Who is the Rickest Rick?

Rory Murray, Staff Writer |

After over a year since the season two finale of “Rick and Morty,” the third season premiered on April Fool’s Day to the surprise of the show’s cult-like following. Season two left fans with the cliffhanger ending of Rick being imprisoned by the Galactic Federation. The latest installment in the series begins with his incredible escape from prison, which left viewers with more questions than it answered, wondering who the Rick Sanchez the show follows really is.

“Rick and Morty” is perhaps the most random and ridiculous show I have ever watched; I have been obsessed with it since the first episode. The Adult Swim cartoon, created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, chronicles the genius scientist Rick Sanchez and his somewhat slow grandson as they travel around the universe and across dimensions in many life-threatening adventures.

In the episode “Rick Potion #9,” Rick creates a serum to make a girl fall in love with Morty, but an outbreak of the flu at Morty’s school causes the effects of the serum to spread and the entire world falls in love with Morty. Rick tries to reverse the impact but instead ends up genetically “cronenberging” the entire world. Rick and Morty leave this timeline behind and teleport to one where they both die at around the time they show up and they quietly slip into the alternate Rick and Morty’s lives.

The infinite number of realities in this show mean there are an infinite number of Ricks as well as Morties. There is even a Council of Ricks, which our Rick refused to join. In the episode “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind,” our Rick, called Rick C-137 is accused by the Council of murdering other Ricks and has to face an evil Morty who took control of a Rick in order to frame our Rick. In this episode we learn that Morty is a cloaking device for Rick, as his brain waves cancel out Rick’s highly traceable brain wave. Most Ricks don’t care about their Morties, but ours just actually might. At the end of the episode, he tells Morty that “It would go without saying that the Rickest Rick would have the Mortiest Morty,” but he then takes the voucher for a Free Replacement Morty that the Council offered him when Morty isn’t looking. He also tells Morty not to let being the Mortiest Morty go to his head because a cocky Morty can cause problems, which implies that the Morty in the show is not our Rick’s original Morty.

The first episode of season three starts with our Rick’s origin story, embedded within the interrogation by an alien from the prison in which Rick is being held. The interrogator enters Rick’s memories to learn the secrets of Rick’s interdimensional travel device. The best part about the interrogation is when Rick and the alien stop at McDonald’s to get some of the limited edition Szechuan McNugget dipping sauce that existed when the memory was formed. They then drive to Rick’s garage where Rick watches his wife and daughter get murdered after another Rick showed up and tried to give him the technology to join all of the other Ricks. It turns out this memory was entirely fabricated and was used to give the aliens a fake formula which would allow him to hack into their computer. He then uses the machine that the aliens used to enter his brain with to take over an alien’s body. Through a series of other bodies switches, he ends up back inside another Rick’s body and topples the Galactic Federation and the Council of Ricks in one fell swoop.

After all of this, Rick returns home with Summer and Morty in tow, and the episode ends in the same style as the pilot, with Rick telling Morty about the future of their own television show as Morty is trapped on the ground. Everything is seemingly back to normal, and all of Rick’s obstacles are gone as he reveals his true motive, to get that Szechuan McNugget sauce even if it takes nine seasons.

We may never know who the Rickest Rick truly is and where he came from, and I don’t think we should try to find out because “Rick and Morty” is just too ridiculous. Instead, we should focus on getting enough signatures on the petition to bring back that Szechuan sauce, because Rick (as he exclaims at the end of the episode) needs that sauce to fuel more adventures with Morty.

The third season will be continued this summer on Adult Swim!