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Rick and Morty Trope Examples
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    A 
  • Absurd Phobia: It turns out Rick is afraid of wicker furniture and pirates.
  • Abusive Parents: Due to species divide, Morty accidentally became one in "Raising Gazorpazorp", as chronicled in his half-alien son's book My Horrible Father.
    Beth: It's a thankless job, Morty. You did the best you could.
    • Beth and Jerry aren't necessarily abusive, more neglectful. They didn't pay their children much attention when they were babies, one reason could be because they became parents so young. Earlier in the series, Jerry tries a little harder at being a good parent than Beth, but she has gotten much better since the end of Season 3 and dropped the Parental Neglect almost entirely.
    • Jerry also mentions how "they can't all be raised like reptiles by a mentally ill scientist" suggesting that Rick may have been this to Beth when she was a child. He was neglectful of her, to the point where she would draw him into family pictures with a crayon. However, this is turned back on Beth when Rick shows her the box of inventions she specifically asked him for. Some highlights include stickers that cause amnesia, shoes that make no sound (for sneaking up on people), and a sentient switchblade. Rick mentions that Beth was a "scary kid" and that he did everything he could to limit her interactions with other people. He fully admits his inability to be a good parent but makes Beth take some responsibility for her own actions.
  • Actor Allusion: "Meeseeks and Destroy" isn't the first time Tom Kenny has voiced an evil bean.
  • Actually Pretty Funny:
    • Subverted with Evil Rick's bug-like henchman, who randomly makes a laughing noise every few seconds, which our Rick mistakes for approval of his zingers.
    • In "The Rickchurian Mortydate", Rick finds the President's rivalry with them to be annoying, but clearly enjoys watching Morty verbally spar with the President.
  • Adam and Eve Plot: The very first thing we see Rick do in the series is drunkenly planning to exterminate the human race except for Morty and the girl he likes.
  • Aerith and Bob: Generally justified due to the many alien species in the series obviously having different cultures from Earth.
  • The Alcatraz: The Ricks of the Citadel agreed to help C-137 build the Central Finite Curve as a way to ensure they'll always be the greatest minds in reality. C-137 built it so that the rest of reality would be free of him and all the other Ricks.
  • An Alien Named "Bob":
    • Played with; Many Gromflomites have alien-sounding first names, paired with last names that sound like mundane human first names. Examples include Krombopulos Michael the assassin, and Cornvelious Daniel the interrogation agent.
    • Tony, the alien gentleman from "The Old Man and the Seat" who turns out to be using Rick's private toilet.
    • The face-hugger aliens who possess Rick's and Morty's bodies in "Promortyus" are named Bruce and Steve.
    • In "A Rickconvenient Mort", Rick has a fling with a very non-humanoid alien woman named Daphne.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys:
    • Summer has a crush on Morty's bully, Frank Palicky, in the pilot episode.
    • Played with concerning Jessica and her boyfriend. She hates how he always picks fights, and yet they're still on-and-off until she permanently breaks up with him by the start of Season 4.
  • Amazing Technicolor World: Several planets and alternate realities Rick and Morty visit.
  • Ambiguously Absent Parent: The whereabouts of Beth's mother have not been given a proper explanation. Rick has implied that his marriage to her was not stable and that they did separate before his disappearance. Beth sheds a tear in "Pilot" when Rick tells her that he wishes her mother was present to eat the family's breakfast, but it is never confirmed if Beth's mother is actually dead.
    • In "The Rickshank Redemption", Rick is shown a memory in which a woman named Diane is his wife as well as Beth's mother, and she is killed in it along with Child-Beth; while Rick claims the memory was fabricated to fool his interrogator, Season 5 eventually confirms that it was real, and Diane and Beth were killed by another Rick.
    • That being said, it seems like the solid majority of Ricks in the multiverse did abandon their own versions of Diane and Beth to focus on science; dialogue heavily implies that this was the case for both of the Beths who act as main characters during the show, and when living with them, Rick goes along with the assumption that he was one such Rick who did so. As mentioned above, dialogue also implies that Diane is still dead in these universes as well (just from a different cause); in fact, the only time Diane has ever been seen alive on the show so far is in other characters' memories of her.
  • Ambiguously Bi:
    • Jerry is in this territory after the incident with Sleepy Gary in the episode "Total Rickall". Although his feelings for Gary appeared to be real, the entire incident was a falsely implanted memory of a relationship that never happened with a man that never existed. As Jerry hasn't yet shown any romantic interest in a male character who definitely exists, it's difficult to say whether him potentially having any interest in men at all is really the case or was just another part of the implanted memory. "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", however, makes this less ambiguous as he participates in a threesome between him, Beth, and Mr. Nimbus.
    • Summer, despite clearly being into boys, has given off hints of being interested in girls. In "The Old Man and the Seat", one of her selected soulmates is a woman, and the episodes "Rattlestar Ricklactica" and "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion" reveal she likes going to Boob World.
    • For most of the series, Beth is only interested in men, with her partners being Jerry and Mr. Nimbus (with whom she has a threesome with Jerry). Come "Bethic Twinstinct", though, and Beth—that is, both versions of her, Earth and Space Beth—fall in love with each other. The ambiguity is whether Beth is outright attracted to women in general as well as men, or if falling for a different version of herself is a special case.
  • Ambiguously Evil: The Galactic Federation in the first two seasons. Rick shows a lot of disdain towards the organization and his friends see themselves as Freedom Fighters going against them. The Federation are made out as oppressive and have been seen to be apathetic to civilian casualties. At the same time, this information comes from Rick and they do keep their word when Rick turns himself in so his family can return to Earth. That being said, their appearances in Season 3 and onward remove any remaining ambiguity; while many of the people working for the G-Fed are Just Following Orders, the government itself is shown committing genocide on various planets, holding an innocent child in a brutal prison simply because her father is a wanted criminal, and decide to destroy the Earth when Space Beth goes there for no real reason except that they can.
  • And I Must Scream: Glockenspiel Jerry is willing to do anything to live until he is incapacitated and forced to endure centuries of torment, unable to die, all scored to Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever."
    • Jessica is frozen in a crystal, completely immobile and unaging yet fully aware, unable to do anything but think, for hundreds if not thousands of years.
  • Animated Shock Comedy: Rick and Morty is generally seen as an example of this trope "done right". A lot of the humor is extremely sophomoric, with phallic imagery, burp/fart jokes, pop culture references and violence galore; however, it plays the consequences of a lot of these jokes completely straight for the sake of furthering the story and developing the characters, who even at their flattest are much more fleshed out and three-dimensional than a good deal of the show's contemporaries. The most notable of this is the writers' conscious decision to make the occasional verbal rape joke while playing every instance of the act itself completely for horror, illustrating the difference between making jokes about rape and thinking rape is funny.
  • Anyone Can Die:
    • One-off or even recurring characters might as well have countdown clocks over their heads. If someone survives a guest appearance, they'll probably be killed off for a dramatic moment when they next appear.
    • Overlaps with Death Is Cheap for the main characters, who can be replaced by alternate-universe versions of themselves and thus might occasionally suffer a sudden Plot Armor failure.
      • "Solaricks" is a particularly notable example. While the audience has followed the same versions of the titular duo throughout the entire series, by midway through the second season, the show is on its second iterations of Summer and Beth and third iteration of Jerry as the "main" versions of the rest of the family. This episode kills off or confirms the deaths of all previous versions who have been main characters in earlier seasons; Original Jerry confirms that the original Beth and Summer died offscreen after being frozen in ice in "The Rickshank Redemption", and he himself is killed by Rick Prime in The Stinger. Meanwhile, the second main version of Jerry dies when he's bitten and assimilated by Mr. Frundles.
      • This especially stands out in the episodes starring the Citadel of Ricks. The main Rick and Morty are safe, but any other versions of them are fair game. "The Rickshank Redemption", "The Ricklantis Mixup", and "Rickmurai Jack" in particular all see extremely high body counts of various alternate Ricks and Mortys, and in the latter episode, the entire Citadel is destroyed, killing almost every Rick and Morty there except for the main duo and a small number of other Mortys (most of whom die in the following episode anyway).
      • A major joke of the episode "Mortyplicity", the entire episode focuses on clones of the family who are evading squids coming to kill them who are, in turn, also clones dressed up as squids trying to kill other clones because they realize they're clones. Repeatedly throughout the episode the viewer watches one particular iteration of the family for sometimes 2-3 minutes of time, only for them to be suddenly killed and focus is shifted to another family. By the end of the episodes, the clones trying to figure out who is the real one are running around killing each other in a mass frenzy, and even then the narrative keeps focusing on a specific family only for them to die and be revealed as yet more clones.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
    • The coda for "Something Ricked This Way Comes" has the very muscular Rick and Summer beating up: a neo-nazi, a bully who pantses a kid, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church carrying one of their infamous "God Hates Fags" signs, and a guy who's mean to his dog.
