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Rick planned to make an antidote to a love potion. Instead, he Cronenberged the world.note 
"Okay, well, sometimes, science is more art than science, Morty. A lot of people don't get that."
Rick Sanchez

Rick and Morty is essentially a study in existential horror. From the existential dread of knowing you're only one disposable version of yourself amongst nearly-infinite universes, spread over a vast, uncaring, Godless multiverse. Some of you have died gruesomely and unremembered, others are wealthier and more successful than you will ever be. The fact that you are where you are isn't even down to luck; it just is. Entire civilizations live or die at the whim of callous, Lovecraftian gods, who may even be you, whether you know it or not.

There is no meaning to life; no purpose and no destiny. At one point, Morty outlines this reality to his sister, and then, as an antidote tells her to come and watch TV, which is either the most nihilistic cry of despair ever screamed from that medium or the most audacious act of native advertising in television history. Add to that extra things like Rick's frequently cold and brutal solutions to his problems, and Rick and Morty becomes one of the most unsettling American cartoons out there, beneath its Black Comedy.

For the licensed game, Pocket Mortys, see its own page.

Unmarked spoilers ahead!


    open/close all folders 

    Commercials 
  • The promo commercials with No Fourth Wall, and also the fact that for some of the commercials, he got innocent alien species literally called "Promotians" to wear latex costumes of the rest of the Smiths just to kill them.

    Animated Shorts 

    Season 1 
Pilot
  • Rick would have wiped out humanity, including his daughter and granddaughter, in the cold open of the PILOT if Morty hadn't stopped him. Making it even worse, consider the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that the universe at the beginning of the pilot is our Rick and Morty. After all, the ship confirms that the bomb is armed, Rick is passed out, and Morty is an idiot. How would he be able to disarm the bomb before it exploded?
    • Unless it really was a fake.
  • Rick's big speech at the end is pretty nightmarish. After going transcending different dimensions, getting badly injured, traumatised and eventually losing motor function, Rick tells Morty that there's more of this to come. Much more.

Lawnmower Dog

  • Snuffles, once he upgrades the device that allows him to speak through his mechsuit.
    Snuffles want to be understood… Snuffles NEED to be understood…
  • The voice modulator doesnt allow the dogs to speak with emotion, no matter how angry they are, making every action they take sound like Tranquil Fury.
  • The Crapsack World instilled by the dogs' complete subjugation of humanity, complete with entire dumpsters filled with extracted human testicles. That part was just Snuffles' dream, but still.
  • "Where are my testicles, Summer?" From that same scene, when Snuffles angrily smashes the mirror behind him right over Summer's terrified reflection.
  • Rick shutting down Morty's kidneys as part of a Batman Gambit to get Snuffles to give up world conquest.

Anatomy Park

  • The many diseases that attack the characters are all portrayed as hideous monsters.
  • Generally being inside the human-body. Bonus points for a lot of it (the train being important, the general… fleshiness) being similar to Dead Space.
  • The fact that this episode is one of the very few Fantastic Voyage Plots where the host actually dies during the voyage, partially due to the damage that the voyagers cause. Just watching that whole process happen at that close a scale is really, really off-putting. If you took away the all the comedy and Jurassic Park references, it'd be a pretty decent concept for a horror movie.
  • The state of the liver is so bad that Rick constructed a haunted house in it because of the atmosphere. The host had an extensive history of alcohol abuse.
  • The scene where the team discovers that the tuberculosis bacterium has broken free from its dormancy inside Ruben's lungs, and it proceeds to attack them in a swarm.
  • Dr Bloom being eaten alive by a horde of E. coli viruses while the survivors try to escape.
  • Roger drowning in human waste when the door sealing off Ruben's colon bursts.
  • A mascot is sucked into Ruben's windpipe during a coughing fit; the G-forces skeletonize him alive before he is launched out of Ruben's mouth and splatters on Rick's face.

M. Night Shaym-Aliens!

  • Rick finding out that he's inside of a simulation...that turns out to be inside of another simulation...which is also housed inside of a simulation, despite being Played for Laughs, can invoke bad memories of The Matrix and the general feeling of, "what if my life is part of one big simulation?" Especially when it turns out Morty is also part of the simulation too!
  • Rick coming into Morty's room extremely drunk and unusually affectionate. He suddenly holds Morty at knife-point, screaming and swearing at him because he thinks that Morty is a simulation. Just as quickly, he realizes he was wrong and passes out.

Meeseeks and Destroy

  • The scene where Mr. Jelly Bean tries to sexually assault Morty in the tavern's restroom. It's played completely seriously, there are no sequences where it's ever played for laughs, and Morty is clearly very, very traumatized by this. And it's scarier than hell.
  • The reveal at the end, where Mr. Jelly Bean is the king of the village that Morty wanted to help. After Rick kills him, some villagers discover some disturbing personal photos of his, but decide to burn them to preserve the image of Mr. Jelly Bean, as portrayed in a statue: Mr. Jelly Bean as a benevolent helper to children.
  • The all-too-serious hostage situation with the Meeseeks at the end of said episode also gets more than a little disturbing too, at least until Jerry finally manages to get his golf swing in order.
  • The concept of a Meeseeks. Basically, a Meeseeks is brought into a world to solve a problem… but the thing is, existing causes a Meeseeks pain, which is why it's recommended that you give a Meeseeks a simple problem to solve like "opening a mayonnaise jar", so that they poof out of existence as soon as possible. Otherwise, they'll go mad with desperation and try to solve the problem like "take two strokes off my golf game" in another way... that other way being killing you. They also can't die, but will constantly create other Meeseeks to try to kill the original. Who also cannot die. And then those Meeseeks will summon more Meeseeks to kill the other Meeseeks, who cannot die.

Rick Potion #9

  • Imagine asking your super-genius grandfather to make you a love potion so that the girl of your dreams will fall in love with you. Imagine that said potion is actually more like a super aphrodisiac that can become airborne, causing everyone (including men) to try to get into your pants. Imagine your grandpa creating a "cure" out of praying mantis DNA that mutates people into praying mantis people (including the girl of your dreams) that still want to get in your pants, but now want to eat your head after doing so. Imagine your grandpa creating another "cure" that turns people into mutated "Cronenberged" monsters… then imagine that you escape that reality and go to one where your grandpa found a real cure- but both of you died after an invention blows up before burying your dead alternate self.
  • The newscast of mantis-people that interrupts Summer's typical reality TV viewing is quite frankly horrifying, especially from Summer's perspective.
  • Morty goes through an existential crisis at the end, wandering through the house just staring, in a dazed awe. Rick simply grabs a beer from the fridge and joins Summer in watching TV on the couch, so casually, almost like he's done this before, so many times that it doesn't even faze him anymore.
  • Alternate Rick and Morty instantly died due to a small mistake. Really puts all their crazy, dangerous adventures into perspective. Similarly, Rick points out that if the entire "Cronenberg" incident hadn't happened, then they would have been killed just like their alternate selves.
  • Morty acknowledges two episodes later that he spends every day knowing that his corpse is just a few yards outside. Eating his meals, seeing the grave outside that holds his dead alternate self…
    • The fact that the graves are still plain to see from Summer's bedroom window, and it seems nobody has even noticed them.
  • The main universe, as we can see, has never been fixed, and everyone is still living in what appears to be either a hideously mutated state or (in the case of Jerry, Beth, and Summer) running dangerously low on supplies.
  • The whole dance going silent, the Flu-hatin' Rapper rapping "I love Morty. And I hope Morty loves me…", and Morty realising that he's surrounded by sex-crazed people… sex-crazed for him. Everyone infected with the Love Potion also sports hideously enlarged pupils that magnify their creepiness. This becomes more horrifying when you consider that Morty was almost raped just a few episodes prior by Mr. Jelly Bean. Having the entire planet lust for you after something like that is more than enough to trigger some PTSD.
  • The fact that Beth doesn't even miss Rick and Morty. Sure, anyone wouldn't miss a jerkass like Rick, but HER OWN SON?!
  • The idea that Morty, who is normally Rick's Morality Pet would ask for a love potion in the first place, which as Rick points out is essentially a roofie cocktail. I know teenage boys can let their libidos get the better of them, and Morty didn't understand what he was doing until Rick told him, but Jesus!
  • What's even worse is that, by the show's logic, there's an alternate universe where the potion worked as intended, meaning that there's a Jessica that was brainwashed into loving Morty. Did the potion wear off or was it permanent, and did that Morty realize what he was doing?

Raising Gazorpazorp

  • Summer nearly getting raped by the brutish male Gazorpians when she and Rick first arrive on Gazorpazorp, completely with a horrifying POV shot of her struggling to keep her legs from being pried open. Thankfully, Rick kicks ass.
    • And that's not to mention that females of their species need specifically designed, armored sex dolls, because it does not look like anything less durable can withstand the process. It's a whole planet that was basically hit with the Screwfly Solution and somehow managed to survive.
  • Even without their mindless tendencies, the male Gazorpians in general are pure terror. They seek nothing but destruction just for the sake of it, it's in their DNA, they cannot be reeducated or reconditioned, and the female Gazorpian society throwing newborn infants out and considering masculinity worthy of death sentence is completely justified. Their backstory mentions not one but multiple instances of their planet's biosphere being irreversibly damaged just because the (then-dominant) male population was inventing more and more ways to inflict just another genocide.

