Rick & Morty S01E06 Review: The One With The Huge Plot Twist

Rick and Morty, Season 1, Episode 6: Rick Potion #9

I think "Rick Potion #9" is one of the most stand-out episodes from the first season that elevates the show from just being a series of trope deconstruction jokes with the audience laughing at what an asshole Rick is, to something that seems to not be afraid at doing... something different. Because while I certainly have enjoyed episodes 1 through 5, for the most part they're a bit... samey? And I really do like how "Rick Potion #9" essentially still follows the trope of subverting a couple of tropes as well, and, in quick order, this episode lampoons the concept of love potion hijinks, a zombie (or insert-your-own-monster-outbreak) apocalypse and a huge, status quo shattering event that... ends up not being quite handled in the way you expect a show to.

And honestly... the first half of the episode is pretty standard Rick and Morty fare. I think I said last episode that while the whole fantasy-land sequence with Rick and Morty in the land of the giants aren't terrible or un-funny, they felt like they were just going through the motions, and the same thing seems to be going on here with the Morty/Love Potion subplot. It's a genuinely tired trope at this point, a kid character struggles at having to deal with the oh-so-important prospect of going to prom but he (or she) is pretty unpopular. And then you throw in Morty asking Rick to essentially make a love potion for him, and you'd think that, hey, that's the joke. Rick's love potion is going to work a bit too well, and that's going to be the joke, like how you can probably see what the whole point of the Meeseeks joke is going to be around a couple conversations into the Meeseeks gag. Hell, even Rick's long and quotable-for-memes rant about how love is just a chemical reaction and also how Beth and Jerry's marriage is doomed is expected at this point, as much as you can expect these sort of cynical rants within five or six episodes of a show.

And while Jessica's more of a plot device than a character (a problem that a lot of 'love interest' style characters in these shows tend to have), again, the sequence of events that happen in the school is... it's fun, but predictable. Of course someone's going to have the flu, and of course everyone from Jessica's douchebaggy maybe-boyfriend to other girls to Principal Vagina end up falling in love with Morty and wants to keep Morty to themselves and breed with Morty like voles. Predictably, this spreads quickly to the whole town and then the entire world, causing everyone in the world to basically be obsessed with Morty. And then Morty gets Rick to try and make the cure, and Rick's insane logic (praying mantises are the least romantic of animals!) end up with the entire population of the town turning into praying mantis body horror monsters. And then Rick's attempt to cure everyone turns them into what the show describes as "Cronenberg monsters", which are just huge lumps of body organs sort of lumped together. It's glorious visuals, too! I'm a huge fan.

If that's the joke, the episode'd be fun, but standalone. We even get the predictable B-plot of Jerry continuing to be kind of a loser. Picking up from the established plot in the previous episode that Beth is having second thoughts about their marriage, including a particularly well-scripted conversation where Beth is just the master of passive-aggressiveness. Jerry's insecurities are heightened even more when Beth is called to do emergency horse surgery, particularly with the existence of the handsome heart-throb co-worker Devin.

Jerry's insecurities, for once, ends up actually turning to be true for all of the wrong reasons. Beth was not planning to cheat Jerry, and neither was Devin trying to seduce Beth, not exactly -- like everyone else in the world, Devin is afflicted with the same Morty-love potion cocktail and is really, really up to get Beth to describe intimately how Morty is to him. And then he mutates into a giant mantis monster creature, allowing Jerry to come in and be a hero... albeit with some of the worst one-liners ever. Jerry and Beth end up becoming apocalypse survivors with shotguns and whatnot, which happens a wee bit too quickly, but I suppose that's part of the lampoon.

Summer's... she's there. She sort of runs around before she ends up being reunited with Jerry and Beth. She really is unremarkable and honestly treated almost as an afterthought in these early season 1 episodes, huh?

But anyway, after the literal world has sort of gone to hell, we have a huge, huge argument between Rick and Morty. Morty accuses Rick of being super-blase about everything that's going on, essentially ending humanity as we know it, while Rick tells Morty off for refusing to accept culpability, noting that Morty is the one who asked and pressured Rick to make the gross "roofie drug" to cheat his way to some sexy-times with a pretty girl... except Rick notes that he's at least not pretending that he's taking any sort of high ground in his mistakes.

