Recap / Rick And Morty S 4 E 6 Never Ricking Morty

Original air date: 5/3/2020

Rick and Morty are trapped on a train that forces them to experience different narratives.

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Tropes:

• Acid Pool: One of these is seen in the first story.
• Ambiguous Syntax: When Rick tells Morty of the Bechdel Test, he mentions that it was proposed by a lesbian cartoonist named Alison Bechdel. Morty asks why "lesbian" is part of her job title.
• An Aesop: The episode emphasizes that one person cannot impose their ideas of narrative on people with whom they coexist. Rick rebels against the train's narrative when he realizes that it's a trap and gets mad that someone is trying to control how his life is going.
• Anywhere but Their Lips: In the last scene when Rick wants Morty to kiss him, Morty is squicked out but eventually goes for the forehead.
• Artistic License – Religion: Story Lord's explanation of the etymology of 'Yahweh' to a dumbfounded Jesus seems to just have been a joke made up for the show, there were no Sumerian or Mesopotamian deities named 'Ya' or 'Weh'^note Long story short, the etymology of "Yahweh" is uncertain, but was contemporary with multiple Semitic gods in the Bronze Age.
• Author Avatar: Story Lord has very overt elements of being one for show co-creator Dan Harmon, though of the self-deprecating kind. The most obvious similarity is in how he employs Harmon's story circle model as a villainous scheme.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: This episode is as meta as can be, and repeatedly gets meta about being meta, with lampshades happening all over the place.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: When the Story Train that Morty bought for him derails, Rick insists that Morty buy a new one instead of returning the broken one since currently no one else is out buying anything with a virus going around.
• The Cameo: A Continuity Cavalcade of them in numerous story clips throughout the episode, including but not limited to Abradolf Lincler, Snowball/Snuffles, Bird Person, Phoenix Person, Tammy, Evil Morty, the Meeseeks, numerous Gazorpians resembling Morty Jr., and Mr. Poopybutthole (who looks like he's gotten the Darth Sidious treatment).
• Chekhov's Gunman: Evil Morty. The Story Lord brings him back as a means to trap Rick and Morty.
• Continuous Decompression: Rick makes use of this effect when fighting the tickets guy who eventually gets sucked out of the train's window.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: The "tickets please" guy is revealed to be a hidden badass once he rips his shirt off. Storylord takes that a step further.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The ticket master gets sucked out a window into space, ripped in half in the process, then because of the effects of the train, experiences a months-long hell of spinning in a circle spraying blood everywhere until Morty finally puts him out of his misery.
• Cue the Billiard Shot: The scene with Mustache Rick playing pool at a club is kicked off with a billiard shot.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Rick and Morty aren't able to put up much of a fight against the completely-ripped Ticket Collector, who breaks Rick's leg and quickly turns the tables on Morty after the latter jumps him. Rick is only able to end the battle by shooting a hole in one of the windows, causing the compartment to undergo Continuous Decompression and the Ticket Collector to get sucked out into the non-canon "space" around the train.
  • The even-more-ripped Story Lord completely wipes the floor with both Rick and Morty, utterly whaling on both of them and repeatedly knocking them into the non-canon space before easily pinning them both to the wall to extract their "story potential".
• Deconstruction: A disguised Rick lampshades the idea of an episode where everyone gathers around talking about how they "almost got" the same character. He asks why they would waste time going around talking about it rather than finding the figure in question.
  • The whole story deconstructs the idea of going meta. On the one hand, it's a brilliant metadiscussion of the structures of stories in general and Dan Harmon's favored circular story structure and beats. On the other, it's so dense and one-off that it alienated a lot of viewers who took it as an attack on their hopes and preferences for the show (see the recap's YMMV page).
• Designated Girl Fight: In one of the stories that Story Lord extracts from Rick and Morty, Summer fights Tammy while Rick fights Phoenix Person.
• Deus ex Machina: A literal example. Story Lord, using his machine to extract the "unlimited storytelling potential" of Rick and Morty, shows them "the end of [their] story", where they are cornered by an enormous army led by Evil Morty. To thwart him, Rick and Morty deliberately invoke an Out-of-Character Moment and pray for salvation from... Jesus Christ, who literally descends from the heavens to save them.