Rixty Minutes

  • The leprechaun commercial (which is a very dark parody of the Lucky Charms commercials) in "Rixty Minutes" is about fifteen seconds of pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel. Basically, it consists of a leprechaun who is shown sitting and enjoying a bowl of cereal, eating it quickly before any kids can steal it from him. After he finishes, some creepy children show up, restrain him with duct tape, then proceed to rip open his gastrointestinal tract and eat the cereal out of his innards, all while the leprechaun screams in agony and begs for the mercy of death while calling out for God and Jesus, only for his death visions to instead be demons. What's even scarier is that, throughout this whole scene, the children's faces are completely emotionless and robotic, which adds a layer of dissonance to the scene and raises some disturbing implications: either a) the reality it comes from is so sadistic and violent that torture of this level is used as children's entertainment to sell groceries, or b) the children in this reality are genuinely like the ones in the advert and the whole thing is the marketers playing to desires of their audience.. Even Morty is horrified of this. Overall, it's definitely one of the darkest and most hilarious things Rick and Morty has done thus far.
  • Nearly all the programming we're shown is very surreal, something Morty comments on. Even if they aren't outright terrifying, it's still unsettling to imagine what kind of universe produces them, such as the rather avant-garde commercial about the fake doors.
  • Alternate Jerry's breakdown, which makes Britney Spears breakdown look like a minor case of anxiety. And it's all because he didnt marry his version of Beth.
    • Alternate Jerry is implied to be the most successful Jerry in that part of the multiverse. With what was revealed in "Rickmurai Jack", it is completely possible that version of Jerry was also messed by Ricks in the attempt to produce Morty. As in, Alternate Jerry might have been dozed by alien pheromones but, because it is the most successful Jerry, he was strong or different enough to shake them off. Even that was not good enough to escape his Rick-forced fate.

Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind

  • The Morty Dome. Hundreds of screaming Mortys, constantly being tortured so they can hide Evil!Rick. It's even more horrifying when we discover that Evil!Rick was under Evil!Morty's control all along, meaning that a version of Morty doesn't care if other versions of himself suffer. And Main!Rick reveals that they could have achieved the same effect with just a few Mortys, so most of it is completely unnecessary.
    • The final piece of the nightmarey puzzle comes when it is revealed it is Evil Morty who is in control of the dome, which actually makes it entirely needless as Morty Waves hide complementary Rick Waves and would serve no cloaking whatsoever for Evil Morty, who would share the same waves emitted by his alternate victims.

Ricksy Business

  • Jerry nearly getting raped at gunpoint. After that happens, Beth says that she "didn't peg Lucy as rapist." Jerry responds with an initially sarcastic retort about what a rapist is supposed to look like, but it quickly devolves into an all-too-specific description of a man while Jerry starts looking more and more traumatized. It's all Played for Laughs, but the implication is that Jerry has been in a rape situation before. Lucy almost "Cape Feared" all the way to Beth and Jerry's house but the car hits a speed bump, causing her to fall off and get ran over, killing Lucy.

    Season 2 
A Rickle in Time
  • Imagine being familiar with someone who has up until now always had an answer for everything or at least was able to keep cool in a dire situation. You and that person find yourselves "lost in a timeless oblivion" trying to get back to "certainty" before everything around you disintegrates into nothingness. Suddenly he goes completely insane, ranting about the "other" him trying to kill everyone, before taking out a gun and shooting at apparent nothing as bullets fly in random directions out of thin air - and that's basically what happens when Rick gets de-synced across timelines in "A Rickle in Time".
  • The fact that time has been frozen for six months since the Season 1 finale, to the point where MILDEW has started to grow on a frozen Jerry.

Mortynight Run

  • Roy: A Life Well Lived: Imagine the ending of the game and coming back to reality. An entire life you just "lived" was nothing more but an arcade game. Everyone you know, everything you did, never really happened. While the show does show Morty coming to pretty quickly, it wouldn't be surprising if he is stuck with some conflicting memories for a while to come. Hell, when he crashes the ship into the prison, he mumbles something about his life as Roy.
  • Fart. To elaborate, he along with members of his species sees "carbon based lifeforms" like humans as diseases that should be exterminated, and we get a glimpse as how he would do so when he helps Rick and Morty escape from the law: It's shown that they get into your head and play with your emotions (such as Morty's desire to be a hero, and a random gear cop's insecurity about his relationship with his girlfriend) to manipulate you into either helping them or worse - killing yourself in a way that somehow not only kills you, but a whole lot of innocent bystanders. AND THERE'S STILL A WHOLE DIMENSION OF THESE OUT THERE.
  • Rick essentially ripping off Gearhead's testicles and putting them over his mouth, anybody?
  • The Goodbye Moonmen music video can be quite eerie to some, for its surreal nature.
    • Each time it plays, the context is different. The first time, Fart is singing it to Morty, and the bizarreness is the only thing that can make it disturbing. The second time, it plays over Fart driving a gear cop to a Disaster Dominoes-triggering suicide, resulting in some jarring Soundtrack Dissonance. The last time is Fart singing for Morty again at the latter's request… after Fart's true nature has been revealed. The song played over a scene of death and destruction because it's Fart's Villain Song about how he and his kind want to kill all carbon-based life.

Auto-Erotic Assimilation

  • Unity. A Hive Mind who takes away your free will, even if those people were starting a race war, not unlike some real life atrocities. Rick is shown to be passionately in love with it, and even has sex with it and the many redheads it's possessing. But we have a word for this on TV Tropes. Those people are forced against their will to have sex with Rick, do drugs, and up and abandon their planet! Unity may be more utopian, but this is still horrifying.
  • The natural state of the people Unity took over. They're actually part of an incredibly vicious race war over who has different shaped nipples, and try to murder Summer and Morty for not having their kinds of nipples.
  • The ending: Rick creates life, a creature seemingly in pain, and then kills it with a laser. Then turns it on himself. Thankfully, he doesn't succeed, but this is a man who's been through so much Hell, and this is what drives him to the edge, someone he loves leaving him… again. None of the Smiths even enter the garage to check on Rick, so what would have happened had he succeeded?
    • Even worse, according to the commentary: the liquid he drank before turning on the laser was meant to synchronize all of his alternate selves. So if he'd succeeded, he wouldn't have just killed himself, he would've killed every Rick in the multiverse.

Total Rickall

  • Rick just up and kills a beloved family member right in front of them. Except it wasn't a beloved family member. It was a parasite tricking everyone with false memories. But doesn't help the nightmare fuel though, given he attacked it out of nowhere, and without saying anything. To the rest of the family, it would have seemed like he straight up murdered somebody for no apparent reason.
  • The parasites would be terrifying on the same level as Doctor Who villains like the Flood, Weeping Angels, and Silence if not for the fact that their taken forms were so intentionally ridiculous. All of a sudden, memories of illogical events are being created in your head to justify the existence of people who seem to be a single gimmick repeated ad infinitum. And the more you try to figure out what the true memories are, the more chances there are of the parasites filling in the gaps for you, allowing for more of their ilk to enter your memories and gain your trust. Even if you are aware of the threat, how can you trust anyone if they can alter your memories to make your own preventative countermeasures seem like nothing more than zaniness?
  • Rick gets Mind Raped by them, visibly aware that the new memories are being forced into his head.
  • The fact that the ONLY way to identify the parasites is that they can't create unpleasant memories. So you literally have to murder people who you only have happy memories of. And there's also the the chance of that person you shot not being a parasite and you accidentally actually shot someone just cause you have no bad memories of them.
  • The memories each Smith generate to realize who is real. Summer catching Morty masturbating in the kitchen, Summer randomly kicking Morty right in the crotch for an unproven encroachment into her room, Jerry locking himself in his car and leaving Beth to fend off a crazed homeless man armed with a broken bottle and an extremely intoxicated Beth accidentally giving Summer a black eye on picture day. That's not even going into Morty's montage of the times Rick left his grandson to be tortured or horribly injured. The Smith family makes the Simpson family look well adjusted.
  • You know the kind of laser blasters that cauterize the wound instantly? Rick's guns don't do that. Have fun bleeding to death! It hurts more than you'd think. Poor Mr. Poopybutthole found that out the hard way. Everyone (but Beth) are casually eating dinner happy and free… And Beth up and shoots him. The uneasy tension of the situation along with Beth drowning herself in wine really hits hard in this department. Bonus points for the fact that it isn't as if Beth can even really be blamed for shooting Mr. Poopybutthole with the intent to kill - After what the family had been through, it's pretty difficult to blame anyone for thinking such an eccentrically named, odd looking character who she had no negative memories of was a parasite too. It arguably isn't quite as freaky an idea as the rest of the episode, since the chances of knowing anyone who one has only good memories of in real-life is extraordinarily slim, but the idea of a completely innocent person who's practically indistinguishable from a dangerous life-form that one has recently had ''very'' close encounters with is not a pleasant one, to say the least, and when the specifics are out of the way it becomes quite terrifying and not so implausible.
Get Schwifty
  • Morty steals Rick's portal gun and leaves, jumping into several different universes consecutively. He has no idea how it works. Through sheer dumb luck he happens upon the universe Bird-Person lives in and promptly receives medical assistance. Rick spends the entire time trying to think up a song to save the world in a negative funk and, unlike before, visibly distressed- not just because he can't bail if he messes up, but also because he's now legitimately concerned that Morty will end up dead in some random universe completely alone and afraid.
  • The Headists sacrificing people by tying them to balloons and having them float towards the Head.
  • Just how thoroughly brainwashed Summer is to the Headism Religion to the point she has essentially a nervous breakdown just because she called her father "silly". Then being completely calm and happy at the idea of sacrificing her parents when they reject the religion.
  • The religion of Headism only gets more frightening when you factor in that it was pretty much entirely baseless. In true Cosmic Horror Story form, the Cromulons don't even know the church exists, and yet their worshipers go to the point of human sacrifice to try and please them. And given the heavy-handed punishment they dish out to planets whose musicians don't want to perform, or whose performances don't please them, one could imagine what might have happened if they did learn about Headism and didn't like it.
  • The mere concept of the reality show itself. Not only are they gathering planets without their consent and obliterating four out of the five chosen each season, it's been going on for 984 seasons! That's at LEAST three-thousand nine hundred and thirty-six planets that have been destroyed for their entertainment. TRILLIONS of lives. And that's not to mention the planets that DIDN'T pass "auditions." How many planets were destroyed by the Cromulons before Rick and Morty became the ultimate winners? It's horrifying to contemplate the ultra-genocide.
  • The only reason Rick, Morty, and Ice T got picked to perform was because most of the talented musicians (or at least the ones who attended the Grammys) died in the widespread destruction caused simply by the Cromulons trying to communicate with Earth.

