Recap / Rick And Morty S 5 E 2 Mortyplicity

Original air date: 6/27/2021

The Smiths suspect they're being hunted, but they don't even know who is real.

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Tropes:

• Ambiguous Clone Ending:
  • Rick created decoys of himself and his family, who then created decoys of themselves until there were dozens of identical and near-identical Smith families. Those who realized they were decoys either killed themselves out of despair or started killing other decoys until There Can Be Only One. By the time they nearly all wiped each other out in a massive war, they don't even care which Rick, Morty, Beth, Jerry, or Summer survived so long as they are the only ones.
    Rick: You the, uh, Summer I came with?
    Summer: Probably.
    Rick: Good enough.
  • It is revealed that the real family was already in space, picking up "Space Beth" on the way back to Earth. This Rick gets an alert that his decoy family was wiped out.
• And I Must Scream: The wooden Jerry android in The Stinger ends up going through many life-threatening situations but he survives through each of them. Even when he's reduced to a head, Wooden Jerry just won't die, much to his dismay.
• Anti-Nihilist: The Wooden Smith Family; especially in the case of Wooden Rick who goes out of his way to help other Decoy Families in a bid to have them all coexist instead of trying to kill each-other. Not that this works out well for them.
• Asshole Victim: Wooden Jerry was able to survive the attack from the Squids by locking out his family and the other decoys. The post-credits scenes reveal that he did not live the rest of his life peacefully; he was dismembered by beavers, buried long enough for humans to be replaced as the dominant species, reduced to a face and then burned alive by alien cowboys, and finally nailed above a victim of crucifixion. The fact that he was unable to die through all of this is what makes this a fate worse than death for Wooden Jerry.
• Badass Boast: The Rick who created the beacon to round up all the decoys lays a massive boast that the entire world can hear.
  Rick: Whattup, you decoy motherfuckers! Come on down to Rick's House of Squids where I'm serving your ass on a platter! I know what you're thinking: "Fuck, a beacon. That's a great idea. He's got home turf, a tacit psychological advantage, and absolutely pendulous balls!" And now you're thinking, "Shit, that's totally what the Rick-est Rick would do! I might actually be fake! I pretended I didn't care if I was, but I totally did! Now the only way to prove I'm real, and not him is to ice his expository ass." So let's do it. Come get some—What? No, Morty, I'm gonna loop it. Why is it--
• Badass Longcoat: The wooden decoys wear green longcoats on top of their usual Smith family outfits.
• Bait-and-Switch: The beginning of the episode starts with the family slaughtered by squid-like beings before it turns to the real one alive; Rick gets an alert that his "decoy family was murdered and has everyone pack up to leave... Only for the squids to kill them too. It then switches to another family with their Rick getting the alert and has his family prepare to leave before they too are killed. The entire episode soon makes it incredibly unclear which decoy family is the real one, which isn't helped by how some of them last longer in the spotlight than others. Then it all turns out the real(?) family was on a space trip with Space Beth.
  • During a Big Badass Battle Sequence involving multiple decoy families, one that resembles a cast of muppets are sitting far from the area. Before they fly off to finish things up, they are shown to just be wearing costumes in hopes of being "too cute to murder".
• Bamboo Technology: The first few generations of decoys appear to be simple clones with a self-destruct device inside their brains. However, as each subsequent generation of Ricks become lazier and defects start piling up, the decoys start to become androids, then robots with cloned skin, then automatons made of wood, then made of basket weave, then straw, etc. The most deformed of them that we see look like they were somehow constructed out of burlap.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: Near the end of the episode, one decoy Rick invokes this to gather every other decoy family on the planet and take them all out in one fell swoop. This was all to save time as discussed by both him and another decoy Rick.
• The Big Board: Rick pulls out a whiteboard and draws an Exposition Diagram to help his family understand the concept of cascading decoys.