    • Poncho's grievances against Dr. Bloom include his pompousness, negligence, and giving iTunes gift cards as holiday bonuses.
    • In "Get Schwifty", the first three undesirables sent to the Cromulons are a thief, a Goth, and a "movie talker".
    • In "The ABC's of Beth", Rick goes through some of the things Beth asked him to make for her as a child: rayguns, a whip that forces people to like you, invisibility cuffs, a parent trap (Bear Trap), a lightning gun, a teddy bear with anatomically correct innards, night-vision googly-eye glasses, sound erasing sneakers, false fingerprints, fall-asleep darts, a lie-detecting doll, an indestructible baseball bat, a taser shaped like a ladybug, a fake police badge, location tracking stickers, rainbow-colored duct tape, mind-control hair clips, poison gum, and a pink, sentient switchblade.
    • From "The Rickchurian Mortydate":
      The President: You're a terrorist, you're an enemy of the state, and you kicked me in the balls ten minutes ago!
  • Art Evolution: The character outlines become smoother and the backgrounds and designs of other characters more detailed as the show goes on.
  • Art Shift: The post-Season 1 promos has Rick and Morty (and Mr. Meeseeks) appearing as puppet versions of themselves, and the commercials for "Two Brothers" and "Jean Quadrant Vincent 16" are animated in a more dramatic, realistic comic style. The promos made for the third season's release use far creepier looking animatronic rod puppets.
    • The special shorts all feature this being animated by different teams- "Bushworld Adventures" is handed in Michael Cusack's trademark style of Deranged Animation; "Samurai and Shogun" is animated by Studio DEEN and Studio Twinkle in full CGI, and "Rick and Morty vs. Genocider" is animated by Telecom Animation Film and animator Takashi Sano in the same style as the Tower of God anime. The following short with the same team, "Summer Meets God (Rick Meets Evil)" uses a more stylized look slightly closer to the show.
  • Ascended Extra:
    • Summer started as a recurring character in the early episodes. She has become more major to the show since "Raising Gazorpazorp", frequently becoming a trio with Rick and Morty in adventures.
    • Beth and Jerry also rise to prominence as the series goes on, with their subplots becoming more important and each of them getting a solo adventure with Rick in Season 3 (Jerry in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy" and Beth in "The ABC's of Beth").
    • Arguably Squanchy Cat. He appears as an almost throw-away gag for Rick's party, in which Rick seems to not know him very well. By the second season finale, it's revealed that Squanchy was a member of Rick's freedom fighters and rock band.
    • Tammy Geuterman and Birdperson aka "Phoenixperson" who barely appear at all throughout most of the series and fall off after the season 2 finale "The Wedding Squanchers", only to suddenly reappear in "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" as the major antagonists of the finale.
  • Ass Shove:
    • Rick makes Morty shove two mega-seeds up his ass so that he can smuggle them through inter-dimensional customs.
      Rick: When we get to customs, I'm gonna need you to take these seeds into the bathroom. And I'm gonna need you to put them waaaay up inside your butthole Morty. Put them way up inside there, as far as they can fit.
    • One alternate dimension is populated entirely by hamsters who live inside people's butts. It's pretty ambiguous if the people are even living things since they seem to function like mobile homes.
      • However, the post-credits stinger shows the family visiting the "Hamster in Butts" dimension, where a hamster helpfully shows a diagram of the arrangement. The 'people' are in fact just empty puppets where the hamsters live. The people are like cars or houses and do not seem to have separate identities.
    • In "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind", when viewing photographs of the murders of 27 other versions of Rick, one of the Ricks was killed by having his head literally shoved up his ass.
  • Attempted Rape / Near-Rape Experience: Quite a bit.
    • Happens to Morty during an adventure. Luckily, Morty kicks ass, and then Rick kills the attempted rapist.
    • Rick argues that love potions are basically this, though he takes his time before saying so. In the same episode, everyone outside of Morty's family is infected by the potion, turning the tables on Morty.
    • Happens to Summer on another adventure. Luckily, Rick kicks ass.
    • In yet another episode, Jerry is the victim of it. Luckily, Beth kicks ass.
  • Author Appeal:
    • In "Something Ricked This Way Comes," the final victim of Rick and Summer's rampage is a dog abuser. Harmon and Roiland are both dog owners. Harmon put his dog on his Vanity Plate, while Roiland named Jerry after one of his dogs.
    • Ice-T showing up in "Get Schwifty," with Dan Harmon doing the voice. Harmon loves doing Ice-T impersonations in Harmontown
    • Dan Harmon does what sounds like an improvised rap in "Rick Potion No. 9." Improvised rapping is a big part of Harmontown.
    • In a Harmontown episode, Harmon tells the story about how he went for years without realizing he had a thing for redheads; A friend looked through his erotica collection and pointed it out to him. In the episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation," Rick has an orgy with a stadium full of redheads. In "Morty's Mind Blowers", Rick has an invention that works like a huge magnet on anything and Morty uses it to attract redheads.
    • In "Interdimensional Cable 2," an alien voiced by Werner Herzog criticizes humanity for doing things like putting an object up to their crotch and saying, "Look, I'm so-and-so penis!" A recurring feature on Harmontown had Harmon singing a song about a man with a chicken noodle soup can for a penis. Also on the podcast, comptroller Jeff Davis would occasionally sing a song called "Pringles Dick," about a man who puts his penis inside a Pringles can.
    • In "Interdimensional Cable 2," the commercial for Little Bits, the restaurant that only serves tiny food, is based on Bytes, the same idea for a restaurant frequently endorsed by Dan Harmon's friend "The Real Abed."
    • The plot of season 3 reflects Dan Harmon's divorce.
  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
    • Jerry and Beth do not have a good marriage, and are sometimes unsure if they're even in love, but one always has the other's back when push comes to shove. They do get divorced at the beginning of Season 3, but end up rekindling their love and reconciling by the end of it.
      • How they get back together is an example as well. Beth is worried that her father may have cloned her and she might actually be the clone, and talks to Jerry about it. Rather than taking advantage of her vulnerability like he might have in the earlier seasons, he sincerely reassures her by recreating their first date, leading Beth to realize how lucky she was to be with him. From Seasons 4 and onwards, while their marriage still has its bumps and minor issues, it's a much happier and healthier relationship overall.
        Beth: This isn't the woman you married, Jerry. Because this woman loves you.
      • This also extends to Space Beth. Even though Space Beth is the version of the two Beths (one of whom is a clone of the other) who remained divorced from Jerry, and questions why Earth Beth continues to stay with him, she did keep his surname and it's hinted that despite their divorce, she does still feel something for him. In "Bethic Twinstinct", it's even implied that she joins Earth Beth in a threesome with him when the two Beths fall in love.
    • The titular characters as well. Rick, despite his abrasive behavior, always wants what's best (well, at least what he thinks is best) for his grandchildren and isn't above having fun with them once in a while. He's abusive as hell to Morty and typically treats him as a means to an end, but there's little doubt he does genuinely care about him. Further pointed out in the episode "Rest and Ricklaxation": Rick considers these feelings negative, but the only reason Toxic Rick fails is because he shows an extreme amount of concern towards Toxic Morty's gunshot wound.
    • This is a show where you spend 99% of the time laughing/cringing at all the Black Comedy, and saying "D'aww" at least Once an Episode.
    • In ''Get Schwifty", Jerry outright says he's sick of pretending they only stay together for their kids. He married Beth because he loves her and wants her to know that.
    • "Rixty Minutes" shows an alternate timeline where Summer was aborted. Jerry becomes a movie star, and Beth is rich enough to sit at home all day. This leads to a lot of hurt feelings between "our" Jerry, Beth, and Summer. It turns out that in the alternate universe, Jerry's miserable and Beth is a Crazy Parrot Lady. Jerry has a meltdown and drives all the way to her house on a Rascal mobility scooter in nothing but his underwear, police and media on hot pursuit, to confess his love for her. This leads to "our" dimension's Jerry, Beth and Summer to patch things up.
    • In "The Wedding Squanchers" the Smith family become fugitives after Rick is discovered to be wanted for terrorism by the Galactic Federation. Jerry suggests that they turn Rick in so they can have a normal life, but the rest of the family refuses because they love Rick (for the most part). Rick has a revelation and turns himself in anyways. Later subverted when it turns out he got caught on purpose to not only topple the government but push Jerry and Beth to separate, letting him, in his own words, "become the de-facto patriarch of the family and the universe".