• Dull Surprise: Morty's stories have the actors speaking in flat, emotionless dialogue because Morty can't think up anything clever on the fly.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: Morty's story that tries to pass the Bechdel Test has Beth and Summer using the power of their periods to fire rainbows from their crotches to kill female scorpions. And no, that sentence will not make any more sense if you actually watch the scene.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Apparently Rick has been dating all types of people. Amongst his past lovers is a man, a Yoda-type alien and a Funny Octopus.
• Feminist Fantasy: Spoofed. Rick calls the story where Beth and Summer save the day with the power of their "special times" a feminist masterpiece.
• Filibuster Freefall: Invoked. Rick and Morty escape from Story Lord's machine by turning the show into a Christian Author Tract, dropping its appeal and marketability.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: It turns out none of the episode's events actually happened to our Rick and Morty; Rick and Morty were playing with a toy from the Citadel. The toy train's version of Rick and Morty are just puppets of fate and are alive but "not in any ways that matter", being forced to go through an endless adventure full of constantly created stories and characters.
• Guns Akimbo: The opening anthology story has Rick fight with a gun in each hand. Exaggerated when he grows another three arms with handguns.
• How We Got Here: Deconstructed and parodied. Everyone on the train talks about how they had an adventure with Rick, how he either helped them, screwed them over, or slept with them. Rick soon gets annoyed because he knows that he couldn't have seen this many alien beings, and he and Morty don't remember how they got on the train.
• Human Shield: Morty tries to fight the Ticket Collector when the latter beats up Rick and breaks his leg, but is quickly overpowered, and the Ticket Collector uses him as this to prevent Rick from shooting him. Rick is sardonic at just how good the Ticket Collector is at it before giving up and shooting the window behind him to blow him into space.
• Hypocritical Humor: Rick is disgusted at Morty using the term "cum gutters" when seeing the abs of a ripped "Tickets Please" guy. Rick later uses the term on the abs of the equally ripped Story Lord.
  • Likely unintentional, but Rick being surprised by Morty's lack of knowledge about the Bechdel test, considering that it's brought into the plot due to how often the show fails it. Not helping that, while Rick correctly nails down its origins, misunderstands the test itself, as shown under Common Knowledge.
• Indy Hat Roll: Morty slips under a closing door in non-canon space after escaping from his "egg".
• Irony: While explaining the Bechdel test, one of the first things Rick clarifies is that there have to be at least two named women. Morty takes the very concept to an absurd extreme, making a story where every character is specified to be a woman (actually using the term "female") and the story revolves around menstruation (though only called "special times")... yet only manages to get one character named (Summer, Beth is only called "mom" through the story, the scorpions are unnamed and so is the supreme court judge [Ruth Bader Ginsbergh]). Although, it should be pointed out that the women being both named was not originally part of the test.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Rick is willing to give up after seeing how jacked the Story Lord is. Too bad the Story Lord won't let them off easy.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After sending Rick and Morty into numerous stories, the Story Lord ends up getting trapped in his own anthology after the duo believes in Jesus. This allows time for Rick and Morty to escape back through Story Lord's portal and destroy it, leaving Story Lord trapped with Jesus Christ. It does not help that Story Lord's death was implied when Jesus Christ self-destructed.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Throughout the episode we pass by lookalikes of Yaddle, Elsa, Anna, Denver and VeggieTales characters.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Morty takes the opportunity to play with the boobs of his woman disguise, which allows Rick to figure out it's him underneath.
• Mercy Kill: Morty shoots the Ticket Collector after he's been slowly dying in space for a while because he feels bad for him.
• Non-Standard Character Design: The characters in Rick and Morty's dream, such as the VeggieTales parodies and the Denver the Last Dinosaur look-alike, stand out from the other characters in the show in being drawn with smoother surfaces and cuter appearances.
• No Periods, Period: Averted. To pass The Bechdel Test, Morty imagines a story wherein Summer and Beth talk about their "special time".
