| “ | There ya' go, kid. Now you're Evil Morty too. Sooner or later, we all are. |
| — Evil Morty |
"Rickmurai Jack" is the tenth and final episode of the fifth season of Rick and Morty, and the 51st episode of the series overall. It premiered on September 5, 2021. It was written by Jeff Loveness[3] and Scott Marder and directed by Jacob Hair. The episode is rated TV-14-DLV.
Synopsis[]
Rick's still doing the weird crows thing, but a middle-aged Morty hopes to reconnect with Rick, leading them down an emotional path in a familiar location.
Plot[]
Rick, now fully immersed in the "Rick and Two Crows" show, has become an anime protagonist who fights anthropomorphic owls using crow-themed gadgets, his crows by his side as sidekicks. After defeating some owls at a village, Morty approaches him, desperate to get back together, but Rick rebuffs him awkwardly. Some time later, Rick is approached at a bar by a now 40-year-old Morty, claiming Rick has been gone so long that Jerry died of Stage 4 cancer and Summer has gotten married to a junkie. He begs Rick to come home, but is rebuffed again.
That night, the crows sneak out to visit Crowscare, Rick's arch-nemesis, to plan adventures with him - Rick catches on, realizing the crows were using him as a rebound just as he used them, Rick returns home, only to find Morty was lying about the time that passed, having took aging serum from the Citadel of Ricks to emotionally blackmail him. After they visit the Citadel and get Morty re-aged, they notices a deformed Morty raving about the Citadel being an inescapable weapon of mass destruction, before he is shot by police. Shortly afterwards, Rick and Morty are both invited to dinner with President Morty, who has pardoned the former for his crimes. Rick is suspicious, but agrees to visit.
Over dinner, President Morty hints how Rick built the Citadel and requests information from Rick on how to bring down the "Central Finite Curve". When Rick refuses, President Morty binds the two to their chairs, revealing he kept the partially-completed brain scan Evil Rick took in "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", and having completed it over appetizers, he now has enough to do what he needs. When Morty apologizes to Rick for bringing him to the Citadel, a disgusted President Morty uses the brain scanning device to show Morty the full extent of the Citadel's Morty abuse - he reveals that Morties are so in demand that the Citadel started forcibly making Beths and Jerrys fall in love to produce Morties, then resorted to cloning - these Morties are then shipped to Ricks across the multiverse as sidekicks, and when a Morty dies, a new one is brainwashed with the old copy's memories and sent to replace them.
Morty is horrified and loses faith in Rick, before he frees them from their bonds. President Morty allows them to leave, but Rick is suspicious. Realizing Morty refilled his portal gun's fluid during their visit, he shoves a Rick guard into a portal to test it and finds that the internal coordinates have been locked to the Blender Dimension, the guard being horrifically dismembered. Rick recognizes President Morty as Evil Morty, knowing he was the only one who ever hacked his portal gun, and fights off the guards before he and Morty escape. Meanwhile, Evil Morty has all the loudspeakers in the Citadel say "Nobody leave, everybody stay" repeatedly - most of the Ricks and Morties naturally attempt to leave, but are killed instantly when their hacked portal guns send them to hostile dimensions.
As the Citadel descends into chaos, Rick and Morty descend to the bottom, hoping to find untainted portal fluid at its source, but it has all been drained. Rick explains that Evil Morty needed his brain scan to obtain schematics for the Citadel's dimensional drive so he could penetrate the Central Finite Curve - while he promises to explain after they escape, Morty is unsatisifed and refuses to go on - Rick caves and gives Morty a brain-scanning device that shows him his backstory - after Rick Prime killed C-137 Rick's Diane and Beth, he was motivated to finish the portal gun and explore the multiverse, making it his life's mission to hunt down Rick Prime and avenge his family. However, no matter how hard he tried, Rick could never find Prime, resulting in him killing dozens of Ricks across the multiverse in hopes of catching him, during which time he descended into depression and became an alcoholic to cope. The Citadel was created to get away from C-137 Rick, with him on board, and so C-137 Rick came to the Prime Dimension, deciding to wait for Prime to come home.
The two meet Evil Morty at the drive, where he states how all Ricks use their trauma to justify anything they do. He tells Morty that the Citadel Ricks have created the "Central Finite Curve", a barrier that separates every universe where Rick is the smartest being from the rest of the multiverse - his plan is to escape from the Curve and live a life free of Rick, explaining that what makes him evil is being fed up of Rick. Morty is disappointed to learn that Rick only came back because the crows dumped him, and Evil Morty states that now they're both "evil". He activates the Citadel's dimensional drive, causing it to begin opening a wormhole - at the same time, portal fluid floods the Citadel. Meanwhile, some Ricks and Morties attempt to use Operation Phoenix to escape, but all are rerouted to the Citadel's cloning vats and dumped into a meat grinder, their remains used to power the drive.