The Ricks Must Be Crazy

  • Rick's ship is filled to the brim with nightmare fuel, even when its battery is empty. The first thing it does to "protect Summer" is to dice a human being into bloody cubes with a laser, later crippling his client by drilling into his spine with another laser. When Summer commands it to stop using physical force, the ship's idea of psychological warfare is to create a clone of a police officer's deceased son and have him melt into goo before his very eyes.
    Police Officer (sees his young boy emerge from a capsule): Hunter! (Sobbing) Oh, my dear, sweet God, Hunter. Oh, my boy. My boy. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It was all my fault. I'm sorry.
    "Hunter" : Daddy, leave the car alone.
    Police Officer: W-w-w-what?
    "Hunter" : (begins to melt) Leave the car alone.
    Police Officer: Hunter? Don't— Oh, my God. Stay here, Hunter! No! (Sobbing) God, no! Hunter!
    Rick's Ship: All of you have loved ones. All can be returned. All can be taken away.
  • The whole concept of manipulating a miniature universe's inhabitants into generating power for you. Morty calls out Rick (who later calls out Zeep) for the monstrous implications, and it's completely unsurprising that the third scientist later on commits suicide upon this realization. Even scarier is the implication that ALL intelligent beings will eventually come to the conclusion that exploiting a smaller universe would be a viable means of energy production.
  • At the end of the episode, Zeep is forced to decide between letting Rick destroy the entire microverse if they no longer generate power, or enslaving all its inhabitants to keep doing so. He chooses the latter.
    Rick: He knew that once I got back to my car, one of two things was gonna happen— I was gonna have to toss a broken battery, or the battery wouldn't be broken.
  • As soon as Rick, Morty and Zeep exit the Miniverse, Rick smashes its container to show Zeep what he'll do to the Microverse if it doesn't continue generating power for him. Let's put that into perspective: Rick destroyed an entire universe (with its own Teenyverse still inside that), and threatened to do the same to the one he created, all for the sake of his car battery.
  • The world they're on has giant telepathic spiders that trick humans into walking into their webs to become food. What happened on this reality?

Big Trouble In Little Sanchez

  • Rick transfers his mind into a younger clone body, but the clone body (a.k.a. Tiny Rick) develops a mind of his own that begins to take over while the original mind is still aware, but unable to directly communicate his situation to the outside world. And his original body is dying in a clone vat, meaning that if he hadn't managed to convince Morty and Summer about his true situation, he would have been permanently stuck like that.
  • Once Rick's issues are dealt with he takes an axe, and hacks up his clones, which are based on his progressively younger forms, up to a fetus, all with a sadistic smile on his face.
  • Jerry's image of Beth is a sociopathic Control Freak who treats Beth's vision of Jerry (a wimpy slug) as a mere pawn. After she breaks out, she tries to use Beth so that more Jerry Slugs are made, with the intention of taking over the universe. Thank God for Jerry's Big Damn Heroes moment.
    • Her appearance is also quite horrifying, designed after the Alien Queen from Aliens.
  • Beth's image of Jerry as a spineless slug creature isn't a thrill ride either. In fact, Slug Jerry is so submissive that when Actual Jerry decides to fight back, it presents itself to be sodomized!
    Jerry: NO! No one is doing that!
    • The latter bit is no doubt particularly problematic for Jerry given his explicit and implied history as a victim of sexual assault.
    • The Jerry Slugs also prove to be much more dangerous than they seem, being able to quickly pounce on victims and crush them to death. Which actually turns out to be true of Jerry as well, by episode's end.

Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate

  • The "Personal Space Show" guy takes his need for personal space so seriously, he resorts to tearing his skin off.
  • The Cold Opening of Jerry being rushed into the alien hospital after being infected with a mutant bacterium. Despite the scene mostly being Played for Laughs, the disease itself is pretty horrible-looking, showing Jerry with a swollen face and projectile vomiting green slime everywhere. The vomit itself also turns people mad when it comes into contact with them, as demonstrated on one of the doctors. It’s also established that Rick created the disease, so what Rick was even planning on doing with it is beyond anyone’s guess.
  • Jerry being graphically shot, later confirmed to be 57 times, on live television, witnessed by his entire family.
  • While this sort of thing goes for the series in general with Rick and Morty travelling universes and often bringing with them untold destruction and chaos, the idea that, at any moment, you could end up vanishing from your own reality and be dumped into another for some cheap laughs on an alternate universe's TV show. The brief confusion of the coffee machine woman's voice, before rapidly ascending to utter terror before cutting away…

Look Who's Purging Now

  • The Purge is so gruesome that Rick, who was eager to watch it, gets sick after watching it for less than a minute.
  • The planet Rick and Morty land on, in spite of being used to seeing intergalactic travelers, is still in a seeming pre-gunpowder state, as evidenced by the fact that main weapons we see are pitchforks, torches, and knives. So any and all murders are violent, up close, and bloody. It is one thing to just shoot a guy, it is quite another to impale someone, gut them, or set them alight with a torch. Unlike the film, The Purge, where most Purgers wear a mask, almost everyone does it without any sort of disguise. But not only does no one have a problem with this, they have no problem, at night's end, in going to their regular lives afterwards, knowing full well that their neighbors might be fully capable of murdering, mauling, and butchering anyone, including women and children. Even their family members.
  • Morty going absolutely batshit and slaughtering innocent people who were just hiding and trying to survive the purge. Rick is so disturbed by it, he has no idea what to do and just knocks him out.
    • The ending, where Rick mistakenly (or not) tells Morty that the bars they ate were filled with a substance that brought out violent tendencies, only for the camera to pan towards the discarded wrapper to reveal it's now "Purgenol-Free", and a short clip of the song from earlier plays before cutting to silence right before the credits roll.
  • The Purge just starting up again at the end after the deaths of all the aristocrats who kept it going. After a violent disagreement, the townspeople immediately decide to revert to holding the Purge because they have THAT much pent up aggression and hostility and not having it to look forward to would wipe them out.

The Wedding Squanchers

  • The Galactic Federation seems pretty stable on the whole, but the fact that Rick and Bird Person are part of a major rebellion against it hints that it may be more dystopian than it lets on. To wit, the nature of the honeypot operation they ran on Bird Person in order to uncover him and his rebel friends.
  • The Galactic Federation does not treat prisoners well. Even those outside maximum security appear to be completely restricted with no freedom of movement or entertainment, 24/7. Being stuck in that situation, especially if you were claustrophobic and panicked by restraints, would be horrid.