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Lampshaded by Morty when Summer leaves for college in one of the stories.
• One-Liner, Name... One-Liner: In the story where Rick sheds a tear about Summer leaving for college, he calls it "A human moment, Morty, a human moment."
• Out-of-Character Moment: Deliberately invoked by Rick and Morty to escape from Story Lord's attempt to extract their "limitless potential" of future stories: when the two of them are in a hopeless situation that Story Lord claims to be how their story ends, they manage to get out of it by praying to Jesus Christ. Since this is something they would never really do (as Rick doesn't even believe in God) and would be a horrible story, it causes Story Lord's machine to lose its power.
• The Pawns Go First: Rick's opponent in the first flashback story waits out on his throne until Rick has finished off all his underlings, then gets up and proclaims "Now I will fight you". It's not clear if this part is true as it comes from an Unreliable Narrator.
• Pet the Dog:
  • When Morty's space suit runs out of continuity and he begins to suffocate, Rick immediately gives Morty his own continuity supply and almost dies instead. One could argue that this is due to needing Morty to tell the story to break the Thematic Seal, but considering that Rick doesn't have the highest opinion of Morty's skills, it's still taking a significant risk and placing a good deal of trust in Morty. Apparently due to the nature of the Train, Rick had to intentionally design the suits to fail at a certain point so that he and Morty would pay the heavy price needed to cross the threshold to get to the Seal.
    Rick: Because if it's too easy we'll never get there! If you don't want to be meta stop deconstructing shit!
  • One non-canon story shows Rick actually tearing up as Summer packs the car to go to college. He says sincerely he's going to miss her.
• Prayer Is a Last Resort: Invoked by Rick to derail the Story Lord's plan.
• Rewatch Bonus: The blonde girl squicks out when a woman in a car asks if she's slept with Rick, saying she didn't. When you realize that's Morty in a disguise, he was basically asked if he performed incest.
• Running Gag: The male antagonists (and Jesus) ripping off their shirts shortly after Rick & Morty encounter them to reveal they're very, very ripped, and their definition is evaluated by the tone of their "cum gutters".
• Scary Scorpions: Morty can't think up anything except a horde of giant scorpions attacking in either of his stories.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of Rick's "girlfriends" in the Story Train is a clear reference to Jadis, the White Witch. Another one is clearly Yoda.
  • Some of the characters that appear at the end of the Jesus Christ story are talking vegetables and Christianity-soaked Denver the Last Dinosaur.
  • The passengers in the train cart that talk about the "Rick and Morty musical" are dressed as characters from popular Broadway musicals, including The Phantom of the Opera, Hairspray, and Cats. One of the posters behind them is for The Sound of Rick.
  • The train, its engine design and the introduction of the conductor Story Lord are clearly a nod to Snowpiercer.
  • At the end, Jesus references ThunderCats (1985) by saying "Father of Omens! Give me blood beyond sight!", which is very similar to the show's saying "Sword of Omens! Give me sight beyond sight!".
• Silly Song: Rick and Bird Person perform one in an story.
• So Proud of You: Played for Laughs when Rick drunkenly tells Morty this, word-for-word, in regards to...Morty "spending money" and "buying something" (namely, the Story Train), much to Morty's confusion.
• Spoof Aesop: The end of the episode has Rick congratulating Morty for engaging in consumerism by buying the train.
• The Stinger: An advertisement, starring (an unknown) Rick and Morty, for the story train on which most of the episode takes place, which the ending reveals is something that Morty C-137 purchased for Rick from the Citadel of Ricks' gift shop.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • The two stories that Morty makes up on the fly, the first of which has one man visiting another and having a completely random conversation, and the second involving Summer and Beth and deliberately passing The Bechdel Test. Rick notes that the stories were supposed to be shitty to work, but the second one is what breaks the seal because passing the Bechdel Test is not something that the show usually does.
