Recap / Rick And Morty S 3 E 6 Rest And Ricklaxation

"We need a vacation."

— Rick Sanchez

Original air date: 8/27/2017

After a super stressful adventure, Rick and Morty try to chill out and relax in a spa. But their chilling-out has consequences...

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Tropes:

• Actually Pretty Funny: Healthy Morty successfully zings Mr. Goldenfold during his math class. Not only does the whole class laugh, but Mr. Goldenfold is also so impressed he dismisses the class early.
• An Aesop: As Rick puts it, toxins are a subjective term. What you consider your biggest flaws may actually be your best qualities.
• All Is Well That Ends Well: Averted. In the beginning, when Rick and Morty go on a stressful and catastrophic 6-day long adventure involving a crystal, after getting awards and coming home, they have mental breakdowns, rather than just forgetting about the whole thing. The mental breakdowns even kick off the episode's plot.
• Allegorical Character: The fuzzy blue thing Rick kept hidden in a potted plant. Toxic Rick pampers it in a shallow manner, which solidifies its loyalty to him while also turning it into a monster. Toxic Rick then uses it to attack a target he considers beneath him. While it wasn't given an official name, that blue thing is a pretty good allegory for Beth.
• All Take and No Give: Healthy Morty cheerfully claims that Jessica only misses the old Morty because she liked having someone around who loved her so much that she wouldn't have to love him back. Given that Healthy Morty is basically a benign sociopath, it's hard to tell if the criticism has any truth to it.
• Ambition Is Evil: "Healthy" Morty may exemplify this as he is sociopathic and wildly successful.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Morty becomes confident and cool enough to ask Jessica out, but his new persona is so energetic and larger-than-life that she breaks up with him, feeling he would quickly grow bored of her.
• Being Good Sucks: It's not stated explicitly, but in addition to removing his timidness, the detoxification chamber also removes Morty's empathy. It's then established that the detoxification chamber only removes traits that the person believes are toxic.
• Bigger on the Inside: The toxin disposal tank is a vast landscape inside a container the size and shape of a fire extinguisher.
• Book Ends: The episode begins and ends with Morty overhearing Jessica talking about Brad with her friends and Rick dragging him off on another adventure.
• Brick Joke: Stacy is accidentally released from the toxic dimension in the post-credits stinger, long after Morty and Rick had both completely forgotten she was still in there.
• Carrying the Antidote: Rick shoots Toxic Morty with poison, telling Toxic Rick that he can save Morty if they merged. Toxic Rick calls a bluff but agrees after Rick ups the poison dose.
• Chest Burster: Both Healthy Rick and Toxic Rick use guns that cause a clone of themselves to develop within the target, erupting their way out of the host.
• Combining Mecha: Rick's drones combine into a mini-Voltron robot, complete with a sword.
• Comedic Underwear Exposure: Jessica's panties can be seen in one frame when she and Rick jump down into Morty's apartment from a portal.
• Continuity Nod: Summer is watching "The Days and Nights of Mrs. Pancakes", the same show Morty's teacher was watching in "Lawnmower Dog". Mrs. Pancakes deviates from her catchphrase "You don't know me!" to "You DO know me", to Summer's shock.
• Converging-Stream Weapon: Rick's shuttle has such a weapon that Morty uses to kill the monster in the action sequence early on.
• Covered in Gunge: Toxic Rick and Morty are made of green slime.
• Crazy-Prepared: Rick keeps several weapons that only he can access all over the Smith residence, including within books.
• Dirty Old Woman: Despite only being in her mid-late 20s, Jacqueline really invokes this in the episode and even worse, more appropriately we're entering in the pedophilia territory, since the one she's dating and she finds "irresistible" is Morty, a barely 14 y.o. and thus barely pubescent boy (the average national age of consent in North America is 16 and it's not the same in all states), and the weirdest thing is that no one finds the thing wrong or strange, they simply ignore it like it was a totally normal thing.
• Emotion Eater: The alien spa has a creature that evolved to swallow lifeforms whole and feed on their stress, then spits them back out. It's the alien equivalent of a mud bath.
• Enemy Within: Toxic Rick refers to himself as if he's always been inside Rick vying for control, and Healthy Rick shares the sentiment.
