| “ | Who's ready for Rick's famous spaghetti? |
| — Rick |
"That's Amorte" is the fourth episode of the seventh season of Rick and Morty. It is the 65th episode of the series overall. It premiered on November 5, 2023.[2] It was written by Heather Anne Campbell and directed by Lucas Gray. The episode is rated TV-14-DLV.
Synopsis[]
The Smith family is enjoying delicious spaghetti for family dinner but Morty uncovers the truth about the dish leading to a horrifying discovery and the collapse of a society.
Plot[]
Morty holding spaghetti.
The Smith Family enjoys bowls of delicious spaghetti bolognese supposedly made for them by Rick every Thursday. Unfortunately, as tends to be the case with situations involving Rick, there is a twist: Morty learns that the spaghetti comes from dead bodies. Specifically, bodies from a planet where people who kill themselves turn into spaghetti – more specifically, the best spaghetti in the universe. Morty finds the whole situation morally reprehensible and immediately confesses to the situation at a funeral for one of the people they ate, against Rick's protests. He also tells his family, though he is annoyed when they are more disappointed at the loss of their spaghetti nights than the fact they were eating people. The president of Spaghetti Planet contacts Morty after hearing about the funeral confession and offers Morty some "ethically-sourced" spaghetti, from a sickly person who sought assisted suicide and accepted their fate as food. Morty finds the idea that he is eating someone who wanted to become food more palatable, and he and the family return to their old spaghetti nights.
Rick getting "spaghetti."
However, Rick reveals the planet turned making spaghetti into a full industry, selling cans of "MortyO's Suicide Spaghetti" across the galaxy. Morty proposes this is still ethical upon noticing the cans have messages from the people the spaghetti came from, until Rick brings him back to Spaghetti Planet and reveals the government have resorted to encouraging depression in the people in order to keep up with the demand. The president of Spaghetti Planet protests that they need to keep the spaghetti trade open or else it will destroy the global economy, which could prove much more destructive. Morty reluctantly asks Rick for assistance to solve the issue, promising to do what Rick wants (for only two weeks). Rick's initial attempt to create sentient clones programmed to kill themselves fails when the clones resort to drastic measures to avoid becoming food; his further attempts at creating less-sentient beings also leave something to be desired, with his most promising result being a torso that is physically unable to do anything, much less kill itself. They eventually solve the problem when Morty suggests giving it a functioning arm. At first, spaghetti production returns with these torsos, only for everyone to find some fault in this: a group of alien consumers claim it tastes terrible and demand real spaghetti, and a group of planet inhabitants still claim it is unethical and claim torso rights (and both end up suicide-bombing the factory due to arguing over which should go first).
Chaos soon erupts on the Spaghetti Planet as other aliens arrive demanding more spaghetti and try to force people to kill themselves. Rick offers one last alternative: take the last person on the planet who is willing to kill themselves and genetically clone the spaghetti so people can still get their fix. The person in question, a man by the name of Fred Bunks who only has two months to live, has put off killing himself out of his own moral opposition to the spaghetti trade. However, Rick informs Fred that if he helps them, his death will end the spaghetti industry on the planet for good. He takes Fred to an assisted-suicide device, which will show Fred and the entire planet his entire life and memories before he chooses to kill himself. Fred's life is then shown to the entire planet, with all his both immoral and moral actions and the complexities that led to him ultimately living a fulfilling life.
As expected, Fred's insides turn into spaghetti after he dies. However, having witnessed the entirety of Fred's life in all its nuances, no one wants to eat him or the spaghetti anymore. Rick explains to Morty it was never about it being right or wrong to eat dead people, but whether you can stomach the complexities of life – and indeed, the claimed-nihilist Rick loses his appetite for the spaghetti from having seen Fred's life. The Smith Family dinner is replaced with salisbury steak, which Rick promises he procured from another ethically dubious source, but the Smith Family chooses to live in ignorance since the steak is so good.
In the Post Credit scene, a planet filled with sentient vacuum cleaners receives a planet-wide broadcast similar to Rick's back on the Spaghetti planet. The broadcast reveals that the vacuum bags everyone uses actually come from sentient plant beings who have committed suicide much to everyone's disgust.
