a portal, but Rick has to enter the coordinates of their home dimension. As the guards begin to shoot at them, Rick tells Morty to shoot back at them, telling him that they are robots. When Morty shoots one of them, however, he finds that they are not robots but living organisms. Rick explains that he was using a metaphor: the guards are bureaucrats, and he does not respect them. During the firefight, a Wilhelm Scream can be heard. Finishing the coordinate input, Rick pulls Morty through the portal into the school cafeteria; Morty lands in front of Jessica, impressing her. Unfortunately, Jerry, Beth, and the principal catch them.

The spouses start moving Rick's stuff, all of which is in the garage, into a moving van, intending to move him into a nursing home. Rick argues with his daughter and son-in-law, who reveal that Morty has a learning disability. Rick then asks Morty to state the square root of pi and the first law of thermodynamics, both of which he promptly and correctly recites. He explains that having adventures is the best way for Morty to learn, and tells them that, later in his own life, Morty will be doing amazing things as a result of their adventures. husband and wife relent, happy and content that Morty is learning. Rick then tells Morty that none of what he told his parents is true: his super-intelligence is temporary, one of the side effects of the mega-seeds breaking down in his rectal cavity. As the other side effects take hold of Morty, he loses his brain function and control of his motor skills, and Rick starts rambling about the future adventures they will have: "Rick and Morty, forever and ever, a hundred years, Rick and Morty..." The episode ends with the garage door closing as Rick continues on rambling.

Characters[]

Major characters[]

Minor characters[]

Mentioned characters[]

Deaths[]

Locations[]

Transcript[]

View the full episode transcript here.

Trivia[]

  • This episode has 7.9 stars on IMDB.
  • In this episode, Rick reveals that he's an atheist as he tells his granddaughter Summer that there's no God.
    • This is seemingly retconned multiple times in the series, most notably in the Season 5 episode "Mortyplicity", in which the decoy Rick and Morty say they're going to kill the Christian God before being killed.
  • Beth tells her husband Jerry that she works as a heart surgeon, to which he replies, saying "Well, yeah, on horses." Beth then starts to get really angry at him, but then Jerry quickly stops her, saying "Let's not rehash the fight." This would be the beginning of a running gag in the series, where Jerry would constantly express disappointment in his wife Beth's job, thinking that she's not really a real surgeon, only working on horses and not real people.
  • This is the only episode not to have a post-credits epilogue.
  • Due to this episode being the pilot, Rick's voice sounds slightly different and is not yet finalized. His voice has a few similarities to Doc Smith's from The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti.
  • All the answers in Morty's math test are 10, except to the question 8+10 which equals 18, and the last operation 6+3 which equals 9.
  • Rick says "Morty" 108 times in the episode.
  • When Principal Vagina mentions that there was no evidence that a Latino froze Frank Palicky, Rick's last name Sanchez is ironically a traditionally Latino last name.
  • In multiple later episodes, Rick tells Morty that he refuses to time travel, feeling it beneath him. This belies what he tells Morty here, that the medicine which fixed his legs was from a future dimension and that he spent a long time living there. It's possible that Rick was lying, but difficult to know why.

Errors[]

  • At the end of the episode, when Rick was talking about his adventures with Morty, while he was having seizures, the garage door closed by itself.

Cultural references[]