    • "The Ricklantis Mixup shows a Rick who is "more into working with wood than science," and creates a jewelry box (complete with a cartoon horse on top) for his daughter's birthday, truly demonstrating his love for Beth. This is then ruthlessly invoked as the scene pans out to reveal that this Rick is kept a prisoner, with this memory being played on an infinite loop just so the "happy" chemical his brain secretes can be extracted. This is done by other Ricks, to add flavor to a wafer.
    • Rick is reluctant to see Jerry killed, being genuinely horrified along with the rest of the family when Jerry was almost shot to death in "Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate", keeping him alive despite Jerry betraying him in "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", killing his ex-girlfriend's jealous boyfriend in "The ABCs of Beth", not going through with killing him in "The Rickchurian Mortydate", and rescuing him when he's in trouble in "Rattlestar Ricklactica" and "Amortycan Grickffiti".
    • Despite their Sitcom Archnemesis status, Rick and Jerry have also genuinely bonded more after their initial adventure together in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy", and Rick looks out for his well-being in addition to his life. In "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty", he erases the horrifying memory of what he and Jerry saw from the Talking Cat out of Jerry's brain to spare him the pain of remembering it, and he tells the Beths in "Bethic Twinstinct" that he and Jerry were drinking together one night and it led to Rick giving Jerry what he claimed he wanted the most (an emotional defense system) with no strings attached. He also gives up a chance to take a fate-controlling alien for himself in "Final DeSmithation" to save Jerry from a fortune that would have forced him to have sex with his own mother. Rick even admits in "Amortycan Grickfitti" that he's grown to genuinely care about Jerry, in his own way.
    • Morty and Summer start with an initially slightly adversarial relationship typical between siblings, but they develop an intense familial bond that is not only the strongest but the healthiest familial relationship in the entire Smith family. They both make it very clear to the other that while they don't always see eye to eye, they'll go to any length to protect the other from harm.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • After their first encounter with Rick in "Get Schwifty", the President and the United States Government got to work on creating their own form of portal transportation. It works, but the military has to spend the time and resources to manually airlift the portal platform to its destination just for a few people to transport through. According to Rick, each usage of the equipment triples the deficit.
    • Invoked again the same episode. The US Government has developed a pill that will shrink the user to near-microscopic levels. Unfortunately, it doesn't shrink their clothes, seems to take a decent amount of time while the user shrieks in agony, and Rick claims it will give them severe and incurable cancer. Rick creates one in a day that circumvents all of these shortcomings.
    • Also invoked in "Vindicators 3". Turns out our heroes weren't called for "Vindicators 2" in which the titular Vindicators destroyed an entire civilized planet just to get one shapechanger villain. Ricks's response?
      Rick: "I could have made you something that would have found him in about 20 minutes."
      • This is revealed to be a lie in the shorts; the villain was killed by a device that Rick had set up and subsequently forgotten about, and the planet was destroyed by Supernova when she miscarried. They pinned it on the villain to avoid the bad publicity.

    B 
  • Badass Boast: So many they could fill their own quotes page. A brief example from each member of the family:
    Rick: I'm a scientist; because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living, and when I don't like something about the world, I change it.
    Beth: I WILL REACH INTO HEAVEN AND YANK YOUR SCREAMING DEER SOUL BACK!
    Morty: Yea well if you think my Rick is dead he's not, and if you think you're safe he's coming for you!
    Jerry: Life is effort and I'll stop when I die!
    Summer: Bitch my generation gets traumatized for breakfast.
  • Badass Family: The Smith-Sanchez family. Even with Non Action Guys like Jerry and sometimes Morty, they still pull this off quite well, and several family members who start off as Action Survivors in earlier seasons end up taking several levels in badass over time. The best examples of this are seen in:
    • "Total Rickall": Once Rick, Morty, Summer, and Beth confirm that they're all real, the four of them work together to gun down the dozens of memory parasites in their home, complete with several instances of Back-to-Back Badasses. (Jerry, however, sits it out and hides in a corner.)
    • "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri": All members of the family are vital to defeating the Galactic Federation by dividing and conquering. Rick brings everybody else to their ship to rescue the Beths and then battles Phoenix Person (ultimately losing, but keeping him busy); Summer and Morty stop the G-Fed from destroying Earth by shutting down their planet-destroying laser; the Beths break free from confinement, shoot their way through the Mooks on the ship, and save Rick from Phoenix Person (even if they also lose to him); and even Jerry uses a Chekhov's Skill to distract Phoenix Person before he can kill Rick and the Beths, giving them the chance to shut him down.
    • "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion": Each of the five family members gets to pilot their own Gotron mecha, and they all later form a Combining Mecha together to take down enemies even more effectively.
  • Bait-and-Switch:
    • Due to the editing, at first it seems like Rick's emergency plan in "Rick Potion #9" managed to save the day offscreen (after he "[did] some scouting"). As it happens, he was actually scouting for a dimension where he and Morty managed to save the day... and then died soon after.
    • Invoked in the episode "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind". The episode begins with Rick being shot to death and Morty being tranquillized and kidnapped by Evil Rick and Evil Morty, who appear from a portal in the dining room. Then it turns out that these were alternate dimension versions of the main duo, and "our" Rick and Morty (C-137) are just fine.
    • In "Auto Erotic Assimilation" after seeing Unity bomb a city, it seems like Rick's going to realize their relationship is toxic for the both of them and leave. Then Unity clarifies that it moved everyone out of the city without telling him just to screw with him, and Rick has no such epiphany. (In fact, Unity is later the one to realize this and end the relationship.)
    • In "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", when Rick gets the drop on Risotto Groupon, he activates the cybernetics in his arm to reveal what appears to be a large, overly-complex gun, only for it to shoot out a suction dart which he uses to grab Risotto's gun and kill him with it.
    • "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" has Rick's ship, which has been put under strict orders to keep Summer safe, stick out a device and scan a person it sees as a potential threat, only for the scanning to actually have been a Laser Cutter that turns him into a fleshy pile of cubes.
    • The ending of "Never Ricking Morty": Rick and Morty have defeated and imprisoned Story Lord and prepare to leave the train...only to find that the control panel is fake. What's more, it's revealed that the whole episode wasn't happening to the real Rick and Morty; the Story Train is a toy that Morty bought for Rick as a present, and the Rick, Morty, and every other character inside the train are just fabrications created by it for a fake-story-adventure.
    • Summer and Rick go on an adventure together in "A Rickonvenient Mort" after the former is dumped, deciding to visit three different alien planets experiencing an apocalypse so they can have no-strings-attached hookups with the different species there, promising each other that they won't get attached. It seems to be setting things up for Summer, while On the Rebound, to grow too close to one of her hookups and Rick to ruin her new relationship in his usual fashion. Instead, in a complete role-reversal, it's Rick who gets too attached, and Summer is the one who eventually stops the third apocalypse in a "tantrum of cynicism" to break up Rick and his fling. He even admits that this was a very "Rick" thing of her to do.
    • Rick's negative dialogue with Young Memory Rick in "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort" about the Battle of Blood Ridge implies that he doesn't like to remember it because it went poorly. It actually went very well, and Rick and Bird Person were Bash Brothers who delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle to the enemy. The real reason Rick dislikes the memory of it is because he basically confessed his feelings to Bird Person and invited him to travel the multiverse with him, but was (politely) rejected.
    • A few in "Night Family":
      • Morty appears to be opening his fly in front of his mom and sister, but actually just unzips a bag with a bowling ball in it so they can drop it on his newly-built abs to prove how strong they are.
      • In The Stinger, the Night Family is completely broke after spending all the Daymanoids' money, and Night Rick has "a device that can solve everything": a revolver, implying they've been Driven to Suicide. He actually just uses the gun to shoot the Somnambulator, which does permanently kill off the Night People and restore them to their Day selves, but doesn't physically harm them at all.
      • Immediately after, Rick checks his phone to see how long they were asleep, and instantly becomes very upset...because Klondike discontinued the Choco Taco!
  • Berserk Button:
    • Don't eat Eyeholes cereal unless you want the Eyehole Man to show up and beat the hell out of you.
    • Rick does not take betrayal well at all, as Gearhead found out.
    • Morty hates being called a terrible person, especially if he's done nothing wrong.
