Out of all of the absurd sci-fi experiments Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland) conducts within the Adult Swim series Rick and Morty, the one that is both pointless and perfectly encapsulates the nihilistic values of the show is when Rick decides to turn himself into a pickle, but why does he do it? During the season 3 episode entitled “Pickle Rick,” Morty (Justin Roiland) discovers that his grandfather has Rick turned himself into a pickle.
Since Rick has little respect for everyday customs, such as marriage and school, Rick often finds himself at odds with Morty and the Smith family’s morals and domestic values, preferring a self-serving perspective of the world. During Rick & Morty season 3, episode 3, when Rick’s weirdest experiment to date arrives suspiciously on the day the Smith family, including Beth (Sarah Chalke) and Summer (Spencer Grammer), all agreed to appear at family counseling, Rick’s seemingly meaningless experiment is proven to have a motive after all: to get out of therapy.
Within the episode “Pickle Rick,” Morty initially has trouble understanding why Rick would turn himself into something as purposeless as a pickle and asks if being a pickle grants him any special abilities, such as flying or immortality. Rick retorts that he wouldn’t be much of a pickle if he could do anything that extends beyond the vegetable’s capability, which extends no further than just being a pickle. Advising Morty to simply be impressed by the experiment, Morty asks the perfectly sane question why he or anyone would bother to turn themselves into a pickle. “The reason anyone would do this, if they could, which they can’t, would be because they could, which they can’t,” says Rick. Rick’s explanation for becoming a pickle not only, in typical Rick fashion, deflects from his true motive, which is to get out of going to family therapy, but it’s the same reason the scientists from Jurassic Park decided to clone the dinosaurs: because they could.
In Jurassic Park, during the scene when Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) eat lunch with John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), Malcom brings up the ethical issues involved in wielding unlimited genetic power without first stopping to consider the dangers of such a scientific endeavor. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” says Malcom. By referring to this line from Jurassic Park, the episode of Rick and Morty hilariously draws a comparison between Rick’s priorities and that of the scientists from Jurassic Park; while both had the capability to wield a similar impressive genetic power, Rick used it not to make millions of dollars investing in a dinosaur theme park, but rather to turn himself into a vegetable so he doesn’t have to attend therapy.
Not only does the reference to Jurassic Park in Rick and Morty highlight the extreme lengths Rick will go to in order to avoid having to take a hard look at himself, it also shows that, despite believing he’s personally above the conventions of human life, such as love and family, Rick is still clearly preoccupied by them since he’s using his mental prowess not to achieve groundbreaking advances in science, but rather to get out of those exact commonplace activities which he scorns. Even the act of turning himself into a pickle shows just how much he actually values family itself. While he could have easily escaped family therapy using one of his other inventions, Rick puts on the performance that he was so busy turning himself into a pickle that he simply forgot about the meeting so as not to directly disappoint Beth by abandoning her once again.
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