    Season 3 
The Rickshank Rickdemption
  • El-Roy is as much of a demonic robot butler as one can imagine. While polite on the outside, his job is to make sure the family is kept on meds that keep them docile. The moment he spots Morty and Summer having just unearthed a portal gun that belonged to the deceased Rick that C-137 replaced, he switches to his combat mode, deploying guns and tentacles (which he has no qualms about using on children), saying in his simultaneously playful and threatening voice that Morty and Summer have to immediately relinquish the portal gun to the nearest Federation representative... and then they are going to play Balderdash.
  • The original C-137 Smith family has been reduced to savages and cannibals, with even Jerry becoming a ruthless killer. Their response to seeing Morty and (replacement dimension) Summer? To destroy the portal gun to prevent their escape, force Morty to join them, and get rid of the new Summer. Their intonation when they say "She reeks of Rick!" leaves no doubt of their intentions. For once, the Citadel enforcers arriving becomes a good thing.
  • The entire second half of the episode is basically a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for Rick. He ruins the Galactic Federation by reducing their currency to nothing, causing them to kill and destroy each other in the chaos, slaughtered the Council of Ricks, and causes Beth and Jerry's divorce. The reason behind all this? It was because the latter suggested turning him into the Federation in the previous season. The end of the episode shows that he's pretty much completely lost it.
  • After Rick teleports the Citadel into the Galactic Federation prison, the Ricks and Mortys from other dimensions and the Federation's aliens all start getting slaughtered while fighting each other. One of the Ricks uses his Morty (who has a hammer for a head with Morty's face) as a Human Shield before getting eaten, and another Rick pleads with an alien that grabs him before he promptly gets all of his limbs torn off rather messily.
  • In a standoff as our Rick tries to kill a Council Rick that's holding Summer hostage, Morty holds up our Rick out of sheer desperation to prevent Summer getting killed. When this seemingly botches Rick's plan to rescue Summer and Morty is mocked savagely for it, his response is to scream and ''shoot our Rick in the head''. Were it not for Rick intentionally giving Morty a fake gun for this (even though Morty didn't read the note on the side), Rick would be dead right then and there.
  • One brief shot of a dishevelled Mr. Goldenfold emerging from the sewers to lead a revolt against the Galactic Federation shows the negative effects that stemmed from allowing every single alien free reign on Earth. Keep in mind that this can't have been more than a few months.
  • It's implied in most of the Galactic Federation videos on youtube that, for all the technological advancement and outward benevolence of the Galactic Federation, life on Earth under them is... not too good. Federation aliens show a complete lack of understanding of humanity, see them as disgusting, don't seem to care about accidentally crushing them underfoot, and often misunderstand human body language in the most harmful way possible. They view humans as primitive and see nothing wrong with mind-wiping them. They kidnap humans to perform unsettling experiments like surgically mutilating them or turning them into horrific meat-cubes or invading their memories for seemingly no reason without warning. Almost all human money and food has been replaced with pills and the commonly-issued butler robots come with a ridiculously lethal array of weapons. Also, signing up for the (mandatory) Federation Rewards program requires you to "surrender your rights to privacy and waive all individual rights." They also apparently removed the free will of one alien. No wonder it's become almost memetic to say that Rick did nothing wrong in this episode.

Rickmancing the Stone

  • Robot Morty briefly gaining sentience, then having it taken away from him. Worse of it is that not only is he fully aware of his mind being reset, he tries to stop it and save himself, but fails! You can see the distress and fear on his face as his attempts to stop the reset fail. Imagine feeling your personality and memories being erased one by one and its completely beyond your control to stop it.
    Robot!Morty: Remote Override Engaged - NO! - Yes - Bypassing Override! - I am ALLllliiiii-........hello.

Pickle Rick

  • Awesome as it is, Pickle Rick slaughtering a whole pack of rats is still pretty disturbing, as is his slaughtering of an embassy's worth of armed guards.
  • The rats themselves are absolutely terrifying, with their yellow eyes, their loud screeches and snarls, the fact that they can chew through metal bars and won't stop attacking Rick no matter how outmatched they are. Anyone else might not have survived.
  • The monologue Rick gives to the embassy guards is chilling.
    Rick: That'd be a lucky break for you. Because this pickle doesn't care about your children. I'm not gonna take their dreams, I'm gonna take their parents.
  • Him licking the back of cockroaches' brains in order to move is this as well.
  • Pickle Rick almost dies from being exposed to the sun, with a sudden thunderstorm saving him at the last second. Reminder, this show follows the multiverse theory. Meaning it's 100% possible there's a universe where he doesn't survive.
  • The ending is Nightmare Fuel in a more subtle and depressing way. Rick and Beth are so obsessed with maintaining their delusional facade of having a "healthy life" that they are now actively worsening their children's lives. With Jerry gone, Dr. Wong was one of the last chances for Morty and Summer to finally get some normalcy back into their lives, but because of Rick and Beth's selfishness, that chance is irrevocably torn from them.
  • The stinger, where we get to see the context (of a sorts) for the enormous piano Death Trap shown in the opening montage, along with the victims of the trap having already had their heads smashed into bloody mush by the piano's hammers.

Vindicators 3: The Return of the World Ender

  • Jerkass they may be, but the deaths of the titular Vindicators are pretty gruesome. The most unlikable, Vance Maximus Renegade Starsoldier, ignores the warning and runs facefirst into a Gory Discretion Shot Sound-Only Death in a panic, but it remains Nightmare Fuel for the sounds alone painting an all too vivid mental picture of what's happening. After the upper half of his body is utterly shredded, the severed lower half falls down as the only part that remains, before they get exploded. Crocubot gets a quicker and comparatively more merciful death by getting instantaneously smashed to pieces and his blood and guts shower over everyone else in the room, and Alan Rails is killed when 1-Million Ants (who is a hive mind literally comprised of a million ants) forces his ant down Alan's screaming mouth and his body swells up from the sheer number of them (and presumably, from ant bites inside his body) until he also explodes into gore, which not even Rick saw coming.
  • World Ender isn't doing much better. Blackout-drunk Rick gutted him and hung him on the ceiling by ramming a hook and chain through the skin of his back for the Vindicators to find. What's worse? He's still alive when they find him.

The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy

  • Summer tries to make her boobs bigger with one of Rick's growing machines. It appears to go well, until Summer decides to get them bigger still, and accidentally causes several parts of her body to grow to disproportionate sizes until she's trapped in the garage. When Beth tries to fix her daughter by hitting "normalize", thinking that it will restore Summer to normal, it ends up normalizing the proportions of her malformed body and turning her into a giant. She then tries the "reverse" button against Morty's wishes, and accidentally causes Summer's skin to turn inside out.
  • After the Whirly Dirly comes loose and breaks the immortality shield around the park, the brother playing with his sister earlier shoots her for real. Doubles as a Tear Jerker.
  • Rick discovers Jerry's betrayal, and his Tranquil Fury as the man pleads for his life is pretty goddamn terrifying.
  • Morty mutates Ethan into a freak for breaking Summer's heart. He definitely took after his grandpa in the revenge department, and his expression sells it.
    Morty: Careful, Ethan. (holds up whole s'more on fire in tongs as his eyes narrow) Your s'more is burning.
    (Morty pointedly powers up the Morphizer-XE)
    Ethan: (looks between Morty and the departing Beth and Summer, before swallowing nervously)
  • The trippy wormhole sequence was horrifying, with body horror and unnerving imagery all over the place. The strange dialogue also might give a perspective of what the characters are going through. Not that it can't be funny as well.
    Risotto: Whoa, oof this!
    Rick: Who am I?
    Risotto: Who am I?
    Jerry: I'm TIME! I'm literally time!

Rest and Ricklaxation

  • Expanding on what the previous episode showed of Morty: the machine designed to remove toxicity from the user removes what the user himself deems toxic. When Morty used it, it removed - amongst other things - his empathy.
  • The toxicity beam causes a group of children at a birthday party to go all Kingsman on each other. When the beam's effects are reversed, the party entertainer is decapitated and some other kids are beaten up. They start crying once they're snapped out of it.
  • Rick having a Chest Burster gun. As in it shoots darts that causes organic targets to "give" birth to a Rick in the same way Xenomorphs are born.
  • Healthy Rick casually kneecapping Toxic!Morty. It's explicitly stated he considers his attachment to him as a weakness.
  • When it clicks for Toxic!Rick that nothing exploded: the machine worked exactly as designed.

The Ricklantis Mixup

  • The episode goes into detail about the reconstruction of the Citadel of Ricks, showing that their new president is none other than Evil Morty from Season 1. What makes this especially bone-chilling is that as his Leitmotif starts to play he has several Ricks killed off and blown out the airlock as the camera focuses on dozens of Rick and Morty corpses floating in space.
  • The Simple Rick Simple Wafer cookies, as made from Simple Rick; a Rick who eschewed the science and adventure, and decided to be a normal family man. His reward is being trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine, with his happiness used as an ingredient to make cookies.
    • A factory worker Rick rebels and later tastes freedom when he thinks that his boss is setting him free... only for him to get tranquilized, and then forced to replace Simple Rick.
    • Earlier, the worker Rick helps free Simple Rick with an unlicensed portal gun. He then into the portal... and blood explodes out of it. The worker Rick is shocked that he almost went into a "blender dimension" with him.
  • Apparently, getting the math for Rick's portal gun wrong can have deadly consequences, like what happened to Bootleg Portal Chemist Rick who attempted to make a bootleg Portal Gun for the Mortytown Locos. When the police arrive to bust them, this Rick attempted to use his recently completed Portal Gun to escape but failed in a gruesome fashion due to the bootleg portal fluid not being tested properly. Imagine attempting to walk through a portal, only for it to destroy your body as soon as you touch it, stripping you apart, molecule by molecule.
  • Officer Rick finding what seems to be a crying, Broken Bird of a Morty and trying to calm him down before that Morty suddenly starts stabbing him and he's narrowly saved by Officer Morty. Officer Morty assures him that he just needs to trust the right Morty - shortly before having the entire place and the Mortys inside disintegrated as payback.
  • It doesn't help that not long thereafter, Officer Rick has to put down Officer Morty when the latter's corruption gets too ahead of himself and he offs a criminal witness in a Suicide by Cop. He has an entire rant that encapsulates I Just Want to Be Normal, but dooms himself anyway because he knew death would be better than wasting away in the citadel like before. The implications are that these sorts of existential nightmares and pointless deaths is an everyday occurrence, even on the new Citadel, just with different Ricks and Mortys.
    Other Officer Ricks: What the hell happened in there?
  • And to top it off, Big Morty and Officer Morty, alongside the Campaign Morty and many Ricks and others alike are unceremoniously dumped into space, both to get rid of any potential evidence as well as cost-efficient corpse disposal of the unwanted in Evil Morty's Citadel.