    • Jerry mentions in passing that he's wondered what it's like to have a vagina. He gets increasingly annoyed at Risotto Groupon repeatedly bringing this up, until he eventually snaps and attacks him, despite normally being a Non-Action Guy.
  • Big Damn Movie: A game, in this case. Episode one of the game has Rick be fully aware that the sudden problem that starts the plot makes no sense.
  • Big Sibling Instinct: Summer plays it straight by showing some Big Sister Instinct towards Morty, and he inverts it with Little Brother Instinct towards her (in his case, sometimes to Knight Templar Little Brother levels). As they both become more and more traumatized through their adventures with Rick, they become increasingly protective towards each other. Morty in particular will not stand for other people making Summer cry.
  • Bittersweet Ending: A few episodes end this way:
    • "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty": Morty, Summer, and Rick get back okay from their adventure thanks to Balthromaw, but Morty, despite getting to help save the day, is rather grossed out and disillusioned from the dragon soul-bonding orgy, which also soul-bonded him to his grandpa and sister in addition to the other dragons. Also, Rick and Jerry view the Talking Cat's brain scan and find out something completely horrible from it that nearly drives Rick to suicide and leaves Jerry curled in a fetal position; Rick uses the Mind Blower gun to make Jerry forget about it and spare him the pain, so he returns to his usual cheerful self, but Rick has to live with whatever it was they saw.
    • "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri": The "bitter" and "sweet" apply to different people. For the "sweet" part, the two versions of Beth are no longer concerned about which of them is the original and which is the clone, make peace with themselves and each other, are satisfied with their respective choices, and have stopped caring nearly so much about getting Rick's approval. Jerry, Summer, and Morty likewise don't care either about which Beth is which, and the latter two are just happy to have "two badass moms". However, when Rick watches his mind-blown memory to learn the truth, he discovers that even he doesn't know which of the Beths is the real one, since he purposely removed their tank labels and had them scrambled to make it impossible to know. He can only despondently comment on what a terrible father he is, and the final shot of the episode is of Rick unable to go inside and join his family, and just sitting sadly in the garage by himself.
    • "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort": Rick does succeed in un-brainwashing, saving, and restoring Bird Person, after the latter discovers that he has a daughter whom he decides is Worth Living For, meaning that he's truly Back from the Dead. However, BP—who has always been one of Rick's staunchest supporters—is disappointed with him for only revealing the existence of his daughter when it was vitally necessary for Rick's survival and it was clear Bird Person couldn't be convinced to live any other way. BP parts with Rick politely but coolly, making it clear that he's not exactly in a hurry to come back and visit him.note 
    • "Rickmurai Jack" is heavy on the "bitter" side. Only the bad guy, Evil Morty, gets a happy ending, and while his motives and end goal are sympathetic enough that there's a small amount of "sweet" involved in seeing him achieve it, his methods nonetheless leave the Citadel of Ricks destroyed and thousands upon thousands of Ricks and Mortys dead, making it mostly "bitter". And while Rick and Morty have patched up their bond and reaffirmed their partnership once more, and Morty has come to understand Rick better after learning his backstory, the two of them are still stranded out in space on the remains of the Citadel, with no way to get back home after Evil Morty destroyed the portal system, so this doubles as a Cliffhanger Ending.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology: So many examples that it could have its own subpage. Lampshaded in the pilot, when Rick points out a random alien creature and says it "defies all logic."
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: The combination of cynicism, black comedy, and the general Crapsack World that is the universe leaves the series with barely any characters who ever really do the right thing. Morty started off the series fairly optimistic and cheerful, but season 2 and especially season 3 have already worn him down. No character ever gets to live their lives and do everything they want without appropriate consequences. For example, Morty's desire to win the love and affection of his crush resulted in—as Rick describes it himself— a date rape drug being spread throughout the entire planet's atmosphere and transforming all non-family members into Cronenberg-style mutants. There are clearly nefarious characters and entities that clearly fall under black, but almost everyone else is grey.
    • Consequences are often bizarrely inappropriate in keeping with the nihilistic morality of the show. Characters suffer even for having the bests of intentions. In "Something Ricked This Way Comes," Summer shows genuine kindness and sympathy for the Devil but is of course betrayed. In "The Wedding Squanchers," the family convinces Rick to open up and genuinely enjoy the healthy activity of a friends' wedding only for it to turn out to be a hit from the galactic government that turns into a blood bath, though Rick's absence would have changed nothing. In "Look Who's Purging Now," Morty's attempt to help an innocent woman leads to them getting caught in a Whole-Plot Reference to The Purge series, where Morty jumps off the slippery slope to enjoy gratuitously killing defenseless people. In "Mortynight Run," Morty objects to Rick selling arms to a hitman, only to later cause dozens of deaths freeing the hitman's potential target and then kill the target because he poses a threat to all other life in the galaxy.
    • "A Rickconvenient Mort" takes this to an extreme. Planetina, a Captain Planet Expy used to save the environment with her Tina-teers. In the modern day, the latter have become greedy, soulless bastards who don't give a shit about the environment and only pretend to care to make money off of Planetina. The rest of the human race is shown to similarly not care and continue to desecrate the planet while lying through their teeth about how green they are. When Planetina is freed from the Tina-teers' rings and allowed to live full-time on Earth, she takes increasingly extreme measures to save the environment and eventually snaps and murders miners. Said miners were unpleasant, but had the valid point that they needed the income, showing how polluting corporations have too many people in their pocket for any meaningful change to arise. The episode comes to the conclusion that humans are Beyond Redemption and there is no hope; humanity will suffer an agonizing, pathetic extinction as a result of its own idiocy.
  • Black Comedy: Most definitely. Most of the humor revolves around Rick's sociopathy and alcoholism and the resulting damage it does to Morty's psyche. After "Rick Potion #9", the show takes a realistic look at the traumatic damage that the pair's adventures can have on Morty.
  • Black Comedy Rape: An interesting subversion. There are a few passive jokes about rape in the dialogue, but the act itself is always depicted completely seriously. For example, Rick makes a passive comment about Prison Rape during his and Morty's trial in "Meeseeks and Destroy," which is meant as a joke, but Morty almost getting raped in a bathroom later in the same episode is not. Rick's reaction to it cements this.
  • Blatant Lies: This shows up in pretty much every episode, especially from Rick, and often Played for Laughs.
    Rick: I wouldn't lie to you [Morty]. Beat Well, that's a lie. Huh.
  • Bloodier and Gorier: While the show has never been one to shy away from on-screen violence, it was rarely extravagant, with most episodes in the first two seasons being rated TV-14. Season 3 takes the violence much further, with almost every episode getting a TV-MA rating and involving a sequence where one or more of the main characters engage in the brutal, graphic, and creative slaughter of a crowd of enemies. Usually, the crowd is a collective Asshole Victim, but it is still the heroes gleefully engaging in Bloody Hilarious violence. The late Season 2 episode "Look Who's Purging Now" is a hint at the beginning of this, with Rick and Arthricia literally dancing in a river of blood to Toni Toni Tone after killing all the aristocratic "fat cats".
  • Book Ends: Season 7 opens and closes with a monologue by Mr. Poopybutthole.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
    • Jerry, of all people, looks straight at the camera and shrugs at the end of the Christmas Episode.
    • All five characters at the end of "Meeseeks and Destroy". Rick even says "See you next week!" to the audience. He does this again in "Raising Gazorpazorp."
    • At the end of "Ricksy Business", Rick ends the episode by ordering to roll the credits, and repeatedly yells that it's the end of the first season.
    • In-universe, the Titanic reenactment cruise that Beth and Jerry are on fails to sink as it was supposed to, and to make up for it the captain of the ship offers everyone free "James Camer-Onion Rings". This prompts Jerry to angrily say "...and now the fourth wall is broken."
    • "Total Rickall" features Rick telling viewers that the show will be back after a commercial break.
    • The same episode has a fake flashback of Rick detailing a get-rich-quick scheme involving selling Nintendo 3DS systems. At the end of the scene, he turns to the camera and asks Nintendo to give him free stuff.
    • Mr. Poopybutthole mentions how "The Wedding Squanchers" ends on a huge cliffhanger, and how it'll take a year and a half or possibly longer to see how it'll be resolved at the start of Season 3. He does something similar at the end of "The Rickchurian Mortydate", referencing that Season 4 will come in "a really long time".
    • At the end of "The Rickshank Redemption" Rick goes on a rant about how finding some way to acquire more Szechuan sauce from McDonald's is going to be his "series arc" and he will achieve it, even if it takes him "nine seasons" or 97 years to do so.