As the Citadel begins to collapse, Rick is trapped under debris. Evil Morty offers to let Morty join him, but he forgives Rick and saves him. Rick and Morty return to the surface, evacuating all the deformed Morties from underground into Mortyburg - Rick detaches it from the Citadel just before the portal fluid reaches it and attempt to accelerate away, but the fluid creates a black hole. Rick and Morty are able to accelerate from out of its reach, saving all the Mortys inside, but are now stranded in outer space with no portal fluid. Meanwhile, Evil Morty leaves the Citadel in an escape pod just as it explodes, travelling through the wormhole and penetrating the Curve. Emerging in the greater multiverse, he sighs with relief, confirming that the Curve has been destroyed, before he opens a gold portal with his upgraded portal gun and steps through.
In a post-credits scene, Mr. Poopybutthole talks to the audience about the end of the "Evil Morty" arc and the collapse of his relationship with his wife after Rick caused him to lose his job in "One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty", hypothesizing about becoming "Evil" himself (shown in "Never Ricking Morty"). As he makes dinner in a tiny apartment, he urges the audience to give love back to those who love them.
Characters[]
Major characters[]
Minor characters[]
- Beth Smith
- Summer Smith
- Jerry Smith
- Diane Sanchez (flashback; no lines)
- Beth Sanchez (C-137) (flashback; no lines)
- Two Crows
- Crowscare
- Pussifer
- Stan Lee Rick
- Mr. Poopybutthole
- Mrs. Poopybutthole (mentioned; pictured)
- Darth Poopybutthole (indirectly mentioned)
- Birdperson (flashbacks; no lines)
- Evil Rick (mentioned)
- Mortabel (flashback; no lines)
- Snuffles (flashback; no lines)
- Rick D-716
- Rick D-716-B
- Rick Prime (flashback; no lines)
- Beth Smith Prime (flashback; no lines)
- Shrimp Rick (flashback; no lines)
- Lizard Rick (pictured)
- Aqua Rick (pictured)
- Eye Patch Rick (pictured)
- Andy
- Hunchback Mortys
Deaths[]
- Three owl people
- Multiple versions of Rick
- Rick D-716
- Supreme Guard Ricks
- Guard Ricks
- Multiple versions of Morty
- Hunchback Morty
- Manly Morty
- Left-Handed Morty (off screen)
- Many monsters and robots
- Many blue goblin people
- Pussifer
- Multiple offscreen people
- Many Gromflomites (flashback)
- Three aliens
- Pleasure blob
Locations[]
- Dimension C-137 (flashback)
- Phone Universe (flashback)
- Glapflap's third moon (flashback)
- Replacement Dimension
Episode notes[]
Trivia[]
- This episode is the second part of the one-hour Season 5 finale, with "Forgetting Sarick Mortshall" being the first part.
- This is the third episode (first was "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate" and second was "The Ricklantis Mixup") that does not include the classic intro.
- Rick's crow design closely resembles the cover art for the video game, Grim Dawn, a character with a similar hat, getup, serious look, and crow.
- The episode title references Samurai Jack, with the title being a blatant riff on the 'Samurai' of Samurai Jack, which had its final season also aired on Adult Swim, the same network that airs Rick and Morty. How the episode relates to Samurai Jack's focus on a samurai who was flung into the future is debatable. It is possible the episode is mocking the serious tone Samurai Jack's final season went for in contrast to the rest of the show.
- The Kanji title 愛鳥家, meaning Birdlover.
- This episode reveals the full background of Rick and it is confirmed that he did in fact lose Diane and his original Beth to an alternate version of himself. It is also revealed Rick has been hunting down the version of himself that killed his family but never found him but helped in the construction of the Citadel before finally settling down with a version of Beth that was still alive and bonded with her son, Morty Smith.
- Oddly enough in Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind Rick is shown having a memory of picking up a baby Morty, even though Rick is said to have moved in when Morty was a teenager. This may imply that he switched families at one point.
- There are some slight differences between Rick's earlier fake memory in which his Diane and Beth died, and what really happened. In the fake memory, he immediately designed a portal gun to escape to other realities where his family was still alive. In reality, he spent a long time consumed by grief and drinking, before eventually perfecting a portal gun - after which he went on adventures, but all the while searching for the specific Rick who killed his family. As seen in Birdperson's memories, he then started attacking the pre-Citadel, interdimensional club of Ricks - not to bring his family back or get an alternate version of them, but purely for revenge. Nor was he satisfied with killing any of the other Ricks, he kept hunting for the specific Rick who killed his family. However, even defeating all the other Ricks and organizing them into the Citadel failed to find that specific Rick, so he despaired and moved in to a dimension where Beth didn't die but was abandoned by Rick at a young age, and Diane had since died.
- Despite Rick's later insistence that everyone can be replaced by infinite alternate versions of themselves and nothing matters, he actually spent much of his life hunting for the specific Rick who killed his family, and didn't try to simply replace his original Beth for many decades. Apparently Rick wasn't always such a nihilist but gave in to despair after spending so many years failing to find the specific Rick who killed his family.
- In celebration of Season 5, Pocket Mortys' weekly updates coincided with new episodes, including new avatars for players to collect. With the release of this episode came Crow Rick as an avatar, plus Forty Morty and Evil Morty to catch.