Characters[]
Major characters[]
Minor characters[]
- Beth Smith
- Summer Smith
- Jerry Smith
- Amber Bunks
- Earl Bunks
- Edna Bunks
- Lawrence Maps
- Michael
- Subject One
- Clone 5617B
- Tanya Radcliffe
- Roger Wayne Marder
- Snuffles (Pictured)
Deaths[]
- Several unnamed Spaghetti People
- Fred Bunks
- Amber Bunks (off-screen)
- Earl Bunks (off-screen)
- Edna Bunks (off-screen)
- Lawrence Maps (off-screen)
- Clone 5617B
- Unnamed male clone
- Uknown number of Torso beings
- Tanya Radcliff (off-screen)
- Roger Wayne Marder (off-screen)
- Five pro-Torso rights protesters
- Five Real Spaghetti protesters
- Zebra in the "That's dinner" advertisement
- Unnamed plant being
Locations[]
- Parmesan dimension
- Earth
- 41-Kepler B (Spaghetti Planet)
- Vacuum Cleaner Dimension
- Alternate 41-Kepler B
Episode notes[]
Trivia[]
- Rick's famous spaghetti from this episode is used for the official Season 7 poster.
- Adult Swim has provided a warning message before the start of the episode due to the presence of suicide throughout the whole episode.
- This is the second episode with a content warning due to the presence of suicide within the episode. The first episode was "Analyze Piss".
- In celebration of Season 7, Pocket Mortys' weekly updates coincided with new episodes, including new avatars for players to collect. With the release of this episode came Madame President as an avatar, plus Ethical Spaghetti Morty and Can of Spaghetti Morty to catch.
- Fred's childhood sweetheart and eventual wife Amber was married to Lawrence, the man whose funeral Morty and Rick crash near the start of the episode. Lawrence and his two children can be recognized in the flashback from their appearances at the funeral.
Series continuity[]
- When Morty, Rick and the President brainstorm ideas to resolve the spaghetti economy, Morty references the fact that Rick has often used clones, which happened in episodes such as "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri", and "Mortyplicity".
- The word "Parmesan" is said by Summer in the typical pronunciation of the Parmesan dimension, which she had initially booed in "Solaricks".
- When the spaghetti situation gets worse, Morty promises that he will never look "under the curtain of a Rick thing" ever again, referencing how Morty's intentions of "doing the right thing" in situations have caused massive consequences and problems such as in "Mortynight Run" and "Rattlestar Ricklactica".
Errors[]
- When Morty catches Rick scooping spaghetti out of a corpse, he drops his plate, which can be heard breaking. However, exactly one season earlier in "Night Family," Rick supplies his family with dinner plates forged on another planet that are 110% indestructible, so it should not be possible for Morty to break one.
Cultural references[]
- The episode's title is a reference to the Dean Martin song "That's Amore". The added letter "t" follows the show's pattern of including main character names in its titles ("mort" for Morty), while also spelling "morte" ("death" in Portuguese and Italian), fitting the episode's theme.
- Morty refers to the situation on Spaghetti Planet as "a-spicy meatball!" referencing the 1969 Alka-Seltzer commercial which spawned the line and inspired memes.
- Rick calls his memory-erasing device "The Men in Black thing", referencing the Neuralizer from the Men in Black films.
- Rick mentions how the Spaghetti Planet is selling their products at every Walmart in space.
- Rick mentions how all of the shows on Spaghetti Planet have become reality shows but not the good kind as if the planet was bought by Discovery, referencing the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
- When Rick claims Morty has to do everything he says, Morty calls him Keith Raniere, referencing the leader of the NXIVM cult.
- Rick describes the clones' rebellion as a speed-run of Never Let Me Go, referencing the novel and film about clones created to be harvested for body parts.
- After his parents die, Fred develops a brick-based construction toy called "Fredblox" and selling them in stores of the same name, a reference to Lego toys and stores.
- Fred pitches the "Fredblox" toys to a group of investors on a TV set, a reference to Shark Tank.
- After the Fredblox success, Fred searches Amber on a social network called "FRIENDBook", a reference to Facebook.
- A cover of the Oasis song “Live Forever” plays during Fred’s life montage, performed by Kotomi and Ryan Elder for this episode.
- The addresses shown in Fred's life montage are the same numbers as Rowf and Snitter's collars in The Plague Dogs.
- Fred's death is very similar to Solomon Roth's death from the film Soylent Green, another film involving the mass consumption of human remains.
- The Spaghetti Planet President bears resemblance to current real-life U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.
Transcript[]
View a full transcript of this episode here.
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