    • Rick looks right at the camera with a deadpan face by saying "We'll be right back" before cutting to the commercial break in "Rickmancing the Stone."
    • In the cold open of "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", Rick calls it a "Rick and Jerry episode!"
    • During the introduction to "Morty's Mind Blowers", Rick gives a Title Drop of the episode, then looks directly at the camera and says, "And we'll be doing this instead of Interdimensional Cable." Cue the intro.
    • At the end of the third season finale "The Rickchurian Mortydate", after Beth and Jerry decide to get back together, Beth makes an explicit comparison to Season 1.
    • "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat": Rick is confused as to how the Phoenix Protocol activated when his body died, since he "axed" it (literally) "two seasons ago" (in the episode "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez"). The ending also has Rick and Morty talk about all the adventures they're going to have, and when Summer mocks them for it, they yell at her for "ruining the season premiere".
    • At the end of "Never Ricking Morty", when the Story Train that Morty bought for Rick breaks, Rick insists that Morty buy him a new one rather than returning it, because "nobody's out buying anything with this fucking virus going around!"
    • Numerous times in "Rickmurai Jack", such as Rick calling it a "Citadel episode", noting that the Citadel "runs on canon", and stating he hates "serialized drama", and Evil Morty notes that Rick prefers to "keep it episodic".
    • A few as well in "Solaricks": Rick states that Jerry's original dimension, which he was accidentally taken from in "Mortynight Run" and is returned to here, is giving him "major Season 2 vibes", and refers to the Jerry who is originally from their current dimension but has been living in the alternate one as "Season 2 Jerry". When the family has to hop dimensions at the end, Rick notes how hard that is to do without portals and that they're going to have to do "the whole fucking episode all over again!"
    • Rick is furious when the dinosaurs of "Juricksic Mort" repair the rift in the Central Finite Curve that was created in "Rickmurai Jack" because they could have milked it "for a whole season, or a three-episode arc at least". He responds by going home and fixing portal travel, and excitedly shouts that they're going to have "classic episodes, Morty!"
  • Breaking Old Trends:
    • After Mr. Poopybutthole's debut in mid-Season 2, almost every season finale since then (i.e. the finales of Seasons 2, 3, 5, and 6) features him talking to the audience as The Stinger. Season 4's finale is the exception, with the Stinger instead having a comedic scene with Jerry.note 
    • "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", the Season 5 premiere, is so far the first season premiere that doesn't pick back up directly from where the previous season's finale left off.
    • Every season has at least one episode that mentions Morty's crush on Jessica and desire to ask her out, and also sees him get feelings for another girl at least once (Annie in S1, Arthricia (though this is one-sided) in S2, Stacy and a mermaid (offscreen) in S3, his unnamed girlfriend in S4, Planetina in S5). Season 6 is the first to break away from this; Jessica doesn't appear at all, Morty doesn't have any love interest or romantic plotline, and his Hormone-Addled Teenager tendencies are barely present, all in favor of focusing on his relationships with his family members instead.
  • Break the Cutie: The entire series is a long process of this for Morty. Particular examples include "Meeseeks and Destroy", in which he is almost raped; "Mortynight Run", when he has to kill Fart to save the universe, and in the process, render all of the death and destruction that he caused throughout the episode pointless; and "Morty's Mind Blowers", where he relives numerous memories that were so traumatizing for him that he outright removed them from his brain. Morty having been broken so many times is a major factor in his ever-increasing Seen It All attitude with each passing season.
  • Brick Joke: Practically every episode has at least one, if not several. It's particularly common for The Stinger to have one.
  • Buffy Speak: Used occasionally.
    • One example is this exchange in "Ricksy Business" that took place when Rick had a massive hangover.
      Rick: Bring me the thing.
      Morty: What thing?
      Rick: The thing, the thing. It's got buttons and lights on it. It beeps.
      Morty: Rick, that describes everything in your garage!
    • Also this one from "Rickmurai Jack":
      Evil Morty: Tonight, the quality of dialogue stops mattering. Tonight, I do that thing I wanna do! With the curve thing!
  • But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
    • Rick has a lot of enemies that he doesn't remember until it comes back to bite him in the ass.
    • Meanwhile, he's on the opposite side of it in regards to Rick Prime, the man who murdered Main Rick's original Diane and Beth from his dimension. Rick spent decades of his life trying to find him, to no avail, and his failure to do so caused him to spiral into cynicism, nihilism, and alcoholism. Meanwhile, it doesn't seem like Rick Prime is even aware of why Rick is trying so hard to hunt him down, just that he is, but he apparently has enough enemies that, when he built a hideout rigged with traps for them to find, he acknowledges in the pre-recorded videos that he doesn't even know who he's talking to.

    C 
  • Call-Back: Happens in pretty much every episode. There are some plot points that are called back multiple times:
    • Rick's insane "Rick and Morty 100 Years" speech at the end of the pilot episode gets a call back at the end of the third season premiere. It even has the same music playing during the speech, and both end with the garage door closing while a confused Morty, on the floor, watches Rick absolutely lose his marbles. The fourth season premiere also has a similar rant, except that this time, Rick and Morty are both eagerly participating in it together, and then yell at Summer for ruining it when she mocks them.
    • Morty pulls his "every 10th adventure" card in "Vindicators 3", calling back to the agreement he and Rick made in "Meeseeks & Destroy" that Morty would get to pick one out of every ten adventures they went on. It's even a literal card, complete with nine Morty ink stamps. It gets brought up again in "Rattlestar Ricklactica", where Rick is annoyed enough about Morty's latest screw-up causing the events of the entire episode that he counts it as a "Morty adventure" and tears up his card to start it over.
    • In "Rick Potion #9", Rick makes a meta-joke that they can mess up their own dimension and shift to a new one only a few times. "Morty's Mind Blowers" has Rick claim they have to jump dimensions once again (though, based on series continuity, this was probably not meant to be taken as canon and was just being Played for Laughs) and remind Morty of that very issue. "Solaricks" sees the entire family (including Space Beth) do it this time, complete with everybody burying their corpses in the backyard.
    • "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" has Rick transferring his mind into a teenage clone of himself, but after it tries to suppress his real mind inside the subconscious of his new teenage mind, he deems the cloning project, called "the Phoenix Protocol", a failure, and destroys all of the clone bodies with an axe. In "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", it's shown that the Phoenix Protocol is supposed to be a way for Rick's mind to upload itself into a new clone body if his original body dies, and because he destroyed all his clones in his own dimension, he reincarnates into alternate-dimension clones and has to get back home. And then in "Rickmurai Jack", Evil Morty hijacks the Phoenix Protocol so that, when the Ricks and Mortys of the Citadel die from his traps (or kill themselves to try to invoke the Protocol and escape), they'll be redirected to clone vats in the Citadel that blend them to mush to power his giant portal gun that opens the Central Finite Curve.
  • Call to Adventure: When the Vindicators activate their distress beacon to summon Rick and Morty, Rick adamantly refuses a "literal call to adventure", but Morty invokes his right to choose one out of every 10 adventures to force him into it.
  • Calling the Old Man Out:
    • Summer is willing to and does do this with Rick. Morty becomes more and more willing to do so over time as well.
    • She also does it with her parents when they didn't seem to care that Morty has a sexbot in "Raising Gazorpazorp".
    • In the same episode, Morty Jr. does this to Morty.
    • Morty calls Beth out for being as irresponsible as Rick in "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy".
    • "The ABC's of Beth" has quite a bit of this, with Beth finally calling Rick out for neglecting her as a child, and Morty and Summer calling Jerry out on quite a few of his flaws, as well as being unable to admit to his new girlfriend that he wants to break up.
    • Both versions of Beth tear into Rick in "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri" for having cloned the original Beth, lying to both of them about who the clone is, and mind-blowing himself so he wouldn't even know who it is. They're so disillusioned with him that Space Beth literally comes back to Earth just to kill Rick, both Beths team up so they can kick his ass later, and they finally overcome their need for his approval. Rick himself admits he's a terrible father after all of this.
    • "A Rickonvenient Mort": After his parents (but moreso his mom) express reservations about Morty dating Planetina and refuse to let her stay with them, he completely goes off on them about how no one in family really respects him or values what he has to say despite all the experience he's had in traveling the universe. This one is a bit tricky, though, in that Beth and Jerry have legitimate reasons to be concerned about the relationship.
    • Beth is not happy to discover in "Amortycan Grickffitti" that Rick's "guys nights" with Jerry are really just using the latter as an oblivious punchline to pay back a debt to some hell demons. Eventually, the demons get her drunk and she gets in on it as well, but in her case, it's more like fond teasing, and she does regret it later when Jerry is hurt by it. Rick, for his part, eventually admits this was wrong.