  • The opening scene of the episode, in which a rambling Rick wakes up Morty and brings him onboard his newly built Space Cruiser, is a parody of the 2006 Oor Wullie comic Joe Republic and the Lizards from Hell Part 1: First Things First by Seán Manz, with Rick and Morty in place of Oor Wullie and Joe Republic. In the comic, Oor Wullie wakes up Joe while rambling about lizards having kidnapped his wife Primrose and brings him to his newly bought UFO to fly to Dundee, revealing once in the air that rather than rescuing his wife, he plans to bring down the government by freeing the Broons.
  • In Mr. Goldenfold's math class, there's one particular background character in his class who has a T-shirt with a blue Bart Simpson head on it. The student is best visible in the scene were Morty is fondling Mr. Goldenfold and reappears as a recurring background character.
  • When Rick returns to fix Morty's broken legs, he explains that he was in a realm where youth was celebrated, and the inhabitants were fascinated by his age. This is a direct reference to the 1976 film (and 1967 novel) Logan's Run.
  • In the beginning of the scene inside Interdimensional Customs, we see various silhouettes standing around a large room. Here are some of the famous characters that can be spotted in this scene:
  • A Wilhelm scream is heard when Morty shoots one of the aliens with a laser, while Rick is trying to set up the portal and go back home.
  • After Morty has hidden the mega seeds and is coming out of the bathroom, he stands in line with Rick behind an alien that is very similar to a ferengi (a race frequently appearing in almost all Star Trek series) at around the 14:40 mark. The differences are the cloths (it has somewhat casual clothing compared to usually having very extravagant fashion sense in Star Trek), skin color (it is having yellow skin and an orange nose while they have beige colored skin and nose in the Star Trek universe).
  • The piles of numbers are featured in Morty's daydreams is likely a reference to the Looney Tunes short, From A to Z-Z-Z-Z.
  • Rick freezing Frank Palicky with a freezing gun is a reference to the film Suburban Commando, where the main character Shep has a freezing gun.
  • The houses in Dimension 35-C are colorful and wacky, bulbous houses that are of a similar style of how many buildings and houses are depicted in Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat books.

Gallery

Click here to view the image gallery for Pilot.
Click here to view this page's gallery.

References

  1. Pucci, Douglas (December 10, 2013). Adult Swim Weekly Ratings Scorecard (December 2–8, 2013). TV Ratings. TV Media Insights. Retrieved on December 12, 2013.

Site navigation[]

ve Rick and Morty Episodes
Seasons
Season 1 PilotLawnmower DogAnatomy ParkM. Night Shaym-Aliens!Meeseeks and DestroyRick Potion #9Raising GazorpazorpRixty MinutesSomething Ricked This Way ComesClose Rick-Counters of the Rick KindRicksy Business
Season 2 A Rickle in TimeMortynight RunAuto Erotic AssimilationTotal RickallGet SchwiftyThe Ricks Must Be CrazyBig Trouble in Little SanchezInterdimensional Cable 2: Tempting FateLook Who's Purging NowThe Wedding Squanchers
Season 3 The Rickshank RickdemptionRickmancing the StonePickle RickVindicators 3: The Return of WorldenderThe Whirly Dirly ConspiracyRest and RicklaxationThe Ricklantis MixupMorty's Mind BlowersThe ABC's of BethThe Rickchurian Mortydate
Season 4 Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die RickpeatThe Old Man and the SeatOne Crew Over the Crewcoo's MortyClaw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's MortyRattlestar RicklacticaNever Ricking MortyPromortyusThe Vat of Acid EpisodeChildrick of MortStar Mort Rickturn of the Jerri
Season 5 Mort Dinner Rick AndreMortyplicityA Rickconvenient MortRickdependence SprayAmortycan GrickfittiRick & Morty's Thanksploitation SpectacularGotron Jerrysis RickvangelionRickternal Friendshine of the Spotless MortForgetting Sarick MortshallRickmurai Jack
Season 6 SolaricksRick: A Mort Well LivedBethic TwinstinctNight FamilyFinal DeSmithationJuRicksic MortFull Meta JackrickAnalyze PissA Rick in King Mortur's MortRicktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation
Season 7 How Poopy Got His Poop BackThe Jerrick TrapAir Force WongThat's AmorteUnmortrickenRickfending Your MortWet Kuat Amortican SummerRise of the Numbericons: The MovieMort: RagnarickFear No Mort
Season 8 TBA
Season 9 TBA
Season 10 TBA
Spin-offs
Rick and Morty: The Anime TBA
Vindicators 2 Rick Can Handle ItPro-NounsThe DanceOut of GasFirst LoveMercy KillGirls NightKintsugiLittle TrainsHeroes
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