I’m about to get into some pretty insane spoilers for the Season 5 finale of Rick and Morty, but this is something that has opened my eyes to what makes this character amazing, and I just have to talk about it. If you don’t want to see spoilers, please vacate now.
I’ve been watching the series Rick and Morty for some time now. The stories of the misadventures of Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty, along with all the people around them is fun. You have the more “light-hearted” (everything in this series has a slightly darker twinge to it) episodes that are just about the random adventures, interspersed with stories that tie into a larger narrative of Rick and how fucked up he is and how fucked up he makes the lives of people who surround him.
When you first meet him, Rick seems like a complete sociopath who is completely devoid of any ability to care about anyone but himself. The first season really paints a picture of the fact that Rick has been an absent father for almost all of Beth’s life, that he treats Jerry like absolute trash because he sees him as a joke, that he doesn’t think much of Summer because he sees her as vapid, and that Morty is a means to an end. However, there are these little moments throughout the first two seasons where you do realize that there is more to him than that. That there is a very personal man who is absolutely tortured by the person he has let himself become and that he wants to try and make things right with his family but is incapable because of his qualms that consistently rear their ugly head at the worst times.
We first see it in the introduction of a character who becomes VERY important to the franchise – Evil Morty. In the episode, they find out that Mortys are being captured to hide a super evil Rick. He kidnaps C-137 Rick and tries to get him to join him in his crusade to be the most diabolical Rick of them all. He sees his memories of all the horrible things he’s done and figures that this guy is perfect. However, as he goes through his memories, he sees that he does care about his family and does have some love for his grandchild. This is reflected when Morty leads a revolution of Mortys and saves him, then to be given a kind word in his detached way, calling him the Mortyest Morty.
Next up, we hear from Bird Person that Rick is tormented and that he is consistently calling out for help, but nobody is understanding him. Morty is certain that he is wrong, but the idea is out there. We also learn about the tragic loneliness of Rick as he rekindles a romance with an alien entity called Unity, only for the entity to realize that Rick has such a destructive and addictive personality that it cannot be with him for fear that it would become him. When Unity leaves him, Rick actually tries to kill himself, and is only saved because he passes out before the machine he created can finish the job.
At the end of the second season, Bird Person tells Beth at his wedding that both him and Rick fought against the governing body of the galaxy, and it is implied that it was a fairly brutal conflict, which they inevitably lost. When it is uncovered that Tammy is an agent for the Galactic Federation, and Bird Person gets killed, Rick takes his family and tries to flee to another world. There, he hears them talking about how much damage he has done to their lives and he does actually feel genuine sadness for what he’s forced onto them because of his own history. So he turns himself in and makes it so they can go home.
We then get to see exactly how much he cares for his daughter, Beth. Throughout the series, he consistently gives Jerry endless shit for how much he ruined his daughter’s life by getting her pregnant, and Beth clearly has some amount of similar feelings, as you learn when you find out that every universe with Summer in it is lame because she is viewed as the thing that took away their ability to follow their dreams. In one episode, Beth comes to realize that she has the same intellect capability as her father and it is being wasted as a wife and mother. It is then that Rick gives her options. Gives her a guilt-free way to leave the family and then pursue her intellect. It is a strange moment where he acknowledges that her being smart is not a blessing. It’s a curse, and one that she will have to deal with all her life. Granted, this all comes back to bite him in a spectacular fashion when you realize that he actually did it, but still.
The kinder, gentler nature of Rick Sanchez seems totally at odds with the character who shows the ability to be cruel in the extreme when need be. He has zero qualms with killing, seeing each life as meaningless because of the fact that there are countless others in dozens of realities. He will bail on an entire reality when he fucks it over beyond his ability to repair because it is simpler than actually trying to undo things. It seems to not match up at all. But then you realize that it does mesh. It absolutely does.