  • Calling the Young Man Out: This happens a few times, too:
    • In "Rick Potion #9", Rick makes a Love Potion for Morty at his request (with Morty, a 14-year-old boy, clearly just seeing the "romantic" implications of this and not realizing how gross this actually is). Rick later likens it to Morty wanting to roofie Jessica, calling the potion a "roofie juice serum", and tells Morty that he's "a little creep" for it (though, as Morty points out, Rick did still make it for him in the first place and only expressed reservations about it later).
    • Rick gives a massive "Reason You Suck" Speech to his son-in-law Jerry in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy" about how Jerry is downright predatory in his constant m.o. of acting pathetic to make people feel sorry for him, and subsequently taking advantage of that pity to get what he wants. Notably, this does get through to Jerry, and he vows that this will no longer be his "signature move".
    • In response to Beth calling him out in "The ABC's of Beth", Rick also turns it back on her by pointing out that At Least I Admit It; he knows he's a bad father and isn't trying to deny or excuse that, but Beth refuses to admit that she's just like him in all the worst ways and takes a Never My Fault attitude about her flaws, deflecting blame to everyone but herself. Like with Jerry, this does reach her, and she admits at the end that she's out of excuses to not be who she really is.
    • When Morty is returned to his original universe in "Solaricks", he meets his original dad (the Jerry of the first six episodes), who calls Morty out on abandoning his native dimension and family and not treating them like real people when he returned there briefly in "The Rickshank Redemption". While it's a bit lessened by the fact that Jerry, Beth, and Summer didn't miss Rick or Morty once they left, he's still not wrong that Morty could have made the effort to come back there and fix things, but never cared enough to bother.
  • Calling Your Bathroom Breaks: In "The Rickshank Rickdemption," Rick begins body hopping to escape imprisonment and enact a complex plan. Whenever he needs to leave a room, he loudly announces he has to take a dump.
  • Canines Gambling in a Card Game: In "Lawnmower Dog", A group of super-intelligent dogs replicate the classic image after taking over the world.
  • Cassandra Did It: The memory parasites try to use this to make it seem like Rick is the parasite due to his own zany wacky personality and incredibly vague backstory. The family, especially Beth and Morty, start to believe them even though Rick is literally related to them.
  • Cast Full of Gay: Jerry has a fake-memory-implanted relationship with Sleepy Gary, and later has a threesome with Beth and Mr. Nimbus. When Summer uses an alien-created dating app, one of her chosen partners is a woman, and she makes out with her. Rick is outright stated by Word of God to be pansexual and has been shown having female, male, and genderless love interests, and Beth literally sleeps with a clone of herself. This means 5 of the 6 members of the Smith-Sanchez family (all except Morty, so far at least) are Queer.
  • Catchphrase:
    • Parodied with Rick's "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub!". Bird Person later tells Morty that this saying translates in his language to "I am in great pain. Please help me."
    • As of the season 1 finale, he decides his new catchphrase is "I don't give a fuck!"
    • He also has a fondness for saying "It's gonna be great!" when talking about his inventions.
    • "And awaaaaay we go!" should probably also qualify.
    • Morty's is "aw geez". Him saying it so often is parodied in "The Ricklantis Mixup" and "Rick: A Mort Well Lived".
    • In-universe, Mrs. Pancakes, in her self-titled series, has "You don't know me!" It's later turned on its head when Summer is watching the show in "Rest and Ricklaxation", where she says, "You do know me!"
    • With power running low, some of the computer simulations are reduced to one sentence Catchphrases like "Yes!" And "My Man!".
    • Later parodied in "Total Rickall" when we see a string of Rick's "really weird, made-up-sounding catchphrases", which are a series of strange Non Sequiturs such as "AIDS!" , "Shum shum shlippidy-dop!", "Graaaaaassss... tastes bad!" and "BURGER TIME!" The context of the scene would lead the viewer to assume that they're the result of the memory-tampering parasites, except that none of the flashbacks feature the parasites and none of them seem to be pleasant memories, meaning Rick really does have these catchphrases even if they've never appeared onscreen before or since (although he re-uses "Riki-tiki-tavi" and "And that's the waaaay the news goes" in the last part of the episode, after all the parasites have been exterminated).
  • Caught with Your Pants Down: Generally involving the 14-year-old Morty.
    • In one flashback, his 17-year-old sister Summer walks in on him.
      Summer: Oh my god!
      Morty: I thought you went to a concert!
      Summer We forgot the tickets! Why in the kitchen?!
      Morty: I do it everywhere! Stop shaming me!
      Summer: You're not the victim here!
      Morty: I hate you and I was thinking about your friend Grace!
      Summer: [inarticulate scream]
    • Referenced in one episode where Jerry opens Morty's bedroom to ask him a question. At the end of their conversation, Morty gives him a protracted warning that he's asking for trouble by bursting into a teen's bedroom without warning.
    • Invoked by Jerry in "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate." When nearly caught by the doctor browsing confidential patient documents, he drops trou and loudly declares he was masturbating.
    • The season three intro features a butt-faced Morty watching porn where a woman has faces on her ass and quickly trying to cover it up when a butt-faced Beth comes into his room.
    • The wizard from "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty", before his final confrontation with the slut dragons, emerges from what seems a medieval portable toilet, hastily closing his robe, while in the toilet there's some kind of magical mirror that apparently shows a Hot Witch.
    • The time-traveling snakes from "Rattlestar Ricklactica" first attack Morty in his bedroom while he's masturbating. He manages to pull his pants back up before fleeing the room for help, but remains shirtless.
  • Central Theme: Nihilism and Cosmic Horror.
    • Embracing the inherent chaos, unpredictability, and cosmic meaninglessness of the universe and finding something to keep yourself tethered to the mortal plane despite nihilism. While nihilism is usually portrayed in media with the mindset of "Life is pointless, so why bother?", Morty actually points out a positive note in "Rixty Minutes" when he tells Summer that nobody and nothing is designed to happen and that it's up to everyone to find their own purpose and enjoyment.
      Morty: Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV?
    • The mental conflict between intelligence and human connection.
    • Both Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have stated that the study into nihilism is really to help find a sense of purpose and live a better life by focusing on human relationships and experiences, and not preoccupy our minds with unanswerable questions.
    • The last few episodes of Season 5 put the spotlight on numerous characters who deal with genuinely sympathetic negative emotions, such as trauma, grief, insecurity, and loneliness, in very unhealthy ways, to their own detriment:
      • "GoTron Jerrysis Rickvangelion": Summer feels lonely and insecure at being the "odd one out" in her family, and in her effort to keep them together and win Rick's approval, enables him in everything he does, including his worst habits, and pushes the rest of her family members away, leaving her in tears when she realizes this.
      • "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort": Bird Person is so filled with grief at Tammy's betrayal and death that he tries to destroy his mind and die in the process and refuses Rick's efforts to save him, only relenting and changing his mind when Rick reveals to him that he has a daughter, whom BP decides is Worth Living For.
      • The above episode and "Rickmurai Jack" reveal that Rick did indeed lose his wife Diane and child Beth in an explosion, and he spent decades afterwards trying to hunt down the alternate Rick responsible, killing countless other versions of himself and making many enemies, only to fail and spiral into being the cynical, nihilistic, depressed, lonely man he is today. A younger version of himself from Bird Person's memory is horrified to see what kind of person he'll become.
      • Also from "Rickmurai Jack": Evil Morty is revealed to have been a normal Morty who snapped from all the abuse he had to put up with from his and other Ricks, and he came up with a plan to escape Rick's influence forever, which is totally understandable. What is not acceptable, though, was how he lost any empathy he once had and was willing to kill thousands if not millions of Ricks and Mortys to achieve his plans, and came to care only about helping himself and no one else.
  • Cerebus Retcon:
    • Although an observant viewer may have inferred it prior, it's revealed at the end of "Ricksy Business" that Rick's constant drinking and abuse of the occasional Fantastic Drug isn't just for fun; he's actually numbing himself from an intense amount of emotional pain.
    • In the same episode, his "Wubba lubba dub dub!" catchphrase, previously portrayed as just a parody of other nonsense-word catchphrases, is revealed to actually be a phrase in an alien language. It means "I am in great pain. Please help me."