• Bigger Is Better: One of the Rick decoys brings up reasons why the squids are trying to kill him. He believes (twice) they're jealous of his dick size and tries to say there are more reasons than just his dick size.
• Blasphemous Boast: One Rick boasts "I'm god...you're just made in my image!" while fighting a decoy of his.
• Blood Knight: One of the wooden Summers craves "glorious death in decoy battle" instead of hiding.
• Body Horror: The decoys several generations down the line, who are of such low quality that it was blatantly obvious to them that they weren't human the instant they were activated. Which is worse: the shoddy scarecrow-like family trying to steal the skin of other decoys, who have notable mental degradation? Or the wooden mannequin robots who are mentally normal? Imagine waking up in a shoddily made, wooden body, but with all the memories and mental capacity of the original family — so you fully comprehend you're not the real you?
• Boom, Headshot!: A number of decoys are killed with well-placed shots between the eyes.
• Brain Bleach: One of the first decoy families has this reaction when their Rick mentions that he gets hard about protecting the family.
• Brick Joke:
  • In the opening, one of the decoys is hunting a little alien guy that screams "Hunt me!" until Rick tells him off for wearing out the concept. By the end of the episode, the last of the decoys are killed by the same little guy...because they didn't hunt him.
  • After the opening, Jerry is chastised by the family for asking questions about Mr. Always Wants to be Hunted instead of about the decoy situation. When the last decoy Rick is mortally wounded by Mr. Always Wants to be Hunted, he begins asking those same questions.
  • In the Show Within a Show When-Wolf, When-Wolf finds Dracula in the prehistoric age and begs When-Wolf not to send him back to the future because Christianity hasn't been invented yet. In The Stinger, Wooden Jerry lives through possibly hundreds of years until the new dominant species take over and reinvent Christianity.
  • Earlier on, Rick says that Highlander rules are in play. Come The Stinger, we have Who Wants To Live Forever? from the film's soundtrack playing over Wooden Jerry's immortal misadventures.
• Call-Back: The first episode of season two had a throw-away joke from one of the time testicles to the other that "if you get to the dolphin people, you've gone too far". This episode's coda has Wooden Jerry meet a woodpecker-person and a dolphin person.
  Woodpecker Person: What is it?
  Dolphin Person: A relic. From a kinder past.
  Woodpecker Person: [pecks Wooden Jerry because he's made of wood, as Wooden Jerry screams]
• Calling the Old Man Out: Throughout the episode, Beths tear into their Ricks for not learning his lesson after Space Beth and continuing to create fully sapient clones of the family that are unaware they're clones, intended to be expendable. Near the climax, one observes that even though he treats his family as so burdensome, he's indirectly created "oceans" of them because he couldn't bear losing them. Her Rick concedes that she has a point.
• The Cameo: The President and Space Beth appear in this episode.
• Chekhov's Gunman: When we meet the second set of decoy Smiths, they’re in the middle of hunting Mr. Always Wants to be Hunted. At the end, he shows up to kill the final decoys because he was angry no one was hunting him.
• Clone Degeneration: Discussed. Rick directly mentions the loss of quality when decoys make a copy of themselves by referencing the loss of quality when copying a copy^note Like when you xerox a xerox, you lose definition with each iteration. In the second half of the episode, a poorly-made burlap-and-straw Rick brings up how Ricks get lazy and each generation of decoys is made with less care and quality (as each new Rick clone is less competent than the last, as well as lazier), demonstrating a sequence of flayed Ricks with increasing mechanization before simply being made of wood and straw, like scarecrows. The straw Rick and his family are the worst-made clones, but many of the decoys are obviously artificial despite being of better quality, like a family made in the perfect likeness of the real ones but made out of wicker.
• Clones Are People, Too: This is (one) Beth's argument against (one) Rick's plan to terminate the decoys.
  Beth: Terminate? They're alive, Dad.
  Rick: And at some point they won't be. That's how existing works. What, you're gonna save every stray cat?