• Enemy Without: Toxic Rick, as a personification of Rick's worst qualities, is this.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Healthy Rick gets one when he realizes that "toxicity" is subjective and therefore the "toxins" that form Toxic Rick and Toxic Morty are what they considered their worst qualities... including Rick's attachment to Morty, which can be exploited. He tests this out by slapping Healthy Morty and noting that he felt nothing afterward.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: As vulgar and abusive as Toxic Rick was, he genuinely cared about Toxic Morty... since Rick considered that part of himself to be a toxin to be purged.
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Rick and Morty both lose what they consider to be "mental toxins", such as Morty's social awkwardness and Rick's narcissism. Morty loses all empathy, abandoning his family to become a stockbroker who's in a relationship with a Replacement Goldfish for Jessica. While he seems to enjoy this life, when Jessica calls him as a front for Rick tracing his cell phone, Morty "accidentally" leaves the line open.
• Foreshadowing: It's subtly indicated right at the beginning that Toxic Rick still cares about Toxic Morty despite constantly belittling him and treating him worse than garbage because the first he does is call out for Morty and pull him out of the sludge he's stuck in. Healthy Rick exploits his Toxic self's love for Morty by using Toxic Morty as a hostage to force them to remerge.
• Freak Out: Rick and Morty's adventure in the opening completely breaks them, even after they succeeded, due to the incredible amount of stress, causing them to do this. It was enough for Rick to have them go on a vacation.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the fight between the two Ricks, some photos can be seen on a table in the background. Beth has apparently taped a tiny horse head over Jerry's head.
  • When the world goes toxic, a group of churchgoers have a wild pansexual orgy right there in the chapel. When things snap back after the toxicity device is tuned off, everyone is horrified and disgusted at themselves... but for one woman, riding a man cowgirl-style in a pew, who smiles blithely down at her partner. She quite clearly enjoyed the chance to let loose her inhibitions.
• Full-Frontal Assault: After using their cloning guns to survive each other, Healthy Rick and Toxic Rick fight in the buff.
• Gilligan Cut: Rick promises an easy, 20-minute adventure. Cue the "Six days later" card.
• A God Am I: Toxic Rick thinks so.
  "If God exists, it's fucking me."
• Good Is Not Soft: Healthy Rick is almost always friendly, polite and an overall Nice Guy. He also has zero qualms with exploiting Toxic Rick's irrational attachment to Morty, repeatedly shooting Toxic Morty to force Toxic Rick to re-merge with him.
• Graceful Loser: Healthy Morty is oddly accepting of Rick finding him, restraining him, and reinjecting the toxins. He even gives his girlfriend the apartment that he earned.
• Green Is Gross: The toxified Earth itself, as well as Toxic Rick and Morty.
• Groin Attack: Toxic Rick when fighting his good counterpart.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Morty briefly becomes this during his time as a stockbroker.
• Hope Spot: Healthy Morty uses his amorality to become a New York stockbroker living in a fancy apartment and dating a hot redhead, only for Rick to eventually track him down and retox him.
• I Lied: Toxic Rick gleefully admits that he lied about remerging with Healthy Rick when Healthy Morty foils his plan to switch places. After all, Rick would have done it.
• Ignored Epiphany: This episode confirms that Rick has willfully chosen to ignore Dr. Wong's advice about putting in the work to repair his family and ignore cheap thrills. Even when he and Morty are traumatized by another adventure, Rick's solution is to go to a spa rather than look inward.
• Improbable Age: No one questions Healthy Morty becoming a stockbroker or dating women in their 20s, despite being 14, because he's just that charismatic.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Attemped by Jessica to get out of her date with Morty at the restaurant. She's not good at it though.
• I Was Just Passing Through: When Rick and Jessica come to turn back Morty, each one claims the other dragged them into it.
• Kidanova: Healthy Morty is this thanks to losing his social awkwardness and self-deprecation. He easily charms at least two older women in this episode.
• Kids Are Cruel: Zigzagged. The toxified children at the birthday party murder the guy in the rat costume who tells them Santa isn't real. However, this can be interpreted as the children all viewing their impulsivity and destructiveness as flaws they don't like about themselves. Tellingly, when they get detoxified and realize what they've done, they all start crying.
