The eponymous antiheroes of Adult Swim hit Rick & Morty have been forced to abandon their entire reality due to major screwups on numerous occasions, but just how many times have the duo moved reality in the show’s four seasons? Soon to enter its fifth season, the anarchic animated comedy Rick & Morty has grown a lot since the show’s humble origins as a viral short mocking the Back to the Future movies.
Now a critically-acclaimed series with a sizable fanbase, Rick & Morty has spent four seasons subverting sci-fi tropes and deconstructing genre conventions through each episode’s silly, often-gory misadventures. Tortured scientific super-genius Rick and his dim-witted but well-intentioned grandson Morty have been on some wild adventures, with the pair parodying everything from Jurassic Park to Game of Thrones, to Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus along the way.
However, for all the show’s chaotic antics, Rick & Morty rarely depicts its characters full-on abandoning their reality for another when they have done irreversible damage to their homeworld. Make no mistake, the series has on occasion pulled off this narrative trick, but the instances of Rick and Morty moving from one reality to another are few and far between precisely because reminding viewers that the pair can always do so tends to sap their adventures of any tension or dramatic investment. To make the action of the series impactful, Rick & Morty can only let its central titular duo off the hook scot-free so many times, a fact Rick even hinted at with the meta-joke “we get three or four more of these, tops” the first time the series used this twist. So, now that Rick & Morty season 5 looks set to make inter-dimensional travel easier than ever, there’s no better time to look back on how many realities the pair have been forced to leave behind so far.
Rick Potion #9's Cronenberg Reality
The first instance of Rick and Morty abandoning one reality for another comes in the form of “Rick Potion #9” (season 1, episode 6). Even for the typically dark series, this episode took a surprisingly bleak and gruesome turn, with what began as a story of Morty trying to win the heart of a classmate soon devolved into a full-blown body horror extravaganza. When Rick’s eponymous potion accidentally causes everyone in the show’s reality, rather than just Morty’s would-be love interest Jessica, to fall for the poor kid, this soon sets off a chain reaction that ends with the entire reality’s population reduced to monstrous mounds of sentient flesh dubbed "Cronenbergs" in a reference to the famous body horror filmmaker.
As a result of this mishap, the pair are forced to abandon this reality entirely and dimension-hop over to another parallel universe whose own versions of Rick and Morty were killed in a freak accident seconds before their arrival. This prompts Rick’s sly meta-joke about the show only having so many of these get-out-of-jail-free moments available to the writers. However, the darkly comic sight of a visibly shook Morty burying his own corpse makes it clear that, while the ending may be an easy out for the show’s creators, this dimension hop had a pretty significant impact on the characters involved.
Morty’s Mind Blowers
“Morty’s Mind Blowers” (season 3, episode 8) may not have brought back interdimensional cable, but the outing did see Rick and Morty use the same story fix that the show had originally utilized in season 1. This time around, Morty is rifling through a few old memories when he comes across an incident wherein he was granted the ability to hear the communication of animals around him via a special device, Dr. Doolittle-style. Not unlike the love potion plot, this similarly Disney-esque comic premise soon leads into some darker-than-Disney territory. In this case, Morty realizes that the squirrels of the world control human life and don’t take kindly to being exposed. A hoard of the animals soon starts chasing Rick and Morty until the pair must leave their reality behind and find another one to grant them safety from the squirrels. Rick offers a callback to his early warning, reminding Morty that the pair only have a few of these failsafe endings to rely on. However, the critically acclaimed "Vat of Acid Episode" soon made a hypocrite of Rick, as he was the one who chose to hop between realities this time around.
The Vat of Acid Episode’s Save-Point Device
The most recent of Rick & Morty’s reality-hopping adventures require a little explanation, as the premise of “The Vat of Acid Episode” (season 4, episode 8) hinges on more dimension-jumping than even this zany series usually offers. When Rick comes up with an embarrassingly thin plan to escape during one of the pair’s many adventures, Morty ridicules his “vat of acid” scheme as ludicrous and under-ambitious. Offended that his grandson had the gall to question his abilities as an inventor, Rick teaches Morty a lesson by inventing a device that lets him rewind his life whenever something goes wrong. It’s a plot device that Morty soon takes advantage of, living countless realities before eventually ending up in an Alive (and South Park) referencing disaster. This experience humbles him and Morty learns to appreciate his normal, sci-fi-free life and new girlfriend—until Jerry accidentally undoes all of his progress.
It's at that moment that Morty learns the terrible truth that he has not been pausing reality, but actually shifting between realities with every rewind. Innumerable potential timelines are being abandoned here, but helpfully Rick condenses all of them into a single merged reality. Unfortunately for Morty, that reality is filled with victims of his “rewinding” who are furious and out for his blood. This third instance of Rick & Morty moving to a new reality occurs when Morty, having lost his latest love interest, concedes that his grandfather is an impressive inventor. This prompts Rick to bring the pair home to their normal reality, even though the clearly superior merged reality boasts rocky road ice cream with peanut butter in place of marshmallows. This final instance of Rick & Morty abandoning one reality for another is the first that didn’t see the pair explicitly reference the trope they enacted, but it is otherwise a definite third case of the narrative trick in action, meaning the series is rapidly running out of opportunities to use this out by Rick's own estimate.