  Beth: No, but I can resist making more of them in a lab.
• Continuity Nod: The weapon one Rick gives to a Morty is a laser-whip, which Morty previously begged for in "Promotyus".
• Cyborg: The decoys, minus the ones made of straw and the wooden androids, are a case of flesh and blood with robotic endoskeletons underneath. One of the decoy Ricks is even shown wearing the very clearly flesh and technology-infused intestinal tract of another around his neck during the final battle.
• Decoy Protagonist: The entire episode keeps following a set of literal decoy protagonists only to have them killed and switch over to following another set until those are also killed and so on and on. This goes on throughout the entire episode until it eventually ends with the supposedly real family, revealing they had been in a space adventure with Space Beth the whole time.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • When asked for potential reasons for the squids to hunt the family, Rick lists three items with the first and last one being the squids envying the size of his penis.
  • When Summer tells Rick he left out the first part of It's Quiet… Too Quiet, Rick points out that it's obviously quiet if it's too quiet.
• Dirty Coward: Wooden Jerry leaves his own decoy family to die just so he can live and use all the varnish for himself.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Morty confronts Rick about making clones of themselves, Rick insists that they are actually decoys.
• Dramatic Unmask: The squids from the shot-down shuttle turn out to be decoys as well.
• Driven to Suicide: One of the Rick decoys kills himself in the squid alien ship after seeing another one of him in another ship.
• Expendable Clone: Rick made a decoy family so they would be targeted. Unfortunately, all the decoy Ricks, being equally as intelligent, independently came up with the same idea.
• Face Death with Dignity: Played with, as each set of decoys has a variable response to the dual realization that they aren't the originals, and that they are being hunted to death by the other decoys (and possibly the real Rick):
  • Some aggressively turn on the other decoys, and each other, leading to a free-for-all wiping most of them out.
  • When some realize they're not the originals, they simply commit suicide.
  • The reaction of the obviously non-human ones is particularly mixed: some turn on the other decoys or have gone insane, but some of them try to rally the others to work together in a futile hope at survival.
  • A few quietly accept their fate with dignity, calmly enjoying their remaining moments with each other and not resisting when they get slaughtered by the other decoys.
• Failsafe Failure: Rick built in an Override Command into the decoys but failed to anticipate that decoy Ricks would build their own decoys with their override commands different from his own.
• Fate Worse than Death: Wooden Jerry wanted to live after witnessing the mass attack of his family decoys but after he escapes, he discovers that he would rather die than being used as a beaver dam, a frame for a mirror in a western saloon, and a crucifix cross and states this continuous torture is the worse thing to ever happen to anyone.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Rick begins the episode by saying how they will kill God just before he and the entire family are killed by squid aliens. As the episode gets more and more crazier, we find out that decoys have been made aware of their existence and how they were made by a more superior Rick (akin to their God) and that the squid aliens are actually another decoy family. Then it warps around to the Stinger where we see that it isn't Rick who kills God, but rather (technically) a wooden puppet version of Jerry.
  • The Rick on vacation talks about how the purpose of the decoys is to go on "fun, self-contained, terrestrial adventures." At the end of the episode, it's revealed the real family was never on Earth to begin with, then again that family might've been decoys as well.
  • After Rick mentions Clone Degeneration and make poor looking Squid costumes for his family the first set of squids they take out are revealed to be Decoys in more convincing disguises. This shows the poorer clones are the result of the latter generations of Ricks becoming increasingly lazier.
• Genre Savvy: Having grown familiar with Rick's antics, multiple iterations of the Summer decoys quickly realize that they and their respective families are likely decoys, to the annoyance of multiple Rick decoys.
• Go Out with a Smile: The decoy Smith family that is standing in the ocean openly accept their fates with smiles on their faces. The Morty from the other Decoy Family that had killed the ones in the ocean questions if they even needed to kill those versions since they were clearly content and not trying to do anything malicious.