• Knee-capping: Rick shoots both of Toxic Morty's kneecaps to force Toxic Rick to comply with his order to merge.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • Healthy Morty, despite being popular with everyone, doesn't actually care about anyone. He merely knows how to manipulate them. He successfully dates Jessica, but is unable to relate to her and takes being dumped in such stride that he seems apathetic, then proceeds to pick up a girl at the bar.
  • Healthy Rick, despite outward appearances, seems to feel the same, since Rick considered "irrational attachments" to be a toxic element. After Healthy Morty blurts out that they have different definitions of "healthy", Rick realizes this trope is in effect and slaps Morty to test it, presumably feeling nothing. He then shoots Toxic Morty to make Toxic Rick submit.
• Literal Split Personality: The detox machine removes Rick and Morty's toxic personality traits and puts them into separate bodies.
• Love Is a Weakness: This is why Toxic Rick has a strong emotional attachment to Toxic Morty.
• Meet Your Early-Installment Weirdness: Toxic Rick and Morty resemble even more extreme caricatures of their personalities in the first season, showing the stark contrast in how they've changed over the series.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Gesture by Toxic Rick when announcing that he controls the universe.
• Mirror Morality Machine: Toxic Rick's machine mentally pollutes the entire world, turning them into whatever they hate most about themselves.
• No Ontological Inertia: Mostly played straight when Rick restores the world from the World-Wrecking Wave with no damage left behind from the toxicity beam itself; however, it's subverted when it comes to any damage done by people while affected by the beam, like with the kids at the birthday party, who turned into rampaging murderers, and the beam's reversal leaves the survivors crying and traumatized amidst blood and bodies.
• No Time to Explain: After his "Eureka!" Moment, Rick grabs Morty and rushes off with him, promising to explain his revelation on the way.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • The normally detached and aloof Rick actually has a massive Freak Out after he and Morty barely survive their latest adventure. He also admits fault and weakness by confessing that their success was based mostly on luck, not his intelligence.
  • Removing their toxins radically changes both versions of Rick and Morty. Rick becomes meek, caring and polite. Morty, however, becomes super confident and largely amoral. Meanwhile, Toxic Rick is a lot more vulgar and burps more often while Toxic Morty loathes himself a lot more and is much more cowardly, bringing their original characterizations to mind.
• Outrun the Fireball: Rick and Morty in the opening adventure escaping the explosion in their shuttle.
• Painful Transformation: When Morty merges with his toxic counterpart.
• Pure Is Not Good: Detoxifying Morty basically turned him into a Sociopath.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Toxic Rick doesn't want to become part of Rick again but also hates his own existence, so he decides to turn the whole world just as toxic as he is.
• Right Behind Me: Gunk Rick assumes this trope is happening upon leaving the toxin tank, but it's not.
  Gunk Rick: That idiot believed every word. Now let's see how he enjoys living in that shit tank. (Beat) He's right behind me, isn't he?
  Gunk Morty: He's in front of you.
  Gunk Rick: Oh. My eyes are still adjusting.
• Safe Word: Stacy uses "sea cucumber" as her safe word. Healthy Morty invokes it to get her to pull him and Healthy Rick from the modified detoxifier, and she is screaming it when she's released from the toxin tank in the stinger.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Instead of Morty reabsorbing his toxicity like Rick, Healthy Morty jetpacks away to abandon his old life.
• Shout-Out:
  • Rick and Morty's Gilligan Cut adventure is an obvious parody of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi.
  • Morty's life as a stockbroker is a clear reference to The Wolf of Wall Street, with his method of selling worthless stocks being based on Jordan Belfort's depiction in the film.
  • Rick describes Clean Morty as "tiny American Psycho", another sociopath adored by those around him.
  • Rick's drones form a mini-Voltron, which he name drops.
• The Sociopath: While Rick in general is this, he and Morty become more benignly sociopathic when their cognitive toxins are removed. They're adored by those around them but lack any real humanity. Best exemplified when Healthy!Rick shoots Toxic!Morty repeatedly with poison and doesn’t change expressions. He knows Toxic!Morty will die but is unable to care since Toxic!Rick also carries his “irrational emotional attachment” to his grandson.