- This episode finally reveals President Morty/Evil Morty's plan, which was set up in Season 1's "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind." The writers had put off revealing this as doing so also required canonizing major parts of Rick and Morty's backstory, which could not be ignored once revealed. Dan Harmon admitted he always felt the "Shoney's revelation" was Rick's true backstory, but avoided confirming it in "The Rickshank Rickdemption" because he thought it was too early in the show's run to be imposing canon.[4]
- Rick references the fan demand for his backstory by remarking "Now everyone can shut up about it."
Errors[]
- During Rick Stan Lee's freeze frame explanation of the backstory regarding C-137's prior memory scans, a Citadel of Ricks guard can be seen blinking in the background. This was likely an animation error, or possibly even yet another meta gag regarding the "scripted" nature of the series.
- Rick Stan Lee also states that Rick's brain was scanned in Season 1 episode 9, when in fact the incident actually occurs in Season 1 episode 10.
- However, due to the production code of Season 1 episode 1 being 000, the production code of Season 1 episode 10 is 109, which is likely the reason for the error. This may have also been a meta gag, because the real Stan Lee was notorious for making errors in his footnote citations.
- This error has since been corrected.
- Due to an inconsistency in the memory sequence depicting Rick's return from space, it may not be discernable which version of the Smith Family he returned to first, as a prominent teleportation crack is visible around the house which can likely only occur if a Rick was already previously inhabiting the dimension as seen in the events of "Ricksy Business."
- It is also possible this was a animation error during the rush to finish the production of season 5. Assuming this scene of Beth seeing Rick crash into her garage depicts Rick's arrival to the dimension seen in the show's first six episodes, then the crack around the Smith house shouldn't chronologically exist. However, if it was intentional, this would hint to a strong likelihood that Rick C-137 had a different Morty prior to his current adventures.
Series continuity[]
- President Morty references when Rick got his mind scanned, which occurred in "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind".
- Rick's "totally fabricated backstory" from "The Rickshank Rickdemption" was, in fact, true, at least up to the moment of Diane and Beth's apparent deaths: the fabricated part that he used to trick Cornvelius Daniel was coming up with the portal fluid formula in the immediate aftermath, when instead some time passed before he was able to do that.
- Glimpses of Rick and Birdperson battling with each other are seen. The full battle was seen in Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort.
- The Central Finite Curve was mentioned thrice before:
- In Season 1's "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", one of the Council of Ricks tells Rick C-137 that "of all the Ricks in the Central Finite Curve, you're the malcontent!"
- In "The Ricklantis Mixup", the advertisement for Simple Rick Wafers says that Simple Rick is "sixteen iterations off the Central Finite Curve".
- In Issue #2 of Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons II, described simply as universes with working eco-systems and a Rick.
- President Morty's ultimate victory is once again accompanied by his theme, "For the Damaged Coda" by Blonde Redhead, but with a new orchestral arrangement of its chorus. The theme was previously played in episodes that he appears in such as "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind" and "The Ricklantis Mixup".
- Evil Morty hacking the portal gun to only create portals to the Blender Dimension is possibly a reference to how, in "The Ricklantis Mixup", Rick J-22 is given a portal gun that was hacked to only make portals to the Blender Dimension.
- The images of Ricks from across the Finite Curve that materialize display scenes from earlier episodes such as "Auto Erotic Assimilation", "The Old Man and the Seat", "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", and "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri".
- Among many other Ricks shown on the wall of a future Council member Rick in C-137's flashback include Buff Rick from "Something Ricked This Way Comes", Turkey Rick from "Rick & Morty's Thanksploitation Spectacular", and Sombrero Rick from "Auto Erotic Assimilation".
- Mr. Poopybutthole mentions the collapse of his relationship with his wife and his firing from his job, referencing the post-credits scenes of “The Rickchurian Mortydate” and “One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty”.
- Mr. Poopybutthole mentions the possibility of a evil version of himself, indirectly referencing Darth Poopybutthole from “Never Ricking Morty”.
- Rick says "Wubba Lubba dub-dub!" for the first time since "Total Rickall" from Season 2.
Cultural references[]
- The episode's title is a reference to the animated series Samurai Jack.
- Morty complains that the Citadel of Ricks feels like Glendale, California under President Morty.
- Rick Stan Lee appears to explain in which episode Rick's brain was scanned, referencing the real Stan Lee's tendency to put cross-references in the margins of Marvel comics.
- One of the shots from Rick's backstory is of him at a ramen bar with Birdperson in a futuristic cyberpunk city, clad in a brown overcoat. This is a nod to a scene from the 1982 film Blade Runner that introduces the character of Rick Deckard, which itself has been visually referenced in various sci-fi media. A synth track inspired by Vangelis' Blade Runner score plays over the entire scene.
- Rick's crow warrior outfit bears some resemblance to Vampire Hunter D.
- Crowscare is a parody of Scarecrow, a villain from DC Comics and frequent Batman foe.
- Hunchback Morty is a parody of Quasimodo from the animated film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Transcript[]
View a full transcript of this episode here.
Gallery
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References
https://twitter.com/RickandMorty/status/1396888811083345924