Original air date: 11/17/2019
Rick hunts down an alien who used his private toilet while Morty and Jerry try to take down an app that was made by aliens with Jerry’s help.
Tropes:
- Air-Vent Passageway: On the mothership, Morty and Jerry escape into the duct system, where they begin to hatch an escape plan.
- Aliens of London: The Planet Looters have New Zealand accents.
- Almost Famous Name: The priest officiating Summer's wedding has the last name Witherspoon. He's Priest Witherspoon.
- Ambiguously Bi: In the app craze, one of the people the app matches Summer with is a woman, and she doesn't have a problem with it. It's unclear whether this is just part of the app craze or she is genuinely attracted to women. It's worth noting that a side character mentions that he learned he is gay through the app.
- Analogy Backfire: The alien leader contradicts himself when comparing love to water."Had you bothered to master love, you would've learned by now, it is as abundant as water. You know what isn't? ... Water.
- Antagonist in Mourning: Rick is shaken after learning of Tony's death in a freak accident and even attends his funeral.
- Arson Murder And Life Saving: Subverted. After Glootie frees Morty and Jerry, Morty delivers a speech to his father that sounds like a pep talk but it doesn't go beyond listing bad things about Jerry.Morty: Dad, I want to say something. I started today disgusted and embarrassed to be your son, and then later I thought we were gonna die because you're a loser.
Beat
Jerry: There's no more, is there?
Morty: Nope. Now quit fucking up and let's go. - Ass Shove: When Rick finds Tony on his toilet again, he has his giant Rick mecha pull down its pants and sit on Tony, leading to this.
- Bait-and-Switch: After his run-ins with Tony, Rick adds some upgrades to his private toilet, and is next seen telling the receptionist at Tony's workplace that he can use it. This suggests that Rick set Tony up to be killed when he does so; however, as seen at the ending, it turns out to be a bunch of hologram Ricks cheerfully insulting Tony about using his toilet and making fun of his 'shy-pooper' status.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Summer spends the whole episode acting like Beth's being controlling and over-protective trying to keep her away from "true love" to spite her going through about five "soul mates" in the span of one day. In the end when she gets over her obsession with the app she simply wants to go home, without any attempt at apology.
- Call a Human a "Meatbag": When Rick shows up at the site of the Robot War, he's misidentified as a "flesh intruder", which he technically is. Fortunately for Rick, he quickly discovers the flaw in his robot disguise, which consists solely of a funnel hat with a QR code printed on it, then turns the hat around so the QR code would be visible to the robots, who would then identify him as a robot lieutenant commander.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Near the end of the episode, Morty bluntly tells Jerry that he's disgusted with him for his complicity in the mess with the app and thought Jerry's idiocy was going to get them killed. After confirming that he's not going to say anything heartwarming, he simply tells Jerry it's time to quit fucking up.
- Compartment Shot: Of Jerry looking for a Midnight Snack in the fridge.
- Computer Equals Monitor: Subverted. Morty bashes the monitors Jerry and Glootie were using to develop the app, only for Glootie to point out that he's accomplished nothing.
- Continuity Nod: Remember the bully that Morty shot into space in the last episode? His face is on a milk carton!
- Control Freak: Tony surmises that the reason why Rick created his own toilet on a far-off planet and went to such insane lengths to keep it to himself was out of a paranoid grab for control of every minute detail of his life.
- Dark Lord on Life Support: Subverted. The alien leader has water tubes plugged into his back but it turns out to be just for show.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: The chip holding the sandwich delivery data gets broken up into four pieces which Rick has to assemble piece by piece.
- Do Not Go Gentle: At the Robot War, the situation looks bleak for the robots so one of them suggests to at least go out in glory.
- Downer Ending: Rick, after finding out that his new friend Tony (whom he vehemently denies was his friend) is dead, goes to use his private toilet and is subjected to the holographic message that he rigged for Tony to find when he came there again, which mocks him(self) for how lonely he is and how he's there all by himself because no one wants to be around him. Rick just listens to all of this in silence, looking forlorn and depressed.
- Dramatic Irony: Jerry and Glootie, the developers of the "Lovefinderz" app, are given no soulmate matches whatsoever when the app scans them.
- Easter Egg: Rick's funnel hat to fool the robots actually has a working QR code that initially linked to a webpage selling the very same hat for charity. Now it just redirects to the Rick and Morty homepage
. - Empathic Environment: It rains in the final scene where Rick takes a dump while undergoing humiliation by a bunch of Holo-Ricks that was meant for Tony.
- Epic Fail: Jerry and Morty drop from the Air-Vent Passageway into a room full of armed aliens even before their Great Escape plan could unfold.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The Monogatron overlord is shown to be a caring husband when his wife enters the bridge. No surprise since his race has mastered the science of "functioning, committed relationships". Do you know what they didn't master? The synthesis of water.