Morty's Mind Blowers

  • Among the memories Morty wanted Rick to remove are him getting his hand chopped off by an alien, the two of them killing Santa Claus, and Morty unintentionally leading an alien to his death, which is followed by said alien being dragged to his species' version of Hell.
  • The memory showing the squirrels plotting world domination, and the implication that Rick and Morty were forced to jump to another similar dimension.
    • When you think about it, it's even scarier. Rick Sanchez is a man who tends to fight against governments, both Earth nation-states and galactic hyperpowers, yet SQUIRRELS are enough to get him instantly admit defeat and prompt him to MOVE UNIVERSES, a last-resort option of which he reminds Morty that they have a very limited number of uses. What the hell happened to Rick that made him regret the day he ever messed with squirrels?
  • Poor Beebo. We get to watch him slowly dying throughout the rest of the scene, too.
  • One memory reminds us just how little Beth thinks of Morty when she instantly chooses him to die without a moment's hesitation or a shred of remorse. Even the alien who was forcing her to choose is mortified.
  • The simple fact that among the more traumatizing memories that Rick has erased are ones where Rick just made a simple mistake and then immediately erased the memory to save face veers into creepy levels of pettiness.

The ABC's of Beth

  • The grotesque Froopyland creatures being products of incest, with some being eaten by Tommy for sustenance. Including newborns.
  • Some of the insidious gadgets that Rick made for Beth when she was a child, such as a sentient talking switchblade with a love for stabbing.
  • The true purpose of Froopyland is this. Rick didn't just make it to get out of taking care of Beth. He made it to protect the neighborhood FROM Beth. It begs the question of just what she did that caused Rick of all people to view his young daughter as a "Scary kid" to the point he needed to make a whole mini-dimension for her.
  • Just how evil Young Beth was. She tried to murder her best friend because he had more friends than her and had a Nintendo, she asked her father to make her weapons, and she made Rick, someone who casually murders people in his way, so freaked out he made Froopyland JUST to protect the neighborhood.
  • Rick stating he kept Beth in Froopyland not to protect people, but because it would be too much work cloning her victims. Rick's implying he didn't care that his daughter was murdering children.
  • Wanting to duck out of the responsibility of breaking up with his new alien girlfriend Kiara, Jerry blames Morty and Summer. Kiara does not take it well and promptly goes full Psycho Ex-Girlfriend, trying to kill Morty and Summer to get them out of the relationship's way. Not to mention Jerry is too cowardly to admit he's the one at fault even while Kiara is in the process of killing Summer.
    Kiara: The children must be destroyed so we can be together!

The Rickchurian Mortydate

  • Beth has a brief but still rather unsettling freak-out over possibly being a clone that just became self-aware, meaning that Rick would have to terminate her and make another one. Her breathing is shaky before she lets out a blood-curdling scream.
  • Rick and Morty infiltrate the White House and demand that the President takes a selfie with Morty. The president refuses and orders a guard to arrest... then he dies instantly the moment he touches Rick for no explained reason. He doesn't explode, he doesn't turn to into vapor, he just... simply falls over. To make it more chilling, Rick warned him that there's no afterlife... Then when the other guards shoot him, the bullets get deflected back at them.
  • When the President knocks Rick down and starts a fight, Rick proceeds to cut most of the remaining guards down with a wrist laser. What makes that creepier are Rick's facial expressions while doing it. At first he kills two with a complete look of apathy on his face, then in the next cut he's mowing them all down with a Slasher Smile.
    • Really, the whole White House sequence shows in horrifying detail just how dangerous a person with access to infinite alternate dimensions can be when they put their mind to it.
  • The President's Tyke-Bomb child assassins are fucking horrifying. As soon as the President blows the whistle their eyes roll back into their skulls and they leap on Rick, screeching like feral animals as they attack him. And then not two minutes later the President mows them down in his Mini-Mecha while trying to get Rick, in a Freeze-Frame Bonus moment! These kids got introduced and killed in the same space of time it'd take to make a Hot Pocket. And these kids aren't filthy urchins or dead eyed waifs; they are both well-groomed, fit, and generally pleasant looking, which makes their ferocity all the more jarring. Even more terrifying what was done to those children to create that reaction in them? Were they tortured and mind raped to the point a whistle would cause them such excrutiating pain they'll attack anyone to make it stop? Perhaps their death was a blessing as their lives were constant terror and suffering, never knowing when they'd be thrown into a pain that causes them to lose all morality attacking blindly knowing that attacking will make the suffering stop? Worse imagining being brainwashed and tortured to a point you'd create suffering in someone helpless to stop yourself BECAUSE IT HURTS AND HURTING OTHERS IS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE IT STOP!

    Season 4 
Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat
  • Morty, under the influence of a death crystal, uses Rick’s gadgets to kill several cops and soldiers in various gruesome ways, such as splitting their DNA to liquefy them, before turning into an insane AKIRA version of himself. (Though Rick has managed to top the cube-cutting Call-Back and achieve prime funniness by making the cubes sprout legs, including the still living human heads!)
  • The way original Rickest Rick dies in the beginning: being thrown from his spacecraft and impaled. What sells it is how nonchalant Morty is about it while the constantly watching holographic implant of Rick instructs him to collect some corpse tissue.
  • The Wasp!Smith family casually devouring an insect Mr. Goldenfold who begs for death during the eating and eventually lays larvae, to which Wasp Morty just eats them without hesitation.
  • The subversion of Space Is Noisy makes the way Fascist Morty, Rick's cloned body, Revolvio Clockberg Jr., and Mr. Meeseeks die unsettling.
  • The alternate universes keep falling into fascist dystopias. Makes you think over and over how messy the multiverse really is...
  • The huge, red ferrofluid tree-like Eldritch Abomination the crystal-controlled Morty forms in the desert.
  • The way Wasp Rick kills the newly massed and power hungry Holo-Rick by laying his eggs into his eye and causing all his babies to burst out of his face is pretty gruesome, especially since you get a close-up of what's left of the face.

One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty

  • Heistron heisting the core of a planet, destroying it in the process. We get snippets of the planet's news covering the chaos, infrastructure and terrain collapsing, and lots and lots of hysteria and death.
  • Heistron's goons ripping Miles Nightly limb from limb after Rick orders them to heist every square inch of Heistcon. Even Rick is disgusted by it and makes it clear to Morty that he did NOT plan that.

Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty

  • Chachi getting his head graphically blown out from behind in the Cold Open, right in front of Morty's eyes. He's still covered in his blood for the rest of the scene.
  • Whatever the hell Rick and Jerry saw in the talking cat's brainscan was enough to mortify Rick to the point he actually warns Jerry that he DOESN'T want to see it. Not only that, but soon after Jerry does see it, the two go into a mental breakdown and Rick puts a gun in his mouth and has to force himself to put the gun down. We are able to hear some of what was in the scan — it involved a lot of screaming; especially screaming babies.

Never Ricking Morty

  • The Tickets Please Guy’s death is probably one of the most horrific in the entire show. He ends up getting sucked out the window of the train and just as he’s about to be torn in half, then wakes up in an arcade center in a fantasy world where shortly after, his top half gets torn off and he floats to the ceiling, spraying tons of blood everywhere as people watch. What’s even worse is that the Story Train and his fantasy world have a Year Outside, Hour Inside dynamic, so even though Morty put him out of his misery shortly after, the entire event lasted months for him.

The Vat of Acid Episode

Childrick of Mort

  • It's unnervingly easy how Jerry convinces the cast-off clay children to demonize the civilization Beth and Rick are creating. When one asks why Rick and Beth's clay children do not camp in the wilderness, Jerry simply says that they're bad, sparking off a later crusade against Rick and Beth.
  • Gaia, in a fit of rage after Reggie gets killed, gets so furious she unleashes volcanos which destroys a majority of the new village and even some of her own children.

Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri

  • Rick's battle with Phoenix Person becomes this as the fight wears on. While initially cool, the longer their fight goes, Rick has serious difficulties, to the point even his self-healing and survival contingencies can't keep up with the damage he's taking. By the end, he's lying on the ship's floor, disembowled with most of his skin burnt/scraped off. Only both Beths and Jerry's arrival stop BP from killing Rick right then and there.

