Rick and Morty's fifth season may be a long way away, but has its first animatic promo already offered fans evidence of alternate reality time travel without portal guns? Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's Rick & Morty is heading into season 5 soon, and the creators recently dropped a short animatic promo of the upcoming season for viewers to dissect. Fans are understandably eager to see what the creators have cooked up, resulting in some deep dives into this short promo in search of easter eggs and clues for new episodes. There's plenty of revelations hidden in the short trailer for fans to uncover, with this brief glimpse of the upcoming series already hinting at an expanded role for Jessica.
Rick and Morty has won over a huge fanbase with its mixture of irreverent humor and fast-paced sci-fi action, with the show managing to both satirize the genre's tropes and embody them at the same time. So it's never a surprise when Rick uses the show's trusty institution, a portal gun, to teleport himself and Morty to another, safer dimension. After all, the show's delicate balancing act of blending absurd high-speed action adventures with low, sitcom-style stakes mean that the series has always needed to play fast and loose when it came to Rick & Morty's continuity (or lack thereof).
But the show's latest promo suggests that there may be a way for the show to incorporate all manner of alternate realities without Rick's portal gun. Rick's comment that the pair were "Blades in this one" when he gazes into a crystal shows that these crystals (which resemble the death crystals in "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat") reflect alternate versions of the character's existences. The various other crystals which can be seen dotted all over the surface of this planet appear to offer more proof that each crystal allows access to another alternate version of our titular protagonists.
Now, Rick and Morty are admittedly no strangers to the thought of different dimensions. So many iterations of poor Morty have been offed by the series that the show once compared him to South Park's often-killed Kenny. But the option of a new method of alternate universe travel could revitalize the show's depiction of both universe-hopping and time travel. The promo sees the duo quickly escape via a closing tear in the space-time continuum but, even in the promo's unfinished animatic, this tear is distinctly different from the swirling green portals that the show has been using to signify inter-dimensional travel up until this point.
The distinction between alternate realities and dimensions may not seem too important. But if Rick and Morty can travel between different versions of their reality instead of to and from different dimensions, the show could mine this for all sorts of mind-bending sci-fi storylines where one reality affects another. Sure, the exploration of too many intersecting multiverses may well send the show into some impossible-to-untangle Donnie Darko-style universe-blending. But if ever there were a show that could pull off mind-twisting sci-fi tropes while holding onto its trademark humor and breakneck pace, it's Rick & Morty.