    • In "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind", Morty, after seeing all the Rick-and-Morty pairs together in the Citadel of Ricks, expresses happiness at how he and Rick have such a close bond that it spans across infinite universes. He's disappointed to learn from Rick that a big part of this is due to Ricks needing the brainwaves of Mortys to conceal them from enemies, rather than Ricks actually caring about their Mortys. This is already fairly dark, but it gets much, much worse after "Rickmurai Jack", which reveals that the Ricks of the Citadel purposely engineer Morty's birth across infinite dimensions, and clone them to create a mass-market of Mortys who can just be sent off to any Rick in the multiverse that needs them, meaning that most Mortys are essentially part of a Slave Race to Ricks. As much crap and abuse as "our" Morty has to put up with from "our" Rick, he's actually one of the lucky ones in that he has a Rick who actually cares about him and doesn't just see him as disposable, which is more than most Mortys get.
    • Also from "Close Rick-Counters", at the end, Morty asks what will happen to all the Mortys who lost their Ricks. He's told that the Rickless Mortys will return home and lead ordinary lives. Instead, "The Ricklantis Mixup" reveals that Mortys without Ricks are kept away from their families and sent to a school where they are groomed to serve as docile replacements for other Ricks, with many shuffling through many Ricks. Mortys who fail to graduate are dumped in "Mortytown," a burnt out, crime infested section of the citadel where they victimize each other. This is probably because, as per the above reveal, many of these Mortys are clones and don't have a home dimension to go back to, because the original Mortys that they were cloned from are already living there.
    • In the earlier seasons, Jerry and Beth are quite unhappily married (despite having quite a few moments of bonding and growing closer), with an alien marriage counselor stating that theirs is the worst relationship he's ever seen and the two of them never should have gotten together in the first place. Then we find out in "Rickmurai Jack" that, related to the above reveal, Beth and Jerry were manipulated by the Citadel into getting together in countless different universes—sometimes even through some kind of love-drug—just so they would eventually give birth to Morty. In other words, the marriage counselor was completely right that they never should have hooked up, and it was engineered by alternate versions of Beth's own father. Luckily, the main Beth and Jerry of the show do have a much more functional relationship in later seasons, but this is not the case for the vast majority of Jerrys and Beths in the multiverse.
  • Cerebus Rollercoaster:
    • While the series never stops being dark, whether dark elements are played for laughs or treated seriously vary greatly. While most of Rick's actions and the horror Morty goes through because of them are treated as Black Comedy, things like his near-rape experience or replacing himself in an alternate universe are not. The marital troubles between Beth and Jerry can go either way.
    • A self-contained example is the episode "Rixty Minutes", which is simultaneously regarded by fans as one of the funniest and one of the most mature and emotional episodes of the entire show, after an excuse to throw around a bunch of random jokes inadvertently triggers a B plot where Summer learns she was nearly aborted.
    • "Total Rickall" features the appearance of several absurd characters, one being named Mr. Poopy Butthole. But the same episode features Rick goading Morty to fatally shoot him in the head, someone accidentally seriously injuring a long-time friend to the point they required physical therapy and an implication that Beth also has a drinking problem.
    • "Pickle Rick" alternates between the absurdist comedy of Rick turning himself into a pickle and Dr. Wong pointing out the hubris and self-destructiveness behind such a stunt and the way Beth rationalizes it and refuses to acknowledge the deleterious effect it has on her family.
  • Chekhov's Gag: In "Promortyus", Summer even lampshades that her "thing" for this episode is to have a toothpick sticking out of her mouth. This ends up saving her from being possessed by the same face-hugging aliens who successfully do so to Rick and Morty, because numerous facehuggers that try to possess her just end up impaling themselves on her toothpick and dying.
  • Chekhov's Gunman:
    • Or at the very least, Chekhov's dead gunman. In the season 3 premiere, Summer digs up the dead body of her own Rick that died in ''Rick Potion No. 9" to get the portal gun that ultimately sets her and Morty's plan to rescue their Rick in motion.
    • The quiet, eyepatch-wearing Evil Morty in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind" turns out to have been remotely controlling Evil Rick all along, meaning that he was the true mastermind behind the serial killings of Ricks. He proves to be this once again in "The Ricklantis Mix-up", where we find out that the newly elected leader of the Citadel of Ricks, President Morty, is actually him. And then he becomes the Final Boss of Season 5 by facing off with Rick and Morty directly in the season finale.
    • "The Rickshank Redemption" has Rick being interrogated by agents of the Galactic Federation so they can view his memory of how he invented his portal gun/interdimensional travel and take the technology for themselves. Said memory involves an alternate Rick (known as "Weird Rick") offering him the technology, Main Rick refusing in favor of being a family man to his wife Diane and child daughter Beth, and Weird Rick blowing up Diane and Beth with a bomb. Rick then claims to his interrogator that this backstory was completely fabricated so he could overpower him and break out of the memory device. "Rickmurai Jack" later shows that, while the part of this memory where he invented the portal gun was indeed fake, the rest of it—including Weird Rick (or rather, "Rick Prime")—was Real After All, and Rick spent most of his life after Diane's and Beth's deaths trying to hunt him down for revenge, to no avail, eventually becoming the man he is today. What's more, in a double-instance of this, "Solaricks" further reveals that Rick Prime is, in fact, Main Morty's original Rick from the same universe, and Main Rick originally came to that dimension and met Morty with the hope that Rick Prime would come back there someday.
  • Chekhov's Skill:
    • A minor, easy-to-miss example, but in Season 1, Beth mentions Jerry's education in civics (and implies it was a waste of time). In Season 2, his "Cervine Institute" con exploits the jurisdiction limits of Brad's Law to let Beth save the deer's life.
    • At the beginning of the pilot, Rick planned to use a neutrino bomb to destroy the Earth; since then, Morty has had to disarm Rick's neutrino bombs before. This comes in handy in "Vindicators 3: The Return of World Ender", which shows that Morty carries a set of wire clippers for just this purpose.
      Rick: "Morty...how many of these have you had to...?"
      Morty: (Interrupts) "Too many, Rick! Too many!"
  • Chekhov's Time Travel: Defied by the creators, as Rick has a box on his shelf with the text "Time Travel Stuff", but time travel is about the only sci-fi trope they haven't touched yet. Roiland and Harmon have said that the box on the shelf is a Stealth Pun, indicating that all time travel stories are "shelved" for the series. (It's for this reason that Rick can't simply go back in time to when Mulan was running in theaters to try McDonald's Szechuan sauce). Time Travel has since been officially reaffirmed as off-limits by the authors in interviews; they reason that it makes all problems just too easy.
    • That being said, the show finally makes its foray into time travel during "Rattlestar Ricklactica", while utterly lampooning and deconstructing the entire concept. This is symbolized by the "Time Travel Stuff" box on the shelf being tipped over for the episode.
    • "The Vat of Acid Episode" revisits this with Rick inventing a device to give Morty his "save point" idea. Morty uses it to pull pranks, avoid injury, fall in love and have a long-term committed relationship...and then Rick points out that it's not a time-travel thing, but an alternate universe thing, and that all of those things really happened and involved an alternate reality Morty dying in agony so Morty could hop over, to the latter's complete horror.
  • Clip Show:
    • Following from the episodes of Dan Harmon's Community which parodied clip shows by featuring clips from episodes the audience had never seen, "Total Rickall" gives us the same joke taken to the next level - the things that everyone keeps remembering never even happened.
    • Similarly, in "Morty's Mind Blowers", the titular mind-blowers that Morty is seeing are, out-of-universe, original content. In-universe, they seem like new content to Morty too because the clips are actually memories of Morty's that he's had removed from his brain because they were so traumatizing; Rick outright calls them a "Clip Show made of clips you never saw".
  • Clock Roaches / Time Police: When Rick attempts to repair the fractured timelines in "A Rickle in Time,", one of these—a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who doesn't like his methods—appears and antagonizes him. The alien's odd appearance is inspired by another, particularly iconic group of Clock Roaches. Rick later purposely attracts their attention in "Rattlestar Ricklactica" to make sure they resolve the family's time-traveling snakes issue.
  • Clone Angst:
    • More "robot" than clone, but in "Rickmancing the Stone", Rick makes robots resembling himself, Morty, and Summer to take their places in the house with Beth while the three of them are on an adventure. Morty's robot-double eventually gains sentience and wants to have real human experiences and feelings, before being shut down by Rick.
    • In "The ABC's of Beth", Rick offers to make a clone of Beth so she can go out and do what she wants in her life. The Season 4 finale reveals the other Beth was out in space, fighting the new-and-improved Galactic Federation, but both are eventually made aware of each other and they try to figure out who is the clone. In doing so, they also realize their mutual dislike of Rick and decide to just keep living their own lives. Rick made a memory tube of who is who, but nobody cares anymore. The tube reveals that Beth asked him to make the decision. He made a clone, properly labelled the cloning vats, but then removed the label and started switching them around until the camera cuts away to make it impossible to see who is who. Rick verbally acknowledges what a shitty father he is.
