Rick & Morty’s third season 5 trailer seems to promise a glimpse of the infamous HP Lovecraft villain Cthulhu, but is it possible that the series will actually depict the monster, or is the show once again messing with its fans? Since beginning in 2013, Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty has grown a massive fanbase thanks to its ribald parody of sitcom conventions. However, it is not just family comedies that the show takes satirical potshots at.
Throughout its first four seasons, Rick & Morty has used its premise of an amoral scientific super-genius and his dimwitted grandson to spoof everything from Jurassic Park to Fantastic Voyage (and that is just in one episode). Rick & Morty has been known to parody the world of fantasy as well as sci-fi from time to time. However, as the show’s litany of references to Stephen King proves, Rick & Morty is also no stranger to parodying horror media.
Judging by the show’s trailers so far, season 5 of Rick & Morty seems to promise more of the same in this department. The season will spoon Voltron and Aquaman, but also offer parodies of ‘80s franchise Hellraiser and kaiju movies in keeping with Rick & Morty’s love of horror tropes. However, one horror mainstay that the series has repeatedly teased but never actually followed up on is the arrival of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. An influential horror author, Lovecraft’s work has informed a lot of the horror spoofed in Rick & Morty and the author’s most famous creation can even be seen in the opening credits of the series, but the show still hasn’t shown Cthulhu in a canon outing. However, the third trailer for Rick & Morty’s season 5 shows a massive, Lovecraftian beast the size of Cthulhu following the eponymous duo off a planet and toward an inter-dimensional portal, something that has been seen in the opening credits of the series since season 1 but is yet to appear in an episode.
Rick & Morty’s Lovecraft History Explained
Cthulhu has been present in the opening credits of Rick & Morty since season 1 of the acclaimed series but has never shown up in the series proper even though the character (like all of Lovecraft’s works) is in the public domain. Series co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland once teased the possibility of the famous horror icon appearing during an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2019, before eventually admitting that they planned to include the character in season 4 and later removed the cameo. Rick & Morty’s horror parodies have grown less numerous with each passing season and season 4 could have done with an appearance from the elder god glimpsed in the show’s opening credits, but given the limited number of episodes in each season, it is understandable that the appearance was cut. However, Lovecraft’s work is uniquely suited to the world of Rick & Morty, and a cameo from his most famous creation does fit the tone of the series.
Why Lovecraft Fits Rick & Morty
Lovecraftian horror is currently having a major revival, with The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and (obviously) the hit historical horror series Lovecraft Country reigniting interest in the writer’s output among television viewers. Rick & Morty is particularly well-suited to spoofing the weighty, cosmic themes of the Cthulhu mythos as plot elements like one of Rick's love interests being a planet make it clear that the show’s universe isn’t bound by earthly logic and will reach any height of surrealism in service of humor. In much the same way, Lovecraft’s writing famously discards the realm of realism in favor of terror. While some detractors find the cosmic scope of Lovecraft’s villains hard to grasp, Cthulhu and company are perfectly suited to the world of Rick & Morty, where moving from one reality to another is only an inconvenience because it is a deus ex machina and not because of the existential dread involved.
Many attempts to parody the horror of Lovecraft soften the creator’s ideas to make a light-hearted take on the material work, thus losing a lot of what makes the writer’s work so influential. However, Rick & Morty’s casual abandoning of entire realities and gleefully anarchic meta-humor make the series a perfect fit to spoof Lovecraft, as the show can explore the dark nihilism seen in the writer’s work while also adding in-jokes and parodies that do not defang the original’s impact. The fact that the similarly glib South Park is one of few series to depict Cthulhu and turned the unfathomable horror into a playmate for Eric Cartman proves that there’s comedic potential in the author’s work once the parody keeps his monsters massive and mind-breaking in scale, something Rick & Morty could easily pull off and has been promising for over four seasons now.
Why Season 5’s Cthulhu Moment May Be A Letdown
Although the monster seen in the season 5 trailer is pretty cosmic in scope, it’s not the same design as the opening sequence’s Cthulhu. This fact - combined with Rick & Morty’s tendency to tease viewers with promised horror action that never comes to fruition - proves that the trailer’s monster might be just another giant space beast that doesn’t bear any relation to the Cthulhu mythos or Lovecraft's output in general. Furthermore, much like the opening credits are something of a trolling exercise for patient viewers, the trailer could well be promising an adventure that won’t appear in the series proper at all.
Rick & Morty has a truly trippy relationship with continuity thanks to both its meta-humor and its frequent dimension-hopping, meaning the series may never actually depict the adventure seen at the close of its opening credits sequence. Rick & Morty’s “The Never-Ricking Morty” (season 4, episode 6) was an entire episode dedicated to mocking fan theories about which characters would soon return and who would prove important in the mythos of the show, and the series had repeatedly made it clear that nothing is guaranteed no matter how much viewers may be anticipating it. As a result, Rick & Morty season 5 may not feature any reference to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos at all—but it just might finally be time for the titular duo to face the mythical monster (and steal its baby, if the opening titles are to be believed).