• Hiding in Plain Sight: One decoy family dress as muppet versions of themselves and sit out the free-for-all, since the disguises so obviously mark them as decoys that the other decoys won't bother to kill them.
• Home Field Advantage: Name-dropped when one decoy Rick decides to cut to the chase and creates a Huge Holographic Head to lure in all the other decoys.
• Huge Holographic Head: The climax of the episode has one decoy Rick creating one of these to lure in all the other decoys.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Flayed Rick pleads his family to end his life but Ugly Rick still needs him alive.
• Ignored Epiphany: The Season 4 finale made Rick realize that he was a horrible father for willfully erasing his own memories about which Beth was the real one and which one was the clone. Come this episode, he reveals that he deliberately created clones of his entire family as expendable decoys for any aliens that might want him dead, with the clones none the wiser.
• Insistent Terminology: They're decoys, not clones. Rick would rather pinch you in the shoulder than explain the difference, though.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: When the family is fleeing in their station wagon, Jerry claims that he doesn't see any danger around. Cue the car getting melted to a lump by a squid killer commando.
• Ironic Echo: Since the episode follows multiple sets of the Smith family, some dialogue gets repeated under variable circumstances. Often, there are minor changes.
• Irony: Before the credits, Rick states his intention to kill the Christian god, and another decoy Rick later declares himself God. In The Stinger, a new messiah is crucified and Christianity begins anew, as God has long outlived Rick.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Spoofed. At the forest, Rick notes that "it's too quiet" to which Summer replies that he forgot to mention the word "quiet" first. Rick argues that he didn't say "quiet" because "too quiet" implies "quiet" to begin with.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Wooden Jerry leaves his family to die out of cowardice. At the end of the episode, he has escaped all the carnage unscathed, only to run afoul of a group of beavers. It only gets worse for him from there as he's forced to endure centuries of life-threatening situations but finds himself unable to die.
• Kill It with Fire: More than once does a Smith clone family get wiped out with the use of a flame thrower.
• Kill the God:
  • In the Cold Opening, some decoys of Rick and Morty talk about murdering the Christian God.
  • In The Stinger, the earthly embodiment of Christian God is killed, not by Rick and Morty, but crucified by non-human earthlings millions of years later.
• Knockout Ambush: When the family tries to hide out in the woods, they get shot with Tranquilizer Darts and captured by a faulty decoy Rick.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Wooden Jerry left everyone else to die so he could keep a single can of varnish for himself to cross a river. He ends up immortal and going through ever-worse situations. Bonus points, as he states immediately after locking the door he doesn't want to die and he begs for death after the beavers get him. It only gets worse from there.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Jerry suggests for the family to split up and hunt squids and decoys separately. Rick is against the idea if only because he hates stories told in Simultaneous Arcs.
• The Many Deaths of You: The many, many decoys are killed in gruesome ways.
• Meat-Sack Robot: The more sophisticated decoys have flesh and blood surrounding their robotic skeletons.
• Mirror Match: Several times, decoys modeled after the same person end up fighting each other.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: When a clone Beth holds a Rousing Speech in front of a group of survivor decoys, she addresses the "Ricks and Morys, Beths and Jerrys. (Beat) Or also Summers". The Summer decoys are not amused.
• Outside-Context Problem: Mr. Always Wants To Be Hunted becomes this. He just shows up out of nowhere at the end and guns down the final decoy family. The last decoy Rick, not being the Rick that met him earlier, has absolutely no idea who or what he is or why he wants to be hunted.
• Override Command: Rick has one to disable his decoys. Typical of Rick, the ones demonstrated are "80085" ("boobs") and "8==D" (an ASCII penis). Beth even says she expected something more creative, to which Rick responds that he never figured he'd be using the code in front of them.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: One of the decoy families gets the idea to poorly dress up as squids to ambush the Space Squids.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Beths keep sniping at their Ricks for callously creating sapient clones of the family unaware that they're intended to be expendable, which they only know because now all of them are forced into a kill or be killed scenario. Ricks try jabbing back a few times, but one Rick basically calls Beth on being so mean to him when he's her father.
