As Beth points out, Rick has gone to the effort to duplicate his family because he loves them, and wants to keep them safe from harm.Īmusingly, aside from Morty, none of the Smiths are Rick’s “originals” - the family from the very first season are still scavenging the “Cronenberg universe” that Rick and Morty abandoned for an identical reality. Their creator is up in space, not giving a thought to the consequences of his actions.Įventually, Rick has a breakthrough moment with Beth, when he truly understands the value of his “original” family. That joke at the beginning about killing God plays itself out, over and over, as Ricks angrily slaughter their inferiors, only to realize that they’re all the same. In those brief seconds before death, those decoys understand exactly how it feels to be just another throwaway life, created by an uncaring Rick. But as an exercise in creativity, ambition, and challenging our ingrained notions of how we should both make and consume stories, “Mortyplicity” is great fun.Some of Rick’s decoys accept that cruel truth more readily than others - many choose death over life as a decoy, some are oddly understanding, and others resist reality until the bitter end.
As with the rest of the show, I can totally understand why someone would hate it. And yet even after proving that none of this is real or consistent and that it’s ill-advised to care about any of it, “Mortyplicity” makes you care anyway, pretty much in spite of itself.īecause of the way it truly contorts its high-concept sci-fi premise, I was totally on-board with Rick and Morty season 5, episode 2. That’s funny as a joke but it’s near-genius as a storytelling conceit because it really does prove something that Rick and Morty has always claimed to be about but never quite 100% committed to.
The final moments imply that this might have been going on forever and might continue to go on forever, and we might never know who’s who.
It’s like a game of tag, but instead of someone becoming “it”, they become dead.Īnd it doesn’t end, really. Every time we think we’re grounded in the perspective of the “real” Sanchez family, another Sanchez family kills them off and we follow them for a while until the same thing – or a similar thing – happens again. And it’s able to do so because it genuinely doesn’t care about the basic, fundamental aspects of storytelling that other shows couldn’t get away with overlooking. Rick and Morty season 5, episode 2 is very happy about how deliberately complex and confusing it makes this premise. The show has never been shy about exposing its artificiality, but here it’s insisting that there aren’t even concrete, “real” versions of its characters within their own universe. We have no idea who the real versions are, or if there even are real versions at all. But it quickly becomes apparent that the decoys don’t know they’re decoys, so all of them get alerts that the other decoys have been targeted, and they all think they’re the “real” Rick, and on and on, with the big “twist” being that the show never bothers to establish a legitimate POV for the audience. The hook is that Rick has created various clone versions of the family since someone is always trying to kill them, and this is set up innocuously enough, with Rick being alerted that one of the decoy families has come under attack.