But the best part of this episode is definitely the ending. We cut away to Rick and Morty at their laboratory-garage, with Morty congratulating Rick for solving the problem and saving the world... seemingly a cutaway to how, again, as in many of these cartoons, world-shattering ramifications tend to be reset back to normal by the end of the episode. Except that's not the case here. In a particularly gruesomely animated sequence and a great, great use of a surprise plot twist, Rick's attempt to use the screwdriver on the machine he wanted to fix at the beginning fo the episode... causes an explosion that kills the two of them, reducing them to horrifyingly bloody and limp corpses.

And then our Rick and Morty appears from a portal, and Morty pretty understandably freaks the fuck out at the sight of the dead, mutilated bodies of himself and his grandfather. Rick tells Morty that this is an alternate reality, a different dimension, where Rick has used his devices to search for a dimension where the exact same sequence of events happened, but these alternate versions of Rick and Morty manage to save the world... but then get immediately killed by a freak accident. That's what Rick's plan is, essentially. To replace their doppelgangers in another dimension, and this is apparently a reset that they can do "three maybe four more times".

It's a pretty awesome little sci-fi gimmick to work into a story, allowing the writers to have their cake and eat it. They get to showcase all of the horrifying after-effects of one of Rick and Morty's science adventures, they get to show a Jerry and a Beth that reconciled their differences and became stronger than ever thanks to the Cronenberg zombie outbreak, and they even get to reset everything back to relative status quo... but judging on Morty's blank expression as he and Rick bury their alternate dimension corpses in the backyard while everything seems to snap back to stark normalcy while the amazing score plays in the background... it's a pretty great ending, as Morty just accepts this as the new normal -- new versions of his family that act and behave and even have memories similar to the ones they have left behind in the original dimension, and it really is interesting to note that this really makes it seem like the show's going to at least make this a theme moving onwards. It's also a gloriously dark (but not too dark) way to end an episode, where our heroes don't save the world. They just abandon it and move on.

Overall, a pretty awesome episode and probably one of the highlights of the first season (the other one I'd call the highlight would be the obvious Rixty Minutes). Pretty neat stuff.


Random Notes:

• The post-credits sequence of this is the new life of post-apocalyptic original-dimension Beth, Jerry and Summer... and that includes Beth apparently admitting that she feels guilty that she's actually glad Rick and Morty are out of their life. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Cronenberg dimension, we get Cronenberg Rick and Cronenberg Morty showing up, apparently having accidentally caused a crisis where everyone in their dimension are turned to "like, regular people", which is just such a hilarious bit.
• There are way too many designs for me to elaborate, but whether it be the initial wave of mantis-human hybrid monsters or the eventual Cronenberg fuck-ups, we get a lot of fun monster designs in this episode. Special prop goes to the initial Jessica transformation, and while it's a slightly racist joke, I really, really loved that the Middle-Eastern and Chinese people end up turning into mantis monsters... that still retain their stereotypical facial hair. 
• Rick quickly stating a limitation "about 3-4 more times" on how many times they can do the find-a-dimension-and-replace-our-counterparts is neat, even if to my memory, at least over the first three seasons we really don't get any further use of this plot device, which, in itself, is pretty great subversion. 
• The "Flu Season Dance" is just such a hilariously bizarre event that Morty's school apparently does, and apparently they bring in a rapper that sings a "Flu Hatin' Rap". 
• Jerry's confusion about Beth's honestly perfect and tired delivery of equating their marriage to "do you want homeless people to have homes" is just perfect.
• There are a lot of great lines in this episode, actually. Rick's rant about how love is just shitty chemical reactions; Summer and Jerry's conversation about jealousy; Rick's increasingly insane deadpan deliveries of his plans to fix the love potion; "Bet you're loving this Morty. You get to be the mayor of I-Told-You-Town."; the actually serious conversations between Rick and Morty in the final act... but the best part has to be Jerry's attempt at sounding badass, which everyone lampshades doesn't make sense. "I am Mr. Crowbar, and this is my friend. Who is also a crowbar". As well as the perfect delivery of "I don't get that and I don't need to" in response to an Ernest Hemingway joke Beth makes.