• Pet the Dog: Decoys they may be, a few Ricks express genuine love and admiration for their families, even Jerry. Given that they're copies of the original Rick, this means that deep down Rick does love and treasure his family no matter what front he puts up.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Rick's Highlander reference elicits no reaction from his family.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: One Rick brings this up. They have to kill all other decoys because if they choose coexistence but even one other family chooses to exterminate the others, they'll die.
• Revolvers Are for Amateurs: Invoked by Rick. When he equips his family with weapons for the final clone battle, Beth gets a huge laser gun, Summer a double-bladed light saber, Morty a Lightning Lash and Jerry a revolver.
• Riddle for the Ages: The whole cascade consists of decoys killing other decoys. It is never revealed what caused the first set to catch on and start the killing.
• Running Gag:
  • Rick reminding his Morty that the clones are not for fucking like done on TV.
  • Beth taking Rick to task for callously creating sapient life and treating it as expendable.
  • Any time the family is wearing costumes, Summer always complains they smell like ass.
• Scary Scarecrows: Some of the less advanced decoys from the second half of the episode are basically this, made of straw and burlap, with small scythes popping out of their wrists.
• Schmuck Bait: One of the Ricks fakes having an existential crisis and pulls down his pants, exposing his ass to Morty. He begs his grandson to check his left butt cheek for a bar code that he claims will prove he's the original Rick. Morty initially declines but finally relents, whereupon Rick farts in his face.
• Self-Surgery: One Rick is shown digging around in his own brain, dismayed to find a chip inside that identifies him as a decoy.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story: We follow the stories of many decoy families. Most of them figure out what is going on and hatch a plan to survive. However, after some harrowing experiences they are all killed anyway.
• Shout-Out:
  • Rick compares the "kill or be killed" situation of the decoys to Highlander. According to Rick, Sean Connery was Not Even Bothering with the Accent in that one.
  • One of the decoy Ricks uses a hologram that's very similar to Andross. He even references Star Fox by name.
  • Two different Mortys mention Westworld and Ex Machina at the sight of paused decoys, to which Rick sardonically agrees before telling him not to try having sex with them.
  • Similar to the Space Beth situation, Rick compares the clones going rogue to Blade Runner.
  • In one scene, a decoy Summer tries proving she's real by cutting her arm in the bathroom mirror, relieved at the sight of her bleeding, also like in Ex Machina. Unfortunately, Rick comes in and rips all the flesh off her forearm, revealing a mechanical endoskeleton like a Terminator.
  • The decoy control chip that one decoy Rick found in his brain may be a reference to the inhibitor chips used in the Clones in Star Wars, to enforce compliance with Order 66.
  • The title of the episode is a parody of the film Multiplicity.
• The Singularity: Rick refers to the continuing escalation of decoys as an Asimov Cascade; Rick made decoys of himself and his family who pretend to be them in the event that they're attacked, only for the decoys to become self-aware enough (without knowing they're decoys) to start making decoys themselves who in-turn become self aware and it just keeps going from there. Since Rick tends to get lazy with his hard sci-fi, this leads to degradation in quality for decoys.
• Sphere of Destruction: One of the executions committed by the decoys-disguised-as-squids is a grenade that disintegrates everything within its blast radius. An unfortunate Jerry is only caught halfway in such a blast and dies in agony after watching his whole family wiped out in front of him.
• Spot the Imposter: Subverted. Two fighting Morty clones ask Summer for assistance but instead of trying to figure out which one was her Morty, she turns away and asks them to fight it out themselves.
  Summer: I had to kill my double. You do your own dirty work.
