While Rick & Morty’s “two crows” plot initially seemed pointless, the storyline allowed the show to parody itself in the season 5 finale. Not every Rick & Morty episode is a hit with fans but, on occasion, the show can use a lesser outing to set up a stellar payoff. Where episodes like Rick & Morty’s “Claw & Hoarder” (season 4, episode 4), for example, are largely disliked due to their over-reliance on crude humor and sex jokes, secretly smart outings like “Rickdependence Spray” (season 5, episode 4) use these same tropes to mask a surprisingly clever setup that pays off later in the show.
Another example of this phenomenon can be seen in Rick & Morty’s two-part season 5 finale. The first half of the finale saw Rick replace Morty with a pair of crows, only to soon find himself in over his head when the birds turn out to be smarter than he anticipated. The ending of the episode sees Rick and Morty seemingly reunited, only for Rick & Morty to then shock fans as Rick announced he was leaving Morty behind to head on new adventures with his pair of crow sidekicks.
The second half of Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale opened with an extended sequence where Rick went on numerous samurai-style adventures with the crow duo as they fought their nemesis, a scarecrow. This subplot came to an abrupt end as Rick was outraged to discover that the two crows he was heading on adventures with were planning all their exploits with their supposed “nemesis,” making their epic plot pointless. However, Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale later showed that Rick was essentially doing the same thing via the Central Finite Curve, using endless Mortys across endless realities to go on endless, self-centered adventures. If anything, Rick’s exploits were far more morally dubious, since he was killing countless Mortys to fuel his ego while the two crows were merely lying to him.
For those who expected the show’s season 5 finale to be a more ambitious, movie-sized Rick & Morty story, the fact that the two crows subplot comprised the entire first act of the episode may have been a bit of a letdown. It’s a simple, self-contained joke whose conclusion was pretty obvious from the outset — while not everyone guessed that the crows were colluding with their apparent enemy, it was still obvious that Rick and Morty would be reunited before too long. However, Rick & Morty used the two crows plot line to parody the formulaic structure of many sitcoms and to interrogate Rick & Morty’s writing style.
By having a furious Rick castigate the crows for misleading him about the importance of their adventures, Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale put Rick in the same position as innumerable Mortys, before revealing this in the episode’s ending. While Rick’s decision to exploit the Central Finite Curve was always morally dicey, the fact that he pointed out to the crows that their plots were all meaningless and their adventures were self-serving nonsense allowed Rick & Morty to point out the same problem with Rick’s storylines. The Rick & Morty season 5 finale proved that Rick’s reign as the show’s lead needed to come to an end with the destruction of the Central Finite Curve precisely because the series would essentially be the adventures of two crows otherwise.