• Something We Forgot: The stinger shows a tour guide freeing Stacy from the toxic tank after a few weeks.
• Spanner in the Works: Stacy proves to be this to Toxic Rick by switching places with Healthy Rick and Morty in the detoxifier, getting teleported into the toxin tank instead of them.
• Squick:
  • One of Jessica's friends states she needs to find a "docking kind of love". Don't look up what "docking" actually is.
  • Seeing an entire planet turning toxic and covered in slime is gross enough, complete with green hues, but then we see the effects of said toxicity. It's an Understatement to say it's not a pretty picture.
• Status Quo Is God: Rick and Morty go back to their usual selves at the end of the episode.
• The Stinger: During a guided tour of the moon tower, the tour guide finds the toxicity tank Rick left behind and opens it, releasing Stacy, who is screaming her and Morty's Safe Word, "sea cucumber".
• Strangely Arousing: Stacy asks if it's weird that she finds Healthy Rick wrestling Healthy Morty into the detoxifier kinda hot.
• Stupid Evil: Healthy Rick considers his toxic self this, as his unchecked worst impulses would have gotten him killed in five minutes.
• Stupid Good: Devoid of his toxicity, Healthy Rick has moments like that, briefly considering letting Toxic Rick get away with his plan to toxify the world because he doesn't feel like he's the right person to tell him he's in the wrong.
• Take That!:
  • Once he has no moral compass, Morty becomes a stockbroker.
  • There's a really sharp dig at the Sbarro pizza chain when the toxicity wave hits; the customers of the neighboring Saladworks all flock there, while the Sbarro's customer walks outside and starts eating straight from the trash.
  • The effects the detoxifier has on Rick and Morty, their new personalities, and the consequences thereafter can all be read as a Satire of the self-help industry (something briefly touched upon in "Pickle Rick").
• Technicolor Toxin: The toxin and toxic versions of the characters have a green tint.
• Tempting Fate: Rick promises Morty a quick 20-minute adventure to get what he wanted. Unfortunately, it takes an extremely dangerous six-day one.
• Tomato in the Mirror: When Toxic Rick finds out he and Toxic Morty are... toxic.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Rick, once separated from his toxic self and turned healthy in the alien spa, becomes a very nice and polite man. This doesn't last though when Rick realizes that he has to reabsorb his toxicity back to save all of Earth from turning toxic. Though there is a small epiphany about his toxic side right before returning things to normal.
  "Now we'll just reverse this hacky toxicity beam. Man, I really overthink shit when I'm angry."
• Virtue Is Weakness: Since the toxins are defined by the actual hosts, it is established that both Rick and Morty believe their own sentiments or empathy for other people are holding them back. Healthy Rick and Morty are the result of this, being content and pleasant, but lacking the ability to care about anyone else. It is only because of a remaining grasp of logic concerning the consequences that Healthy Rick (and ultimately Healthy Morty) decides to reverse the effects.
• Vocal Dissonance: The Emo Teen often seen walking around in Morty's school is burly and boyish in appearance but is revealed to have a feminine speaking voice in this episode.
• We Want Our Jerk Back!:
  • Rick certainly wants his toxic qualities back, at any rate, if only because his healthy self feels guilty about stranding them in the tank.
  • Morty, on the other hand, doesn't miss his toxins at all and runs away to keep from getting them back. Rick gets Jessica to help him track Morty down by hounding her into it, but at the very end, Morty learns that she actually missed the old him, too. It's hinted that Morty secretly wanted the toxins back, as evidenced by his nonchalance at having left the call going so Rick could track him down and retoxify him.
• Wham Line:
  • "We're the toxins!" Basically saying that Rick and Morty removed their perceived toxic qualities from themselves.
  • The line where Rick mentions "irrational attachments" as something he considers toxic.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Toxic Rick drops a hint as to the location of the "mid-western town" where the Smith-Sanchez family lives when he builds his world-toxifying beam on top of a "moonlight tower". They were built in a few cities across the midwest, but they still exist in one location: Austin, Texas.
• World-Wrecking Wave: Toxic Rick rigs up a device to toxify the whole world, manifesting the toxic parts of everyone on the planet save Healthy Rick and Morty. Simply turning the device off reverses the effect.

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