• Spotting the Thread: In the opening scene, Rick gets suspicious when Jerry mentions a job interview he is going to. Five seconds later the family gets gunned down by a group of squids.
• Stealth Pun: The burlap and straw decoy Rick that explains to another family of Smiths about the misfortunes of the decoys that know they obviously aren't human is not only a decoy in the form of being akin to a scarecrow, but because of his radical position opposed to the flesh and blood decoys, he is literally a Straw Man in the argument.
• The Stinger: The wooden Jerry decoy seen earlier goes through many near-death experiences but ends up surviving in each of them, proving his immortality, but he is anything but happy with it.
• Straw Character: There is a Rick determined to kill clones to harvest their organs in order to make himself more real, lamenting the plight of the more degenerate decoys, who is eventually defeated by another Smith family, but the Rick in question is not only a figurative straw Rick, but literally made out of burlap and straw.
• Strawman Has a Point: In-Universe. Straw Rick mentions that, because Ricks are inherently lazy, they will sometimes make their decoys out of worse and worse material, to the point that these clearly inhuman decoys realize from birth that they aren't even real, which ruins the effectiveness of them being decoys.
• Stunned Silence: After getting signaled about a killed decoy family, Rick announces a family emergency. In walks Jerry from the kitchen to present his gluten-free, sugar-free, lemon-free lemon squares. Rick is momentarily stunned by the absurdity of the situation.
• Stylistic Suck: To demonstrate that the decoys are of degraded quality compared to the original, not only do they look worse (lego family, Bizarro family, wood family, rotten meat family...), but the wooden decoys also have degraded audio, like they're working with really shitty mics that muffle their sounds.
• There Can Be Only One: The decoys are determined to wipe out all other decoys because they know the other decoys will try the same thing and they'll only be safe if they kill the real Rick and all the other decoys. One decoy Rick compares the situation to the Prisoner's Dilemma, and another declares "It's basically Highlander rules now."
• Tomato in the Mirror: Suggested by Summers throughout the episode only to be dismissed by their Ricks, though the boast of one near the end suggests that none of the Ricks are as confident as they're acting. Notably, a montage near the middle of the episode shows a decoy Rick finding a control chip in his brain and another decoy Rick ripping the flesh off of a decoy Summer's robotic arm, to her horror.
• Tranquillizer Dart: The family in the forest is taken out by these.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: For betraying his family and the clone society, Wooden Jerry lives the rest of his life in a torturous state where he's unable to die and forced to watch humanity be replaced by another species.
• Troubled Fetal Position: One Jerry is found quivering like this in a closet while everyone was fighting around him.
• The Unreveal: One of the first shown Rick decoys is just about to reveal what happened to his dead ex-wife Diane until the decoy beeping alert interrupts and makes him change the subject.
• Watching the Sunset: One decoy family calmly watches the sunset by the ocean before getting killed, which is undercut with the reveal that they're actually there to pee in the ocean as a Bucket List goal.
• Wham Shot: The Space Squids that have been wiping out decoy families since the start of the episode are revealed to actually be decoys themselves in disguise. It is later revealed that other decoy families have the same idea.
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Invoked. One family survived until the end by dressing up as Muppet characters which no one dared to gun down.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Rick is constantly taken to task, sometimes by Summer (who wonders if they're the decoys as well) but mostly by Beth for all the decoys he (and his decoys) made.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Averted. One of the decoy Summers comments that she and her decoy family live in Colorado. According to Word of God, the Smiths live in Washington, just outside of Seattle, so the Colorado comment is Five-Second Foreshadowing that this Smith family are decoys too. A hint of this is that even the decoy Summer's exact comment is that they didn't "feel" like they were supposed to be living in Colorado — because in her real memories, they actually don't. Some of the other decoy families mention other states that they live in or have moved to.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Again, Wooden Jerry, to the point that the Queen song that named the trope is playing in the background.
• You Monster!: Beth calls the degenerate Rick a monster for skinning another Rick alive.

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