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On the most recent episode of Rick and Morty, everyone is another copy in the aptly named ‘Mortyplicity’, likely a reference to the bizarre clone Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity. The episode is absolutely filled with ridiculous accelerations and raising of stakes, until it’s all made moot by the end. In a fascinating little wrapper joke, the episode starts by what seems to be Rick and Morty talking about killing the ‘Christian god’ before they are all killed by a bunch of invaders in squid-like spacesuits.
It turns out that they are all decoys, copies of a different Smith family for protection in case something goes completely wrong. But after a few little jokes, and an intentional misdirect (the figurative decoy of the episode when Rick and Morty imply that they will be watching a show called ‘When Wolf’ instead), the true understandable truth is revealed. If the decoys are nearly identical to the originals, why wouldn’t they create their own decoys?
And so on and so on, as copies are made of copies, of lesser and lesser qualities and capabilities, until there’s no way of knowing how many are out there. Sure, at first it’s simply minor differences like Morty referencing Westworld versus Ex Machina, but eventually we get to the first horrific one — a Rick that appears to be wearing a Rick skin suit with his family members similarly hideous.
Yet there is a feeling of loyalty and love by this crazy Rick toward his family, one that is fascinatingly repeated in beats with a few of the other Smith decoys. Until finally with the fake puppet decoys (which was a great joke that I didn’t expect), Rick explicitly says that because he’s capable of sincerely apologizing for cloning Beth, that means that there is something in the original Rick that feels the same way and is capable of expressing it.
A secret current of feeling in an absolutely crazy episode. I mean, the squids were Smiths, it’s so obvious that I should’ve realized it immediately, although I did realize it before they took the helmets off so I guess that’s something. But it isn’t just about the Smiths getting killed over and over again as jokes are thrown out like Jerry saying, ‘We’re saying ‘ciao bella’ to our deposit.’
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Because there’s also the fun little side secret society of decoys who wanted simply to be left alone, led by a bunch of wooden Smiths that talk like the tinny audio of classic 90s computer games. And then a little extended diatribe about the bizarre casting of Sean Connery in Highlander as a character called ‘The Spaniard’, a common joke about it that was already perfected by Craig Ferguson.
And there’s a laugh-out-loud tiny scene with our old friend the President (voice of Keith David again) reacting to the news about all of the decoys calling it (correctly) exhausting, and joking about how he also knows that the Electoral College was about slavery. I also noticed that one of the passwords to disable decoys was just a joke about writing something dirty in ’emoticon’ form.
The ‘When Wolf’ show also references Christianity by having Dracula say it hasn’t happened yet so crosses are ‘baby T’s’, a sort of indirect layer of mockery about it. But at the end of the episode, with a truly chaotic, hilarious end credit scene, the cowardly wooden Jerry decoy that keeps coming back to life in different distant futures until we leave him at a new alien Jesus, in a way that has an odd cyclical reference to the concept. It’s hard to say what it all means except to be weird about it.
And the final pre-credits scene shows Space Beth again with who we assume are the original Smith family as Rick hears the decoy family alarm. I suppose we will never know the actual reason for the decoys starting to kill each other in the first place and starting the ‘Asimov Cascade’. But on the other hand, I don’t think the show really cares about that, it’s all about the crazy sci-fi concept taken to extremes and hiding that little emotional core underneath. Which means that this was both a super entertaining episode and surprisingly deep — really a great continuation for the season.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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