- Subverted at the end when as soon as their mission goes south they turn on each other and get divorced.
- Double subverted with the mob boss when Rick attempts to hold one of his 800,000 kids hostage. He doesn't seem bothered by it but relents after learning that 470,000 more of them are also in danger.
- Everyone Is Armed:
- When Rick confronts the mob boss, everyone in the room suddenly draws a gun on him.
- Averted and Played for Laughs with the Monogatrons; Morty and Jerry can take Glootie hostage and force their way to their leader simply because none of the Monogatrons are armed, despite Morty and Jerry being unarmed themselves. They casually declare that someone with a gun is coming, though the size of the ship means it takes them a while to catch up before they can flip things against Morty and Jerry.
- Evil Plan: Jerry asks the Monogatron leader what his evil plan is. The latter denies that there is one until a gun arrives at the bridge, at which point he begins his Evil Gloating about humanity's failure to master love and his plan to take Earth's water resources.
- Extra Eyes: The Monogatrons sport two pairs of eyes stacked upon another.
- Eye Beams: Rick wins the Robot War by shooting lasers from his eyes.
- Face Death with Dignity: Tony is totally calm when Rick threatens to kill him and tells Rick that he is ready.
- Fatal Family Photo: Before getting killed, Tony asks Rick to be allowed a final look at his wife's photo.
- Flipping the Bird: In their first encounter, Rick leaves Tony by putting a device on his table that looks like several connected asses. After farting hard enough to break the ceiling, it poops up a hand made of crap which flips Tony off.
- Flying Cutlery Spaceship: The Planet Looters' spaceship looks like this.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: By sampling alternative realities, Rick proves to Tony that the death of his wife had nothing to do with the toilet incident.
- Friendly Enemy: Tony, a being Rick couldn't bring himself to kill, was self-aware enough to reject his personal heaven that Rick created to get him out of the way. Just after Rick finishes preparing his ultimate Troll move for Tony, Tony dies in a freak accident, leaving Rick as an Antagonist in Mourning.
- Giver of Lame Names: Jerry dubs the dating app "Lovefinderrz", which is obliviously mocked by Beth. The aliens also roll their eyes when they hear the name.
- Hell of a Heaven: Tony doesn't seem too happy to end up in a toilet-themed Fluffy Cloud Heaven, even though it should be his ideal fantasy created by the chemical he's been dosed with.
- High-Five Left Hanging: Morty is reluctant to high-five his dad in the Airvent Passageway.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Invoked. The episode ends with Rick mournfully subjecting himself to the holographic "The Reason You Suck" Speech that he rigged for Tony to find when he uses his toilet.
- Humble Goal: If Jerry's Globaflyn-induced fantasy in The Stinger is any indication, he'd be perfectly satisfied just having a simple job where he's appreciated.
- May not be as humble of a goal at first glance, however. The job he does in his fantasy is simple enough, but in reality there’s no guarantee everyone would be pleasant towards him all the time. A job is one thing, the appreciation of others can be more complex.
- Hypocrite: Beth is firmly against Summer living and having sex with someone significantly older than her. Fine enough. However, in "The Wedding Squanchers", Tammy's age was supposed to be the same as Summer (and, as such, she was younger than Summer was in the episode), and while we don't have a definite age for Bird Person it's supposed to be close to Rick's. You know, Beth's father and Summer's grandfather. She didn't show any concern for the age gap back then, and chastized Rick for being against the wedding (although it must be said, Rick's reasons themselves had nothing do with age).
- Idiot Ball: Rick knowingly hired an intern who was planning to develop an app to take Earth's water, parades it around, leaves it unsupervised and doesn't even bother to explain why developing his app would be a bad idea. Particularly since, no matter what Morty says, it's not out of character for Rick to impose senseless restrictions just to screw with people. Jerry in particular is used to getting this treatment from Rick and has no reason to be so sure he is doing it for a good reason.
- Improvised Weapon: Summer and Beth fight each other at the airport using a broom and a golf club.
- In Spite of a Nail: Rick isn't convinced by Tony's reasoning that he only used Rick's private toilet because he's not thinking straight due to the passing of his late wife...so Rick tracks down and presents to Tony an alternate Tony who never lost his wife but still felt the need to crap in Rick's toilet anyway.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Morty applies this technique to get information out of Glootie.Jerry: Shake him more, Morty. That was working.
- Laxative Prank: After modifying his toilet to give Tony a surprise, Rick comes by his office to deliver presents of vegan chili and some chocolates. The chili is self-explanatory, while Rick quickly warns the mourning secretary off of trying the chocolates because she'll end up like the oil spout from Beverly Hillbillies. Sugar alcohols like sorbitol will act as a laxative, maltitol is even prescribed as a laxative. And sometimes sugar alcohols are used in candy as a sugar substitute. The chocolates were specifically described as sugar free.
