My Favorite Rick and Morty Moment is in a Post Credits Scene

For a show that often loudly professed to hate continuity, canon, and backstory Rick and Morty caps off the first season with an episode that both references characters from earlier in the season and sets up a bunch of characters for future multi-season arcs. Jerry and Beth go off to a Titanic re-enactment experience while Rick and Summer decide to enact the classic Wild Teen Party with much of the humor coming from Morty being the straight man trying in vain to keep the house from being trashed. References to earlier in the season include some stair goblins, the flu hating rapper, and some Ricks from the Citadel of Ricks (a parody of John Hickman’s Council of Reeds). Seemingly throwaway characters that become important characters throughout future seasons include Birdman, Tammy, Squanchy, Gearhead, and Slow Mobius.

Throughout the next few seasons we learn that the Rick we have been following is not the Rick who left Beth as a child. Our Rick had his Beth and Diane (we eventually learned the name of his wife) murdered when he refused to join in on the Ricks who used portal guns. Our Rick goes on the hunt for the murderer which leads him to often end up killing other Ricks who are aligned with the murderer. Eventually, to try and gain more success, he makes a deal with Birdman (who he initially met at an intergalactic Woodstock; they also met Squanchy there) to help Birdman in his rebellion against the Gromflomites if Birdman will help him find murderer Rick. (And so we learn why Rick and the government don’t get along, as he puts it early in the show’s history) Eventually, there’s a Rick brain scan that shows us that finding murderer Rick consumed our Rick’s life. It became his only obsession. Eventually he killed so many Ricks that they begged for a truce, leading to the formation of the Citadel.

After dripping this out over many seasons, our Rick finally confronts the murderer Rick who has constructed the “Omega Device” which allows him to kill a person from all possible universes/timelines. It’s revealed that at some point, he eliminated all the Dianes, not just the one-on-one murder of our Rick’s Diane. To hurt our Rick even further he decides to start purging people from Rick’s life. His first target is Slow Mobius (who we haven’t seen since season 1). Slow Mobius is revealed to be an uncle of Rick’s as he slowly falls into the beam that will elminate him from all timelines. The rest of the episode is a resolution of the Rick conflict and the apparent resolution of the “evil Morty” arc (which also ties into the various Citadel of Rick episodes). But after that episode ends we finally arrive at my favorite moment in Rick and Morty.

Each episode (except the pilot, I think) has a post-credits scene that usually contains a joke related to the episode. (With the exception of the Mr Poopy Butthole post credit scenes which reveal he’s the only character other than Rick that knows he’s in a TV show) At the end of this episode instead of a joke, the writers decide to show us the results of murderer Rick eliminating Slow Mobius from all the timelines. When his wife realizes that the kids don’t even remember him, she goes on a rampaging quest to find his killer. The visuals and music repeat what we previously saw from Rick’s memories when he was hunting the Ricks. However, at one point during her revenge quest she stops at a bar and starts talking to someone else who was on a revenge quest. She ends up forming a relationship with him and the episode ends with a scene showing that they are married.

That post-credits scene is my favorite moment of Rick and Morty because it shows an alternate path. Rick didn’t need to keep obsessing over murderer Rick forever. There was a way to find love and purpose again. In fact, this post-credits scene is a reinforcement of what Evil Morty tells Rick after he kills murderer Rick. “Feel better? No? It never does” And we see Rick numb, with all the audio muted, as he walks through his home. (The next episode even has him just lying on the floor without any motivation) For a show that’s often just full of silly jokes and movie parodies, these moments of serious emotion really stand out and they also ground the series. In the same way that humor helps keep a serious or horror movie from getting too onerous for the viewer, doing the opposite with a comedy show gives the viewer a reason to emotionally invest in the characters. They’re not just vehicles for jokes, they’re fully realized characters. `

As a post-script because it was the inspiration for the Citadel of Ricks and because it was such a great Fantastic Four run, I leave you with 2 images from the Council of Reeds:

• Rick-and-Morty