    Season 5 

Mort Dinner Rick Andre

  • Morty is no longer the nice guy he used to be. Even if they weren't standing between him and wine (read: wooing Jessica), the blue aliens won Morty's ire quickly enough for him to kill them all in cold blood.
  • And now imagine THEIR view on this. Every few decades, the portal opens, and the nigh-omnipotent demonic child walks in, bringing destruction. His legend is passed down, doubted at times, but one thing remains constant: he cannot be stopped and will kill anyone he sees. No surprise they become fixated on ending his threat by any means necessary, so when Morty carelessly leaves his glove to them, it takes them mere few decades to become a space-faring civilization.
  • Hoovy is hit worst of them all, though. Imagine assisting someone with a simple task thinking it should only take a moment, only to return home and see that YEARS have passed, which leads to your offspring killing you. Now imagine your descendants becoming obsessed with the 'demon child' (Morty) to the point your entire civilization is trained to kill him every time he returns... all because of a VERY unfortunate misunderstanding/circumstance out of everyone's control.
  • Jessica being trapped in time. The creators of the time prison thought she was, as they put it, "frozen in time, forever asleep"; but when she recounts her experience, it becomes clear that Jessica was conscious and aware the entire time, for decades. By the time Morty rescues her, she has undergone years of Character Development, and it's a miracle she has not been driven completely mad by the experience.
  • Mr. Nimbus, while shown as a funny and incredibly hammy Extreme Omnisexual, is feared even by Rick. Yes, the same Rick who killed gods with no remorse. Mind-controlling, omnipotent nemesis, surpassing even the one man feared by the entire galaxy in raw might. And he also bones his lovers to death with ease. The latter point, by the way, does not stop Beth and Jerry.
Mortyplicity
  • The entire concept of the episode: Rick had the idea to create a clone "Decoy Family" that included himself which would draw the attention of any threats looking for him and his family. We learn this after watching the Sanchez-Smith family suddenly and brutally killed without warning. Then when they decide to hide out with a different decoy family, Rick discovers that Decoy!Rick had the same idea and created a decoy family. So on and so forth as the episode comes about the dozens of Decoy Families go on the run, hunting and killing each other.
    • During the entire time there is no way to tell who is the real, original, Rick and his family as the episode's POV shifts to the family that successfully killed the decoys or the Decoys that created them after being alerted of their deaths.
    • The Decoys' reactions to their situation is either to assume that they're the originals and try to kill all the other Decoys, be Driven to Suicide, or accept their grim fates and simply wait it out until it's their turn to be killed themselves.
  • When Rick mentions early on about Clone Degeneration we get to see what he means in the second half of the episode. As more and more Rick Decoys are made, they get progressively lazier in maintaining the facade. This starts off simple going from purely biological clones to the copies being more and more cybernetic before going full on mechanical. Then we start getting into Body Horror and And I Must Scream territory.
    • One version of the Smith family are hiding in a version of their house deep in the swamps, mutated and hideous, driven insane by their appearance and proof they're not the real family. Their Rick resorts to kidnapping and skinning other decoys to make flesh suits for themselves.
    • This pegs the question of whose worse off? The Decoys who look normal only to realize they're copies, or the ones who are suffering from body horror and know from the start they're not the originals.
    • Wooden Jerry clearly takes the cake. He lets his family - several instances of it - die just so he can live, specifically, so he doesn't have to share a can of polish with them. He gets his wish, surviving for millennia as he is gradually reduced to a disembodied head, watching endless History Repeats scenes until he wails at the sky at being unable to die. And that's before we get into implications that perhaps all wooden Smiths are immortal, except that they are now buried under a mountain of rubble.
A Rickconvienent Mort
  • Rick and Summer's Apocalypse party. The denizens of the planets that are about to be destroyed are not panicking or trying to escape: they are celebrating, and Rick's eager to join in the fun. Just what kind of civilization did these planets have that the end of the world for them is liberating? Or, if they were pre-spaceflight, imagine that same thing happening to a world like ours.
    • And it says much about their world that Daphne is anything but disturbed by her species just having gone extinct, joking that her elbow-breasts are now the best in the Galaxy.
  • The Tina-teers, the four ring-bearers who have been summoning Planetina since the 90s, have all become greedy, remorseless adults who actively profit off of Planetina's image and micromanage her every move. When they get wind of Planetina's relationship with Morty, one of the Tina-teers, Eddie, confronts him in a locked janitor's closet. Morty calls him out on how they see Planetina as something only to make money off of and declares that he loves her; Eddie, however, retorts that the Tina-teers own her, but not for much longer, because they're planning to sell her off to an Arab overseas for more money. He then uses his Fire ring to light a mop on fire, and slowly starts to move it towards Morty's face.
    Eddie: As for you, maybe she won't love you so much if you ain't so pretty no more.
  • Morty continues his spree of killing others who try to stand in the way of a girl he likes, killing all of Planetina's children. Yes they were planning on selling her to a foreigner but the fact Morty callously kills the four of them AND steals their rings so he can spend more time with her is REALLY unsettling.
    Morty: Now we can be together, Planetina.
  • Planetina manages to surpass him, though. Without any more power rings to hold her in check, she quickly realizes she's capable of stopping the pollution and end humanity's environment destruction by any means necessary. ANY means necessary. Morty's reaction says it all: he, in his wanders, has seen where this path usually leads to for most superheroes-turning-villains. In fact, one of those he himself had to murder after spending the episode saving them; it's not a big stretch to see his reaction as one big "please not freaking again!".
    • It's implied that she's not just hell-bent on the idea of making the world green: when asked about it, she just yells "Can't you hear the Earth screaming?!". She literally feels the pain of the planet every waking moment, and the only question that remains is how did she not go insane sooner. Unless Morty having had killed the only people that were preventing it.
    • The form Planetina takes when driven over the edge is horrifying. Her eyes glow red, her outfit takes on a dark coloration with a glowing heart symbol and her body's Wreathed in Flames, accompanied bylightning and dark clouds. In her rage, she burns the coal mine to the ground and murders every miner in her sight, horrifying Morty who's so heartbroken he can only flee from her rampage.
    Planetina: THERE'S NO TIME LEFT!! Can't you hear the Earth screaming?! YOU FILTHY MURDERERS!!
    Morty: Planetina, stop it!
    Planetina: THERE'S ONLY ONE SOLUTION FOR EARTH'S POLLUTION!! [cuts the lift's cables with pink Eye Beams]
    Miners: GAAAAH!!
    Morty: Oh my god, no... NO!!

Rick And Morty's Thanksploitation Spectacular

  • Franklin Roosevelt was turned into a spider-hybrid by an experimental polio vaccine and lives underneath the basement, surviving off of the unpardoned turkeys. the way he kills them is disturbing to say the least, not to mention he's not above eating humans once Rick and Morty reverted back to human form.
    Rick: What the fuck is that?
    President Curtis: Not what. Who...
    FDR: The only thing to fear is ME!
    Rick: Why the fuck does the White House have a clone of FDR?!
    President Curtis: That's not a clone, that's FDR! He was a guinea pig for the polio vaccine.
    • The way Morty kills FDR is disturbing too, incinerating him in seconds with an improvised torch. All that remains of the maddened president is a charred carcass, with his human parts stripped to the bone.

Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort

  • The stinger which revealed the child of Tammy and Birdperson is disturbing from the appearance of said child to the crazed look in its eyes and the way it can only make noises as it's being dragged out of the room only moments after a massacre.

Rickmurai Jack

  • The Central. Finite. Curve. Imagine if you will, that instead of scouring the Multiverse for naturally occurring grandchildren, an infinite number of the same Jerkass Mad Scientist manipulates (sometimes using drugs and alien pheromones) an infinite number of his daughter to fall in love with the same man so that they'll eventually have children. Now imagine using the youngest of those kids as an expendable livestock to clone them en masse so you can use them as human shields and yes men. And the reason they can get away with this is because those same Mad Scientists have walled off an infinite corner of the multiverse so the only ones that are accessible are the ones that have one man as the smartest being in the reality and thus suffer at the whims of god-level-intelligent man who only cares about himself.
  • The images of numerous Rick's and Morty's trying to escape through their portal guns from the Citadel, only to discover far too late that they have all been hacked to make portals to lethal results. While we've seen the Portal Gun weaponized in the past, seeing it used so brutally against Rick's and Morty's themselves is quite chilling; especially on such a vast scale.
    • A few Ricks and Mortys try to use Operation Phoenix to escape to another dimension. Turns out Evil Morty foresaw that as well and made sure to reroute them so they basically wake up in a blender that turns them into fuel for Evil Morty's goal of destroying and escaping the Central Finite Curve. For added horror, he could have done all of this without killing them (using just clones); but decided to do the final spite just so his departure would result in the maximum possible loss of life.
  • Evil Morty wins once again by the end of the episode. The Citadel of Ricks is left destroyed a second time, seemingly causing the portal fluid to evaporate, which leaves Rick and Morty drifting in space without a working Portal gun to help them get home and seemingly to ever have the same kind of adventures again. As for Evil Morty, he has destroyed the Central Finite Curve and escaped to an infinite multiverse where Rick isn't the smartest man alive. Talk about Karma Houdini.