  • As part of the episode's Take That, Audience! potshots, the story snippets containing Tammy + Phoenix Person and Evil Morty, who are probably the most-hyped antagonists on the show in many parts of the fandom, are deliberately written to feel like they came right out of a bad fanfiction. In the former case, Summer and Tammy are having a Designated Girl Fight with lightsabers and Rick fights Phoenix Person while a giant battle between mooks takes place in the background, and all of them spew cliche, cheesy dialogue. For the latter, Evil Morty has assembled a gigantic, generic army that has Rick and Morty cornered; The Dragon is an evil version of Mr. Poopybutthole who blatantly rips off Darth Sidious; a bunch of Meeseeks are also present; and, to top it off, Evil Morty is back to wearing the eyepatch he had on in his first appearance, while also wearing a cape and carrying a staff like a generic supervillain, seemingly all for the purpose of looking more intimidating.
• Subtext: Once Storylord has Rick and Morty at his mercy, he decides to extract their limitless potential, with Rick replying that their potential isn't limitless and he'll just kill them. The series had gotten an unprecedented order from the network and the writers were well aware this could all go horribly wrong.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: Mustache Rick gets impaled from behind by a Morty equipped with a bayonet.
• Take That!: The victory against Storylord is a literal Deus ex Machina (yet another meta element) that summons Jesus and a ton of low budget Christian characters. It can be read as a take-that to the tendency of writers to rely on DEM to find an ending for a story, but it's definitely a hit on media that make a shocking swerve into religious territory (often to make sure an unsalvageable project can still make money, but sometimes because it's just a very low budget religious project made by amateurs).
• Take That, Audience!: This episode rips into the notion of the show needing to make serialized arcs centered around seemingly big characters being set up in previous episodes. Heavily hyped characters, such as Tammy and Evil Morty, appear in service of brief non-canon gags. Some of them were even teased in the Season 4 Part 2 trailer in scenes that looked big and epic, showing just how big of trolls the writers can be.
• Take That Us: A lot of the meta pokes fun at the show relying so heavily at Dan Harmon's favored story methods, but also a lot of the things the show has been criticized for, such as not passing the Bechdel test.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The female scorpions in Morty's Bechdel Test story have long eyelashes and wear pink bows on their heads.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: How Rick beats the Ticket Collector: he tries to Just Shoot Him, but the latter uses Morty as a Human Shield, so Rick eventually just gives up and shoots the window, causing the man to be sucked out into the area around the train. Unlike most examples, this doesn't kill him, since, rather than being killed by lack of pressure and air as is usual for someone who undergoes this, the difference between inside and outside the train is "canon" vs "non-canon" (seen when Rick and Morty have to use "continuity masks" instead of oxygen masks to breathe). The Ticket Collector continues to float outside the train in agony until Morty gives him a Mercy Kill.
• Toilet Humor: Rick's farting joke in the opening story, where he only communicates in farts. Then, after defeating the henchmen, using a formula to grow a second ass just so he can fart from both.
• Virgin Tension: In one of the stories, a male character in the Ticket Collector's non-canon dream reveals that he is part of a religion that stays a virgin to keep the Ticket Collector alive and save the world. He then gives in to the temptation coincidently at the same time Ticket Collector is given a Mercy Kill by Morty.
• Visual Pun:
  • After the alien explains his theory on the Bleeding Man, blaster shots fill the screen as the theory is "shot full of holes".
  • At the end of the episode, the Story Train completely derails itself.
• Voices Are Not Mental: Both Rick and Morty have different voices when they are in disguise. This has the added bonus of them not recognizing each other.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Story Lord has Rick and Morty at his mercy, and he wants to drain them of their story essence to reach "beyond the Fifth Wall"^note Which is when a character in a show acknowledges their actor's lives and makes references to the actor's other work or life as their own; breaking the barrier between actor and character. rather than killing them(though he also doesn't care if they burn out). So he puts them in a scenario where they see all of the continuity nods and their greatest enemies, ostensibly going out with a bang. Rick realizes they aren't dead yet and have a last resort: derail their marketability with OOC behavior.
• Winter Royal Lady: Among Rick's exes are women who look similar to Jadis, Aldrich and Elsa.

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