- Let's Get Out of Here: Spoofed in the church scene where three of the suitors bursting into the room drop a variation of this line before taking their lover away, including the officiant.
- Life Will Kill You: Downplayed. Tony's death happened while skiing down a giant mountain, living life to the fullest, but it was still a freak accident that had nothing to do with his rivalry with Rick.
- Likes Older Men: Summer doesn't seem to mind her supposed matches being too old for her.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: This episode reveals that Rick has a substance called "Globaflyn" that connects the "want" and "have" sections of one's brain, giving them lifelike visions of their greatest desires.
- Tony ends up in a fantasy where he and his wife are in a Heaven full of toilets. Tony ends up squirming around in the pod and nearly choking himself, forcing Rick to cut him loose. This scene also shows that Rick has dozens of aliens suspended in pods full of the stuff, all aliens that he both refuses to kill and refuses to let into his life.
- In The Stinger, Jerry inadvertently samples some Globaflyn and receives a vision of himself as a water delivery man who is appreciated by customers. When he comes out of it he desperately laps up more of the chemical.
- Make an Example of Them: Rick kidnaps an alternate version of Tony and beats the crap out of him as a warning to his Tony.
- Mama Bear: Beth is unrelenting in her quest to stop (underage) Summer from running off with her so-called "soulmates", to the point she even fights Summer after the fourth one.
- Mars Needs Water: Glootie's species use dating apps to distract the populations of worlds so they can steal their water unimpeded.
- Mook–Face Turn: Glootie decides to take down "Lovefinderrz" after seeing how he and Jerry aren't so different.
- Nobody Poops: Thoroughly Averted, as Rick's story in the episode revolves around "shy-pooping".
- No-Tell Motel: Summer checks into one of these with her new-found soulmate. It's a place where no one cares about rape or assault.
- "Not So Different" Remark:
- Tony's pointed observations of his own life, namely losing people and feeling like he has no control of his life, is similar to Rick's, which convinces Rick to not kill Tony, and later to consider him a friend.
- Jerry using "Lovefinderrz" to show Glootie that they are both losers (the app, which is supposed to be able to find a soulmate for anyone, can't find one for either of them) convinces Glootie to let Jerry and Morty go rather than killing them as ordered.
- One-Word Vocabulary: The frog people at Vermigurber's restaurant only say "ribbit" (and technically "hey").
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Part of Rick's depression at the end is that he kind of did maybe strike up a friendship with Tony and is sad the man died. However, he also wanted to prank him and make fun of him for being a shy pooper no matter what he said to or about Rick, and the fact that Tony turned his loneliness around and died living to the fullest means even if Rick had pranked him, it wouldn't have worked. Tony won even before he died.
- Pet the Dog: Rick attends Tony's funeral and gives Tony's father some money and a means to clone Tony (though he points out that this isn't really going to bring Tony Back from the Dead).
- Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Rick is enraged when the alien secretary doesn't get his The Beverly Hillbillies show reference.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Though they're planet-looting alien invaders, Glootie and most of the Monogatrons are mostly just interns, and so are Affably Evil for the most part. When Glootie informs Jerry and Morty he's been assigned to kill them because he's the one who brought them, he informs them of this with the same upbeat, casual tone he's used up until this point.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Rick gets what he wanted and gets his toilet all for himself, but he ends up accidentally driving away Tony to his death, and gets screamed at by thousand versions on himself on how badly he screwed up.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The insult trap Rick had planned for Tony ends up turning into this for Rick himself given everything that had happened.Holo Rick: There he is! There's our guy! Congrats, Tony! Have fun with your stupid toilet that you get to use all by yourself now. Enjoy using it all by yourself while you sit there and think about how nobody wants to be around you and how you ruined it for yourself because you're a huge piece of shit. Look at you sitting there, King Shit on his throne of loneliness. Enjoy this toilet with a thousand of me screaming every time you take a shit! All hail His Majesty, the saddest piece of garbage in the entire cosmos! Long live the big bad doo-doo daddy! May his reign last a thousand years!
- Refuge in Audacity: Tony continues to claim he and Rick will be friends even as he blatantly antagonizes Rick, a being who, in their first encounter, grabbed an alternate-reality Tony and beat the crap out of him just to make a point. Despite himself, Rick actually begins to like Tony and feels bad when Tony dies in an accident.
- Revealing Hug: When Beth and Jerry hug at the end, we see her checking the dating app behind his back.
- Robot War: Rick is forced to intervene in a war between robots and cybernetically enhanced reptile men to get the information he needs to find his toilet thief. He winds up completely winning the war for the robots just to get the delivery data from a delivery robot that had joined the cause.
