Rick Sanchez has invented some pretty cool stuff over the years. From interdimensional travel to robots that serve butter to little blue creatures that pop up out of nowhere to help people with a problem and then pop away again when it’s fixed, Rick has conjured up some incredible inventions.
With the fourth season of Rick and Morty due to begin airing this November, we’re surely in for some new spectacular inventions. But for the time being, we already have some amazing ones to feast our eyes on from the show’s existing trio of seasons. So, here are Rick Sanchez’s 10 Greatest Inventions, Ranked.
10. Dream inceptor
The second ever episode of Rick and Morty, “Lawnmower Dog,” parodies a number of movies, including Lawnmower Man (hence the title) and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the most obvious one is Inception.
Rick isn’t as big a fan of the movie as Morty is, but that didn’t stop him from inventing a device that allows entry into people’s dreams, much in the same way as Dom Cobb and his team enter people’s dreams in the movie. Rick and Morty’s objective is initially to change Morty’s grades, but it later becomes to simply escape the various dream levels they’ve become trapped in.
9. Timeline viewer
Rick criticized Jerry, Beth, and Summer for their narcissism when they asked to use Rick’s VR headset that takes you into the minds of your alternate selves. But come on, who among us wouldn’t want to use one of those timeline viewers to see what we’re up to in alternate realities?
Of course, it would always lead to crushing disappointment, like it did with Jerry and Beth when they realized how much better their careers would be going if they hadn’t stayed together. Even then, though, their alternate lives were sad and empty and they ended up coming back together anyway, which was sweet.
8. Microverse battery
Most people who created an entire universe containing a race of people with their own society, history, and culture would use it for something other than powering their windshield wipers. But not Rick Sanchez. The battery of his car – which is really more of a space cruiser, but he calls it a car – is technically a microverse.
The craziest thing about the microverse battery is that, not only is there a whole culture inside it, it’s a culture so advanced that it created its own microverse to provide its power, and the culture inside that one was so advanced that it created its own one (and so on).
7. Shrink ray
As scientists have pointed out in the wake of the Ant-Man movies’ success, proportional shrinking of humans is simply impossible. Still, Rick Sanchez managed to figure it out as he developed a theme park inside a homeless man’s body called Anatomy Park.
He shrunk Morty down and sent him in there to talk to Dr. Xenon Bloom – a parody of John Hammond from the Jurassic Park franchise – who ended up having nefarious intentions and screwing things up. To get Morty out of there, Rick managed to reverse the shrink ray’s technology to enlarge the homeless man and get Morty back to regular size inside.
6. Space cruiser
Considering he just hashed it together from a collection of things he found lying around the Smiths’ garage when he first moved in, Rick’s space cruiser – or “car,” as he calls it – is an impeccable thing. The most impressive thing about the car is its security system.
When Rick instructed it to “keep Summer safe,” it diced up one guy, paralyzed another guy, and traumatized a cop with a lifelike recreation of his dead son. It also brokered a peace treaty between the humans and the telepathic spiders that share the world in that dimension. It just goes to show that it’s not about the tools you use; it’s how you use them.
5. Butter-passing robot
When the Smith family was too wrapped up in an argument over the breakfast table to pass Rick the butter, he put together a little robot to travel across the table, grab the butter, and bring it back to him.
On paper, it might not seem like a robot whose sole purpose is to pass butter is all that impressive. But you have to bear in mind that the robot became sentient, grappled with the soul-crushing philosophical revelation that there was no deeper meaning to its life than passing butter to people, and it only took Rick a few short seconds to whip it up.
4. Time freezer
Having the ability to freeze time would be awesome. If you were getting too stressed at work or you wanted a few more hours in bed or you wanted to stroll around town without any crowds, you could just freeze time. And Rick’s time-freezing device doesn’t come with any nasty side effects like the one Christopher Walken gives to Adam Sandler in the movie Click.
It doesn’t start skipping everything you’ve ever skipped before and it wasn’t created by the Angel of Death and it doesn’t have a weird DVD menu. Well, there is the side effect of ripping open the space-time continuum, but that only happens if you leave time frozen for too long.
3. Dark matter
Dark matter is the fuel that allows for faster space travel. It proves to be such a lucrative invention that a whole race of aliens abducted Rick – and Jerry, accidentally – and put him in a simulation of his home with simulations of his family to get him to reveal the formula for it.
In the end, he didn’t fall for any of their simulations, providing the episode with yet another plot twist (the writers didn’t call it “M. Night Shaym-Aliens!” for nothing) as Rick hums along to “Baker Street” and the formula he gave the Zigerions blows up their mothership.
2. Interdimensional cable TV box
This invention is so great that the writers of Rick and Morty squeezed two whole episodes out of it. In the first season, “Rixty Minutes” introduced us to an alternate reality in which Jerry is a movie star, a version of Game of Thrones where Tyrion is mocked for being taller than everyone else, and an appliance salesman named Ants-in-My-Eyes Johnson.
In the second season, “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate” showed us conjoined aliens who host rivaling TV shows, a game show that teleports random people into dangerous situations, and an action movie about a dystopian future populated with clones of Jan Michael Vincent.
1. Portal gun
Not only is Rick’s portal gun his greatest invention, he also insinuates it’s his favorite one. It’s certainly the one he uses the most. Frankly, the ability to shoot a squiggly green circle anywhere in the world, step into it, and come out in an entirely different dimension in the multiverse is remarkable.
It’ll almost definitely never exist in the real world for as long as the human race is around, because the technology behind it is completely unrealistic, but it’s believable in the context of the show, since Rick is depicted as the smartest being in the universe and it stands to reason that if anyone could create a portal gun, it would be someone of that description.