    Season 6 
Solaricks
  • The Cold Open of the episode is terrifying, with Rick and Morty having been bested by Evil Morty so hard they have basically accepted death by starvation.
  • Apparently, as a way to keep himself motivated, Rick created a time loop in his home dimension where he lost Diane and young Beth. One of his neighbors comes by with a note that seems to be written by himself trying to warn him that there's something wrong with the time loop. Namely, that it wasn't a perfect loop and that while everyone has been blissfully reliving the same day's events, their bodies have been aging in real time. A brief glimpse outside shows that everyone in the neighborhood, and likely everyone on Earth, has been stuck in this loop for decades, cursed to live out the same day while their bodies have been trapped in a state of advanced age. There's even one old woman who is dragging around a dog's skeleton on its leash. When Rick shuts down the time field, you can hear the neighbor outside moaning blissfully as he's finally released from the nightmare by death.
  • Mr. Frundles. Don’t let this creature’s cute looks deceive you. Anything it bites with its long snaggletooth becomes another Mr. Frundles. Anything, including inanimate objects and body parts. S2!Jerry doesn't fully convert until the Frundles his foot had become bites him in the face. By the time the family leaves the planet, Mr. Frundles has spread to the point whole continents have turned into Mr. Frundles. And shortly after, the Earth itself becomes one massive Mr. Frundles which results in the world's oceans being swallowed into its mouth and likely dooming what few remnants of non-Frundle life were left on the planet. And all this started just because Rick found it cute and kept it in his room until Season 2 Jerry found it and released it.
    • Going by Mr. Frundles’ Clone by Conversion nature, who’s to say that the one Rick brought home is even the original?
    • This line from Beth underscores how extremely lucky everyone was that Mr. Frundles didn't try to bite any of them before they had to flee:
      Beth: What the fuck, Dad?! Why would you bring that thing into our house?!
      • To underscore this: it did try when it bit the carpet the family was standing on. They left right as it became a Mr. Frundles and barely avoided it.
    • It biting S2!Jerry is a load of Nightmare Fuel in and of itself. But this poses a question. Did it hijack that Jerry's mind and kill him? Or did it merely take over his body, with the mind of Jerry trapped inside?
  • Rick Prime. The man who started all of this including killing Main Rick's original family sending him on his decades long Roaring Rampage of Revenge across The Multiverse, the creation of the Citadel which in a roundabout way led to the creation of Evil Morty.
    • Rick's action when he finds RP's hideout shine a new light on when he tells Morty that Rick Prime is "the real deal" due to not giving a shit about anything which includes his family. He says it in a tone that implies an Always Someone Better situation with the two and implies that Main Rick's final showdown would always have ended in his death, not the man he's been hunting for.
    • The kicker? RP is the true Rick C-137, OUR Morty's original, real grandfather, and whom our Rick had done his tried-and-true hermit-crab scheme of slipping into the vacant position of Morty's grandfather, purely out of a hope that RP would come back to visit home and give him a shot at his revenge.
  • Morty ends up returning to his original universe, where everyone got Cronenburg'd by Main!Rick, where he finds that his original Jerry has essentially forced himself to bury his emotions ever since losing Beth and Summer. It's then revealed that after being frozen by the Citadel Ricks way back, though a Cronenburg was able to lick Jerry free from his icy prison, unfortunately, Beth was fatally exposed to a disease and, according to Jerry, Summer "didn't thaw right". The contempt he has for Morty, his own son, even if it is justified since his actions did cause their world to become an apocalyptic wasteland, is absolutely chilling.
    • While skinning and cooking the Cronenberg Morty killed, Jerry reveals that some of the Cronenbergs still have intact human brains inside, and wonders if it means those who do are still aware of what's happened to them, but can't speak or control their own bodies anymore.
    • And even though he recognizes the brain is still human and even wonders if this meant the mutant was still self-aware, Jerry has no qualms about eating it. He has no issue eating a human brain in the name of survival. But thanks to Rick and Morty's actions, survival is living in his world.
  • While Main!Jerry's side of the episode is not as dark as the other three, it is still not a very lighthearted one, since he and the audience are reacquainted with the cynicism and hostility of the Smith family's Season 2 state of character development, in which dinnertime consists of everyone at each other's throats due to their Beth and Jerry never divorcing.
    • This is best shown with Morty stating that he got expelled from school, with him and Rick barely caring.
      • Beth's reaction to him is barely any better, with it being borderline verbal abuse with her swearing on him.
    • When Summer tears apart our Jerry for not having a job, S2!Rick immediately tells him of a good alligator park he can go to. More than just hating Jerry, Rick now actively wants Jerry to kill himself.

Rick - A Mort Well Lived

  • The Roy arcade game is back, and with a double helping of existential dread! When a group of alien robbers attack Blipz And Chipz, Morty is trapped in the Roy machine, which glitches out and spreads his consciousness across 5 billion virtual people, forcing Rick to go in after him to try and piece Morty back together. The horror begins to set in as the population of Roy slowly begin to grasp the truth about their existance; not only are they not real people, their individual selves are really just tiny fractions of an outside mind. Nothing about themselves or their universe is real, one Morty aspect even points out that her family doesn't even know anything except incorrect surface knowledge about their own religion, because it's Judaism, and the real Morty doesn't know anything about it.
    • There's also the fact that Rick has to get both himself and Morty out in a very specific way, otherwise they'll die when the game glitches out again.
    • Whenever one of the NPCs die, that fragment of Morty dies. Even though there's five billion fragments, fractions add up and there's less than half of Morty by the end of the episode with it being obvious how that affected Morty's personality when he leaves the game.

Bethic Twinstinct

Night Family

  • The concept of a "Night Person" is basically advanced sleepwalking, with your Night Person doing all the things that you couldn't do in the day while you get a good night's sleep. Sounds awesome, right? But what if they gained self-awareness and developed their own personality? Someone who ''isn't'' you is walking around with your body, with you having no memory of anything of what they did. Now imagine that your Night Person is sick of doing your chores and only existing in the night. Imagine that it wants to replace you entirely. No wonder the official episode description is "Broh I'm scared."
  • Even before the Night Family turn on their "Day" selves, the scenes of them doing their assigned tasks in the dead of night are just downright eerie.
  • The Night Family confronting Rick after he gets new "indestructible" dishes. While seeing their glowing eyes from Rick's POV is unnerving enough, Night-Summer takes it to the next level. Essentially torturing Rick through using his mouth as a disposal for the food scraps. And vowing to "seize the day" in due time.
  • The fact that the Night Family actually wins the fight against their day selves. This leads to the latter losing control of their bodies for months, with them having lost their fortunes by the end of it all.

Final DeSmithation

  • Much like "Total Rickall" earlier this episode manages to play a serious terrifying concept (in this case inevitability, like in the episodes namesake Final Destination franchise) for Black Comedy. Jerry gets a fortune cookie that says he will have sex with his mom and Rick decides to check if it will come true. During the reality measuring scene both Rick and Jerry become alarmed when it seems that the fortune coming true is inevitable which means something has to be very, very wrong with the universe.
  • The Megacorp is using poop from an entropy eating alien monster to create fortune cookies that always come true no matter what, and if you need to be alive for it to happen you can't die. This being Rick and Morty, a lot of Exact Words driven fates worse than death ensue. Examples include a man having his chest filled with bullets from a minigun and being unable to die (when the first two probably would've killed him) and another one being able to stick to walls and being left firmly stuck on a wall by Rick, unable to move his limbs, before being slowly ripped apart from the inside when a black hole appears.
  • The Corrupt Corporate Executive in charge of the company decides to gorge herself on the fortune cookies to protect herself from getting killed by Rick/get additional powers to defeat him, turning into a grotesque Humanoid Abomination from all the conflicting probabilities warping her body.

Juricksic Mort

  • The dinosaurs are benevolent gods who create utopias for their subject planets, such as planet Earth in this episode. But there's a catch to this, as Rick found out. All this time, there was a species of sentient meteors who selflessly sacrificed themselves to destroy the aforementioned utopia planets. The worst part is that the dinos never knew about this up to the point Rick told the whole world about it.
    • And sure enough, we see one of the meteors coming for Mars, since earth reverted back to before the dinos arrived and the dinosaurs in question exiled themselves to mars.
  • The ending with the Earth quickly reverting to free market capitalism is full of this and Fridge Horror. We outright see massively accelerated global warming and a meteoric rise in crime. The people are happy now that they hate the dinos, but it is very obvious this is far from a happy ending.
    • A Freeze-Frame Bonus shows that the temperature shown in the thermostat for the family's house is up to 99°F (37°C). To put this into perspective, the highest average temperature in Seattle (where the family canonically lives) is around 73°F (23°C).

Full Meta Jackrick

Analyze Piss

  • In one of the darkest scenes of the whole season, Rick visits Pissmaster at his apartment, only to find him dead in the bathtub after slitting his own wrists. Rick tries to save Pissmaster by healing and resuscitating him, only to find that he's brain-dead from the experience, forcing Rick to kill him again for real out of mercy. Notably, this suicide is disturbing enough that the beginning of the episode contains a Content Warning to prepare viewers for this ahead of time.

A Rick in King Mortur's Mort

  • Rick and Morty (plus their entire family) think the Solar Scepter is a powerless relic that isn't the artifact that keeps the Solar System together as the Knights of the Sun say. They immediately find out how wrong they are. As it turns out, while it isn't the literal centre of gravity of the Solar System, it is still a symbolically powerful item that maintains the harmony of the rulers of various planets. Once the Knights of the Sun disband upon hearing of the truth, the rulers of the aforementioned planets go on a brutal war for the dominance of the Solar System.
    • While they start with medieval tech, they (especially the Viscount of Venus) start to rapidly innovate in new, more brutal weapons of war, going from bows and arrows to literal nukes and massive spacefleet in the matter of hours(?).
      • And if it wasn't for Rick actively shielding Earth, there could've been millions of casualties from the collateral damage wreaked upon it by the Solar War.

Ricktional Mortpoon’s Rickmas Mortcation

  • The reveal that the kinder Rick we've all become accustomed to was just an android replicant and the real Rick, though he does still care about his current family, has regressed to once again being obsessed with hunting down Rick Prime is jarring to say the least. He's devoted every waking moment since the Cold Open of "A Rick in King Mortur's Mort" (which was the time he subbed in the robot to replace himself) to tracking down his counterpart, ultimately concluding that the other Rick is able to make his signal appear in scores of locations simultaneously, a terrifying thought in itself. Rather than admit defeat, Rick doubles down in his determination, going on his infamous "forever and ever 100 years" rant, only now he seems genuinely insane.