- Schmuck Bait: Glootie has a tattoo on his head reading "Do not develop my app", which he is constantly asking people to do. Morty even Lampshades that Rick would only add the warning in such a fashion because he is too lazy to explain why it would be bad. Jerry, naturally, falls for it before the episode even reaches the intro sequence.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: After Jerry uses "Lovefinderrz" to demonstrate to Glootie that they are both losers, he decides to let Morty and Jerry go, despite having been ordered by the alien leader to kill them.
- Sentimental Music Cue: There is a gloomy tune playing over the Downer Ending scene of Rick on his "throne".
- Serious Business: Summer explains that Rick is a shy pooper, elaborating on how shy he is in detail, even telling the rest of the family that he has a special pooping place... although, knowing Rick, Summer more than likely isn't really giving as much of a detailed elaboration as she thinks. Rick actually has an entire planet rigged for the sole purpose of creating a private bathroom for himself. When he finds out that someone has been using his toilet, he goes to any lengths necessary — threatening a drug don's extended family and wiping out the enemy forces in a war — to get the information he needs to find his "toilet thief". He then goes to just as insane lengths to keep said thief away from his toilet.Tony: You can make a perfectly-realized, toilet-filled simulation of Heaven, but you can't share a toilet?
- And then there's the drug dealer, who's incredulous that Rick would go to all this trouble to find out who ordered a sandwich.
- Space "X": Rick is informed by the front desk at his office that Tony died in an expedition on Space Mount Everest, which Rick lampshades. After his pop culture references don't land, he irritably tells her to watch the Space Beverly Hillbillies.
- Spectacular Spinning: Glootie exits after his Heel–Face Turn with rapid twirling that helicopters him away. Jerry and Morty lampshade how out of nowhere this is.
- Spit Take: In his underground lab, Rick spits his beer when the scanners show that Tony has returned for another pooping session.
- The Stinger: Jerry raids the fridge late at night and drinks some of Rick's Lotus-Eater Machine-inducing chemical. After imagining himself as a humble but satisfied water delivery man, Jerry immediately goes back for seconds.
- Take That!: At dating apps and the people who use them for thinking they can replace the concept of simply going out and seeing other people yourself.
- Toilet Humor: A rather literal example, since quite a bit of the humor in this episode is related to the actual private toilet that Rick has on another planet. That said, there are still quite a few jokes cracked about pooping and/or farting as well.
- Too Dumb to Live: After three seasons of Rick warning everyone not to do something, and someone doing that something anyway leading to something horrible happening, Jerry still decides to help Glootie with his app despite Rick's various warnings. Having learned this lesson enough times for it to stick, Morty snaps and makes it very clear that he thinks his father is an idiot and a loser.
- Jerry finds a mysterious unknown liquid in the fridge that he assumes belongs to Rick. His immediate action is to stick his tongue into it.
- Turned Against Their Masters: After Rick wins the Robot War for the robots, the news report notes that "the Robolution has overturned the lizards".
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The episode cuts back and forth between three plot lines: Rick hunting down his toilet thief (which is separate and unrelated to the others), Morty and Jerry trying to save Earth from the Planet Looters, and Beth trying to stop Summer from getting involved with the sleazy people that the app matches her with (the latter two plots are somewhat related in that the Planet Looters were the ones who created the app, and after Morty and Jerry defeat them and shut the app down, it mostly wraps up Summer's and Beth's storyline too).
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- Rick eventually convinces Tony to live his life to the fullest. This gets Tony killed in a mountaineering accident. Rick is left distraught.
- Jerry and his dating app.
- The lizard soldiers who went after Rick when he was just on the battlefield trying to track down who pooped in his toilet from the delivery bot, especially the one who swallowed the last piece he was after. Rick ends up turning around a war they were winning against the robots.
- We Have Reserves: Invoked. Vermigurber, a giant fly drug don who runs a frog restaurant, attempts to take Rick threatening one of his kids in stride, saying that he has 800,000 kids, so losing one apparently isn't that big a deal to him. Unfortunately for Vermigurber, Rick is NOT "a fucking idiot" and tells him to check his voicemail, revealing that he actually threatens to kill off 470,000 (more than half) of the don's offspring unless he gets the information he wants.
- White Flag: The alien news report footage shows one lizard waving a white flag signalling his surrender to the robots.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Invoked. Glootie uses the ticking sound of his "Ominous beeping app" to try and scare Morty and Jerry off so he can slip away. His added Ominous Adversarial Amusement helps to sell the act. Glootie only fails because he has trouble getting the window open before Morty and Jerry realize that they've been played, allowing Morty to grab him before he can complete his escape.
- Why Waste a Wedding?: Summer meets one of her "soulmates" while he's getting married to someone else, he asks the priest to just marry him and Summer instead. Before this can happen all three meet their next "soulmates", as does the priest.
- Your Makeup Is Running: The alien secretary's makeup is running due to her mourning Tony's death.
