When Jerry Smith (Chris Parnell) discovers a talking cat during the Rick and Morty season 4 episode “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty,” he naturally wonders why the cat has the ability to talk. While Jerry and Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland) eventually discover the answer by scanning the talking cat’s (Matthew Broderick) mind with one of Rick’s gadgets, their reaction to what they see in the cat’s head leaves the audience with more questions than answers, making the reason why the talking cat can talk one of the series' biggest mysteries.
While it’s unclear how the cat came to the Smith household, Jerry learns from Rick that the talking cat is an “abnormal event” unrelated to Rick’s usual science experiments and adventures. Throughout the episode, the talking cat really only says a variation of the same thing: stop asking questions about why he can talk and start having fun. Convinced by the talking cat’s “just have fun” philosophy, Jerry travels to Florida with him, a place where the cat claims people party and don’t ask questions, but Rick has growing suspicions about the cat upon meeting him. Trapping the talking cat inside an energy box, Rick scans the cat’s mind and observes his memories through a pair of goggles, despite the cat’s protests that he can talk simply because he’s from outer space. While the audience only hears screams, Rick and Jerry watch the cat’s graphic experiences, which causes Jerry to vomit and Rick to contemplate suicide.
While the reason the cat can talk is still left unanswered by the end of the episode, similar to other gags featured in Rick and Morty, the mystery is the point. While the series could’ve provided a straightforward answer, or even revealed the cat’s memories, any answer wouldn’t be as satisfying as Rick and Jerry’s extreme reactions, making the evil the talking cat is capable of as unlimited as the viewers’ imagination. While it’s left a mystery within the series, Chris Parnell, the voice actor of Jerry, describes in an exclusive interview with Digital Spy what he thinks the cat’s mind scan depicted. "Oh, wow. I guess it would be [the cat] just eviscerating other people, or maybe a sort of Hitler kind of ruler overseeing the death of millions, or – I don't know – doing horrible sexual acts,” said Parnell. "It's just... I don't know. It's hard to imagine. It's probably better left that way.”
While the mystery is never answered, and most likely never will be, there is some significance to the talking cat being a cat in the first place. The talking cat is most likely a representation of Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, since the energy box Rick traps the talking cat inside resembles the bunker from the thought experiment. Schrödinger demonstrates how quantum theory could be misinterpreted through the following thought experiment: if you place a cat in a bunker along with poisonous gas, there’s a 50% chance that the gas will release killing the cat and a 50% chance that nothing will happen allowing the cat to live, but the act of us looking inside of the bunker to see what happened to the cat forces nature to make a choice. Before being observed, however, the cat is both alive and dead in a superposition of states at the same time.
Similar to the thought experiment, when Rick and Jerry decide to look to see how the cat can talk by peering into the cat's memories, it forces nature to provide an answer, for Jerry and Rick at least, and it's one that is rather gruesome given their reactions. Just as the thought experiment is an existential enigma, the talking cat is meant to remain a mystery for the audience, leaving the reason the cat can talk stuck in a state of uncertainty. At the end of the episode, however, Rick erases Jerry’s memory of the entire incident, making it as if Jerry never looked “into the bunker.” Since Jerry’s curiosity has yet to kill the cat per se, it also leaves the door open for the talking cat to return within season 5 of Rick and Morty, given that Jerry is left with the dissatisfying answer that the cat can talk because he’s from outer space.