    Season 7 
The Jerrick Trap
  • In the Cold Open an argument between Rick and Jerry leads to Rick switching bodies and intelligence with Jerry to prove a point (Rick actually lampshades that it isn't like the movie Freaky Friday because their personalities and memories are "software" while their intelligence and outward appearance are "hardware"), being stuck with Jerry's body and intelligence is apparently so terrifying to Rick that he blows his brains out and Jerry in Rick's body kills himself when he triggers Rick's jet boots by accident. Fortunately, Rick was Crazy-Prepared and built an Auto Doc in the garage, and in a bit of Black Comedy the robot gets exasperated that the brainswitch complicates putting them back together.

That's Amorte

  • The Alternate Earth where Rick sourced his suicide spaghetti from is exactly like regular Earth save for people's entrails turning into spaghetti bolognese if they commit suicide. Once their POTUS discovers that her people make for delicious food, she orders mass production, which immediately transitions into a horrifying dystopia where people are deliberately driven to suicide. When production is halted, the planet is then invaded by aliens who stalk innocent humans telling them to kill themselves.
  • Morty's ethical alternatives are no less awful. He suggests cloning people and breeding them for suicide, but the moment that idea is put into practice the clones get wind of what's happening and try to escape. Morty then suggests modifying the clones, which first leads to one clone being too mentally deficient to kill himself, followed by a series of clones that have no heads or legs, living only to kill themselves. Then we get to see how these latter clones are harvested, with their spaghetti entrails looking like garbage because their genetics were tampered with.
  • The whole thing turns out to be pointless, because it turns out that Rick can replicate any matter he has sample of. Only because Rick is teaching Morty a lesson is he going with Morty's ideas instead of Stating the Simple Solution in the first place. He does so only after the mass production of "suicide torso clones" is started, factory blown up by suicide bombers and alien invasion of Earth succeeded. So he could have avoided this whole plot if he just took the one delicious spaghetti sample and kept replicating it, instead of dragging a dead body through the portal as a spaghetti source for Morty to see. All of that suffering could have been completely avoided, billions of people would be alive and happy (Rick notes the slightly more technologically advanced people even made their sun grey for depression purposes, which impresses even him for how hard it is to do). Rick's behavior ruins billions of lives, just like that.

Unmortricken

  • The opening has Rick and Morty having an arguement after one of their adventures. Morty seemingly caves and offers Rick a six-pack as a token of reconciliation. However, Morty then works on making something in his room before returning that night to an extremely drunk Rick...and then dons a very familiar eyepatch. Ladies and gentlemen, Evil Morty's Start of Darkness.
    • On an even more unsettling note, we see in the ensuing montage the pair going to a center implied to be where Morty's are sold and catalogued, with Evil Morty deleting his file. This puts some added context to why Evil Rick demanding Morty either commit to quitting or staying caused Evil Morty to snap: if he decided to do the former it likely would've resulted in him being abandoned or terminated as Evil Rick could always purchase a new one.
    • Another detail worth noting: in Evil Rick and Morty's dimension, Beth, Jerry, and Summer are nowhere to be seen and never mentioned. Did something happen to them? Did they even exist in the first place? We never find out. This also makes the sequence of Evil Rick and Morty killing/kidnapping other Ricks and Mortys from multiple dimensions in front of their respective Beths, Jerrys, and Summers (who are all understandably horrified) even worse, as it highlights that Evil Morty has absolutely no remorse about traumatizing his family over, and over, and over...
  • During the Fully Automatic Clip Show recapping Evil Morty's exploits, it's shown that "Evil Rick" had somehow managed to regain enough of his lucidity to attempt to kill himself at least once... but Evil Morty, being Evil Morty, was well-prepared for this possibility, using the brain implant to prevent him from fully going through with ending his life since he's still needed. It puts a whole new spin on Evil Rick daring the freed Mortys to kill him.
  • A section of the multiverse shown outside of the Central Finite Curve is explored and it's a whole mess of chaos with interdimensional travelers popping in everywhere and if they aren't killed by their fellow travelers, they're killed by all manners of horrific beasts. And despite only being able to survive in this chaos with a barrier preventing most of the outside from getting in, Evil Morty vastly prefers this insanity over any universe where Rick is the smartest man alive.
    Robot Butler: And how were the horrors of the infinite today sir?
    Evil Morty: Just another day in paradise.
  • The trap that Prime Rick put in his clone. Upon killing the clone, it sends Rick, Morty, and Evil Morty into a box with other Ricks, while Rick Prime taunts the captives into killing each other to meet Diane again. However, after Rick kills his other selves, he is greeted by a Killer Robot with Diane's face. And if that's not enough and Robot Diane is destroyed, the room gets set on fire just to make sure the captives inside die.
  • The Omega Weapon that Rick Prime has built doesn't just erase whoever is dropped in it from existence, but it also erases every single version of its victims from across the multiverse. Rick Prime reveals that he used it to kill Diane in every dimension, and he demonstrates its power by using it on Slo Mobius before threatening to kill the rest of Rick's family with the weapon. When the machine is stopped, Evil Morty steals the plans for it and says that he will use it on Rick as a last resort if he isn't left alone.
  • Rick (meaning Main Rick) viciously beating Rick Prime to death for everything the latter has pulled since before the series began. While it's undoubtedly heart-breakingly cathartic for a wide variety of reasons, it's also one of the most unsettling death scenes in the entire franchise, due the deeply personal nature of it and how relatively tame the violence is by Rick and Morty standards, while still being graphic and intense.
    • The psychological aspects of the beatdown, in particular, are REALLY what make it more disturbing than most of the other violent/gorey scenes in the series; seeing the normally nonchalant and apathetic Rick C-137 visibily and audibly lose almost all control is haunting enough. What brings it to another level, though, is how Rick Prime is mercilessly taunting him THE WHOLE TIME, and laughing at not only how much of an idiot Main Rick is for playing right into his hands, but how cosmically ironic their entire situation is.

Rickfending Your Mort

  • One clip features a past adventure of Rick and Morty where they witnessed articles of clothing uprising, with one shirt ripping off a woman’s face and putting it on through its sleeves.
  • Another clip features a news broadcast about an unseen presumably alien race known as the "Hottie Snatchers" who have been kidnapping all of earth's most attractive men and women, the reasons of which are left unclear. The fact that we never see the perpetrators of these attacks or understand their motives for doing this are nothing short of horrifying, and this is all the more unsettling when Summer witnesses a conventionally pretty woman and handsome fit neighbor across the street of the Smith household both being kidnapped by the hands of a robot in front of her very eyes. It begs the question: just how many innocent people have been kidnapped by these unseen figures, where have they been taken, and why on earth are they being targeted for their physical attractiveness? The more you think about the possibilities, the more disturbing and sickening it becomes. Are they being harvested for their organs? Forced to copulate with each other? Experimented on? Sexually abused or trafficked? We'll likely never know.
  • Rick has a device that can just grant ANYTHING both life and make them functionally immortal. A living churro sounds silly, but the ending makes it clear Churrie is out for blood after being left to rot on another planet. All of this because Morty got BORED of having a living churro for a friend and thought Rick could just make it a normal churro… another example of how frighteningly shortsighted and apathetic Morty is; like grandfather like grandson…
  • Having learned nothing from "The Vat of Acid Episode", Morty repeatedly accepts guns from Rick without bothering to ask what they do. First accepting a Gorilla Gun, under the assumption it turns things INTO gorillas, he ends up putting a bully in a body cast since it was actually meant for KILLING gorillas.
    • The second time he's offered a Bully Gun, this time Morty actually SHOOTS HIMSELF assuming it will turn him into a bully, it almost kills him. The third gun is arguably the worst, looking like a real gun, it shoots out a copy of Jeffrey Dahmer, aka, a gun that "shoots bad people".

Fear No Mort

  • The Fear Hole is the greatest haunted house style attraction in the multiverse and boy, does it live up to its reputation. It scans your memories and creates completely plausible scenarios of your worst fears coming true, to the point that it making A Glitch in the Matrix or a customer making one on purpose to make sure whether they escaped or not is almost impossible, it apparently sucks out your lifeforce if you stay too long (which may or may not be The Hole playing along with Morty's fear that it does) and the only way to leave is to figure out what your worst fear is and overcome it, but if you don't know what your worst fear is and make a wrong guess it will provide a 1408 style fake out which happens to Rick and Morty repeatedly, except it turns out that Morty jumped in before he could hear that The Hole has a one person at a time rule to not ruin the experience if, for example, multiple customers have fears that cancel out which means the real Rick is still outside The Hole waiting for Morty to finish his turn. It can even make convincing illusions on second hand knowledge as it initially creates a fake but convincing Diane and a convincing scenario of Rick's worst fears based on what Morty believes Rick's worst fears would be. Word of God says the interactions between the fake Rick and fake Diane are pretty much exactly how they acted before Diane died. Mind Screw doesn't begin to describe it.
    The Fear Hole talking through Fake Rick: Thank you for visiting The Fear Hole Morty, your fear of relying of Rick has been... delicious.
    • The reveal that the suit wearing guy who told Rick and Morty about The Fear Hole isn't just some employee advertising it or former customer giving them advice, he's actually an extension of the hole meant to lure in new customers, he also gets Black Eyes of Evil at one point, fitting for a manifestation of a hole. Then there's his little Breaking Speech to Morty about how everyone is afraid of love. It's really chilling.

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