| “ | This is what is happening: you and me and your sister are at an arcade called Blips and Chitz. It's been taken over by terrorists, the power went out, the game restarted, and your identity has been splintered into all the non-player characters. So, I jacked in as Roy, that's the player character, to get you, my grandson, Morty, out of the game before it's over and you die. |
| — Rick |
"Rick: A Mort Well Lived" is the second episode of the sixth season of Rick and Morty. It is the 53rd episode of the series overall. It premiered on September 11, 2022. It was written by Alex Rubens and directed by Kyounghee Lim. The episode is rated TV-14-DLV.
Synopsis[]
When alien terrorists take over video arcade Blips and Chitz, Rick asks Summer to help him out by channeling "Die Hard," a movie she's never seen.
Plot[]
A Rick, Morty, and Summer trip to Blips and Chitz goes awry when the arcade is overrun by a gang of aliens. Morty, who was playing Roy: A Life Well Lived when the gang attacked, becomes trapped in the game with his mind spread out across the various NPCs, forcing Rick to go into the game as Roy to try to get Morty out. Summer, in the meantime, is instructed by Rick to "do a Die Hard" to fight back against the aliens (who as it turns out are led by a certified expert on Die Hard) even though she has not seen the movie. Ultimately, she uses this to her advantage, taking the aliens by surprise by not following tropes used in Die Hard.
Inside the game, Rick (as Roy) attempts to explain to the NPCs that they are all his grandson stuck in a video game. The explanation develops into a new religion among the multi-Morty population, which splinters into different cults, eventually leading to religious wars. In order to get Morty out of the game with his mind intact, Rick has to get all of the Mortys to agree to fly into space beyond the programmed edges of the game, forcing it to reset and eject their minds back into their real bodies. Rick finds a Morty named Marta, who has full realization of her existence as part of Morty's complete mind, and they team up to take on the mission to unite the Mortys. Years pass within the game, and they manage to get up to 92% of the world's population to agree to leave, but the remaining 8%, who have also long since realized they are in a video game, refuse because they feel that the real Rick is actually contemptuous of them, has never said "I love you" to any Morty during all the decades in the game, and they are better off living a full life in the game. Marta-Morty asks Rick to tell them he loves Morty and they will all agree to leave, but Rick's awkward hesitancy only proves their point. More decades pass, and over time Marta joins the opposing side in rejecting Rick's attempts to free them. Eventually, she loses her will to keep fighting as some of the Morty NPCs including her father age out and die. Even her own children decide to join Rick. She commands the Mortys to leave the game, but tells Rick she herself will remain behind. The world's Mortys board the space ships and fly into space beyond the game's borders.
Rick and Morty are freed from the game and injected into their real bodies just in time to help Summer, who manages to one-up the alien gang one last time by reading a plot summary of Die Hard and actually performing one of its tropes for once (i.e. taping a gun to her back). The three depart Blitz and Chips, but not before it is revealed to the audience that Rick paid for the Roy: A Life Well Lived game to remain powered on to allow Marta-Morty to live out the rest of her life in peace.
In a post-credits scene, the gang of aliens tries to do Die Hard 3, made difficult by the fact that their previous leader died playing the Hans Gruber role at Blips and Chitz.
Characters[]
Major characters[]
Minor characters[]
- Larry
- Joanna
- President Leland
- Kevin (human) (not Kevin)
- Tony (human) (not Tony)
- Frank
- Winslow
- Roy NPCSs
Deaths[]
- Frank
- Gang Members
- Almost half of the Roy NPCs
- Marta's Dad
- Blips and Chitz employee
Locations[]
Episode notes[]
Trivia[]
- This episode was previewed early at the 2022 Adult Swim Festival Block Party.
- In celebration of Season 6, Pocket Mortys' weekly updates coincided with new episodes, including new avatars for players to collect. With the release of this episode came Roy as an avatar, plus Marta Morty and Larry Morty to catch.
- Jerry, Beth or Space Beth are not seen nor mentioned anywhere in the episode.
- Jons claims once an intelligent species anywhere in the universe evolves enough, they create the same myth or tale which has all the elements of Die Hard. This is an example of comparative mythology, real-world instances of different cultures independently creating variations of the same story, such as Cinderella, in this case played to the extreme with an action movie from the 1980s. Author Joseph Campbell, a known inspiration for series co-creator Dan Harmon, worked in the field of comparative mythology.
Series continuity[]
- This episode features a return to Blips and Chitz, first featured in "Mortynight Run", and uses the game Roy: A Life Well Lived as a major plot point. This is the first time it is shown since the scene in "Never Ricking Morty".
- "Die Hard" is said exactly 42 times in this episode. 42 is the well-known answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. This may be connected to the name of the game Morty plays and gets stuck in, Roy: A Life Well Lived, or it might just be a coincidence.
Cultural references[]
- The arcade scenes in this episode are an extended, deliberate reference to Die Hard:
- Summer is literally being told to sneak around and crawl through vents, i.e. do what John McClane does in the movie.
- The Alien Leader ("Chans") knowingly takes on the role of Hans Gruber, and has even modeled himself after said character. His book "The Nakatomi Paradigm" references "Nakatomi Plaza" from the film, and he potentially slips in a nod to the third film's main musical theme later ("two by two").
- An alien shoots a table thinking Summer is hiding under it, telling her not to do it like in Die Hard.
- Another alien plays a little of the first film's refrain "Ode to Joy" at a key moment, at least before Jons decides that's going too far.
- Summer performs a bastardized version of John McClane's catchphrase "Yippee ki yay, motherfucker!"
- The character "Winslow" has an epiphany at the end that parodies Sergeant Al Powell (played by Reginald VelJohnson whose other most famous character was Carl Winslow).
- The alien leader's brother tries to recreate Die Hard 3 with mixed results. The antagonist of Die Hard 3 was literally Hans Gruber's brother.
- The alien terrorists resemble Jar Jar Binks, a character from the Star Wars franchise.
- When confronting Marta, Rick mentions how Batman dreaming was 8% of the film Zach Snyder’s Justice League.
- The storage room of Blips and Chitz resembles the government warehouse scene in the Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Transcript[]
View a full transcript of this episode here.
References
https://comicbook.com/anime/news/rick-and-morty-season-six-episode-titles/
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