Throughout the series, one thing that Rick seems to hate more than anything is the Council of Ricks. The gathering of Ricks who came together to make a powerful hegemony to their own intellect. One that is more disturbed than I could have imagined, but you always wondered why Rick despised this place with such a fervent passion. In fact, throughout the series, the backstory of Rick is always very up in the air. Beth talks about him bailing when she was very young, and you hear about him fighting for the Resistance, but what else. Season 3 shows Rick being a scientist who was inventing portal tech, when a Rick from another reality comes into his own and extends him an offer to join them. He turns them down, only for there to be a bomb planted that kills his wife and child. In that episode, he says that that is nothing but an illusion as part of his plan. Now we know that what he said was a lie.
Season 5 has really filled in the vast majority of the gaps with Rick’s past. The episode where he is looking to bring back the mind of his best friend after he defeats what the Federation turned him into, you see that Rick was once a much younger, but still tortured person. He helps Bird Person in his fight, looking to get him to join him on a mission of his own, saying that it is a call to adventure. Bird Person refuses, driven to stay in his own battle. This seems odd, but now we have the rest of the story filled in.
It turns out, the thing about his family being killed by a Rick because he wouldn’t join him is true. However, it appears that this wasn’t part of the Council of Ricks. This was in the formative years, before there was a Council. When some Ricks were just starting to come together. After he is lost and destroyed for a while, he decides to hunt down the person who took his world away from him and kill him. Along the way, he learned about the galaxy, about new technologies. His intellect grew as he gained new tools with which to navigate the galaxy and to understand the nature of the multiverse.
However, very quickly he came upon one of the worst parts of the multiverse – the fact that it is infinite. No matter how many Ricks he killed, he couldn’t find the one who had taken his wife and child. Ironically enough, his efforts to kill the one who had hurt him galvanized the Ricks to come together to fight back against him. The conflict continued to escalate until he had to do unfathomable damage to the Rick population overall. This lead to the Council of Ricks making him an offer, but by this point, he was too disillusioned and too broken to really care. He turned them down, deciding to pursue that which he had lost along the way – a family. But this was after you learn that he helped in the establishment of what is called the Central Finite Curve. A walled-off section of the multiverse where the infinite realities where Rick is the smartest person in the universe are kept separate from those that are. A multiverse bastion of their own intellect. But with all that power, he just wanted to get back what he lost.
And so, he chose a reality where the Rick there wasn’t going to be coming back and went home to find Beth, now a grown woman. The timeline matched up enough and he was able to build a new life and new relationships with the people he cared about. This realization puts so much into context about Rick. Why he was so unhinged, what he really wanted from life, and why he despises the Council of Ricks so much. Not only have they become a bastion to their own intellect, one that he is unable to escape, but they are perpetuating a cycle of abuse of his family. They are deliberately getting Jerrys and Beths together in the Central Finite Curve so they don’t have to scour the galaxy for grandchildren. They are easy to find. They are deliberately fucking over his child for their own ends. So much of everything he does value is destroyed because of these people.
The end of the last episode has him being saved by his Morty, when Morty realizes that his grandfather does care, more than any Rick anywhere, and that he wants to be a family. He learned that he is valued, in that way that Rick does value people. It isn’t outspoken, it’s sometimes cold, but it’s there, and he feels it deeply. With the Central Finite Curve destroyed, this opens up a vast plethora of space that Rick can now explore. I see the debate online that Rick is unable to use the portal gun anymore, but in reality, this would just break down the gaps between the Central Finite Curve. Now he will have access to a much larger multiverse to learn.
There are so many other things I could talk about, like how Beth is looking to be following in his footsteps (which is a story-line I am desperately hoping they run with), but for right now, I’ll leave it at that. Rick is a phenomenal character. He has so many layers to him and you never really know exactly what he is going to do in any situation, so you are constantly kept guessing. People say that the series is getting stale, but I personally don’t agree. This series has kept my attention throughout all of it, and now I am dying to know what happens next. It’s gonna be awesome.
Until next time, a quote,
“So it would go without saying that the Rickest Rick would have the Mortyest Morty.” – Rick Sanchez, Rick and Morty
Peace out,
Maverick
Lucien Maverick's Den 