    • "Mortyplicity" deals with the aftermath of meeting Space Beth, where Rick created decoy clone families and placed them all over the country because there are always enemies that want to hunt them down. With families being killed by alien squid people, other Ricks are alerted to the clones, leaving the families confused what is going on. Rick uses decoy override protocols to shut the decoys down, but also learned that there are decoys who also came up with the idea of creating decoys, which leads to the decoys who discovered they were decoys to dress up as squid aliens to hunt them down. Rick explains the "Asimov Cascade" where all the decoys will inevitibly kill each other. Complete chaos ensues when the decoy families begin to kill each other, until the last family themselves get killed by Mr. Wants To Be Hunted because they didn't hunt him. Meanwhile, the original family is returning from a space adventure and meets up Space Beth, and the confusion begins all over again when Rick reveals the decoy families.
  • The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: In the season 3 premiere, Summer starts acting crazy, thinking there must be some way to reconnect with Rick. She goes into the garage, which has now replaced all of Rick's gadgets and sees a group of dead flies on the countertop. She thinks that maybe if she rearranged the flies, they'd activate a hologram or a door of some sort. When Rick later comes back to the garage, he sets everything back to normal by setting the flies a certain way. Summer's placement wasn't even that far off.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Evil Rick tortures hundreds of alternate versions of Morty to hide from the Council. The fact that it's actually Evil Morty at the wheel here makes this an especially wicked Expendable Clone scenario.
  • The Collector: In "Morty's Mind Blowers", Rick and Morty are shown to have been captive in a menagerie, and escaped by replacing themselves with unwitting doubles in a parody of Contact
  • Comedic Sociopath: Rick definitely fits this, although it is implied he is more empathetic than he lets on and his sociopathic tendencies are some sort of defense mechanism.
  • Comic-Book Adaptation: Several. There's the main-line Rick and Morty, as well as several spin-offs: Lil' Poopy Superstar, Pocket Like You Stole It (based off on "Pocket Mortys"), Rick and Morty vs Dungeons and Dragons, and Rick and Morty Presents:. Now has its own page here for these adaptations.
  • Comic-Book Time: It doesn't really matter how many hundreds of adventures Rick and Morty are implied to have been on, or what events transpire over what period of time during the course of any given season, or even what dimension you visit. Morty is fourteen years old, Summer is in her late teens, and both are likely to remain roughly the same age no matter how many seasons pass.
    • Summer's age in particular is given a Lampshade Hanging in "Never Ricking Morty" where Rick and Morty are shown a possible story of Summer finally turning 18 after what "feels like years" and moving out to attend college — a scenario that Rick explains could have become canon if it wasn't being presented as a possibility.
    • Also lampshaded in "Bethic Twinstinct" when Summer comments that Morty "really came of age this Thanksgiving", and Morty responds by asking how old the two of them are even supposed to be and how many Thanksgivings they've had by now.
  • Comically Missing the Point: Most commonly seen with Jerry and Morty, whom the latter admits are the biggest idiots in the family, and occasionally happens to side characters as well.
  • Conditioned to Accept Horror: Aside from the immediate threat of death, almost nothing in the multiverse fazes Rick, not even having to bury his own corpse. Over time, the rest of the family becomes this more and more, too, especially Morty and, to a slightly lesser extent, Summer.
  • Conjoined Twins: A pair of conjoined twins named Michael and Pichael (the former being a news reporter and the latter being the host of his own cooking show) appear in "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate".
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu: The Citadel of Ricks lives on this trope.
    • This includes the Citadel's leaders, the Council of Ricks. Despite, in theory, being all the same insanely clever scientific genius, the original Rick and Evil Rick easily outsmart them in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick-Kind".
    • Taken even further in "The Rickshank Redemption", where they are reduced to mooks, with the original Rick being able to sabotage them repeatedly without effort, despite them expecting him, and the Federation security being able to inflict heavy casualties on them, if not about to overpower them. This is the same security the original Rick could smack around effortlessly by himself.
    • It happens again in "Rickmurai Jack", where OG Rick takes on a security force of several alternate versions of himself who just attempt to use guns and spears and the like to attack him, which he easily prevents with a force-field that they apparently can't counter. He then easily beats all of them up, since they apparently don't have their own similar force-fields.
  • Continuity Nod: Happens more and frequently as the series progresses. See here.
  • Continuity Snarl: Possibly. "Morty's Mind Blowers" from Season 3 seems to indicate that after "our" Rick and Morty were shown hopping dimensions to live in a different universe in "Rick Potion #9" (from Season 1), they've since done so again offscreen at an unspecified point when Morty accidentally incurred the wrath of the squirrels of that universe. The problem is, based on references in other episodes, there's no point in time that this could have occurred to fit with various events. Certain plot pointsnote  indicate that, after "Rick Potion #9", Rick and Morty are still in that same universe in "Rixty Minutes" (also Season 1) and "The Rickshank Redemption" (the Season 3 premiere), both of which reference what happened in the former. Furthermore, events of the Season 4 premiere are a direct result of Rick's actions in "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", a Season 2 episode, proving that Rick and Morty haven't switched dimensions between then either. The best explanation is probably just that Rick's claim in "Morty's Mind Blowers" of needing to change realities again was being Played for Laughs, wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and is just subject to Rick's MST3K Mantra of "Don't think about it!", especially since it wasn't shown happening on screen and has never been mentioned again since.
  • Conveniently Close Planet: The plot of "Look Who's Purging Now" is kicked off by a large alien bug hitting the windshield of Rick's spacecraft, and Rick heading for a nearby planet to get more windshield wiper fluid.
  • Cool Old Guy: Definitely Rick. Not only is he capable of making almost any sci-fi gizmo you can think of, he's a total badass both physically and mentally and spends almost all of his waking hours spending his idea of quality time with his grandkids, which ranges from death-defying inter-dimensional adventures, to freezing time to play pranks on the neighbors, to dancing to booty jams in the front yard. He's even shown to be "cool" in the more traditional sense in "Ricksy Business", co-hosting a killer party and getting, in his own words, "Riggedy-riggedy-wrecked."
  • Corrupted Contingency: Numerous versions of Ricks and Mortys across the multiverse have a plan to cheat death called the "Phoenix Protocol", which allows their consciousness to escape into a cloned body when in mortal peril. However, the main villain of season 5 rerouts all of the cloned bodies to be dumped into an enormous meat grinder upon revival.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: The horror that we are insignificant specks in a vast universe, at the mercy of beings whose power and motives are beyond our comprehension. Rick And Morty has Cosmic Horror tropes in spades, and surprisingly, they are usually Played for Laughs. Examples include:
    • Morty convinces Rick to help him get a date with his dream girl, but something goes wrong, then Rick's attempt to fix it makes it worse, then Rick's attempt to fix that makes it worse, culminating in every human on Earth except Morty's family turning into gibbering mounds of flesh and limbs. Rick gives up on trying to fix the world and just takes Morty to another dimension where Earth isn't completely ruined. This also involves Rick and Morty burying the mangled corpses of that dimension's Rick and Morty to take their place. And come "Solaricks", they have to do this again, this time with Summer, Jerry, and both Beths joining them as well.
    • Rick creating an entire universe in a box, so the intelligent denizens living in that universe can perform slave labor to act as a battery for his spaceship.
    • Played for Drama: In "Rixty Minutes," Morty talks Summer out of running away when she finds out her birth ruined her parents' dreams. By revealing the events of "Rick Potion #9," Morty turns what would otherwise be a horrifying statement about mankind's insignificance into a very touching moment.
      Summer: So, you're not my real brother?
      Morty: I'm better than your brother. I'm a version of your brother you can trust when he says "Don't run." Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV?
    • Morty eventually convinces Rick in "The Vat of Acid Episode" to give him the "do-over remote" he wanted, which lets him erase his mistakes and try again to avoid consequences for them. At least, that's what Rick tells him it does. He later discovers, to his shock, that every time he uses the remote to "do over" something, he'd really just been hopping to a different timeline, killing and replacing the Morty there, and considering how many times he's used it by now, he realizes with utter horror that he's killed dozens of other alternate-timeline versions of himself. And all of this was because Rick wanted to teach Morty a lesson for criticizing one of his ideas.
    • "Rickmurai Jack" is probably the most extreme example yet. Morty learns that the Central Finite Curve he lives in is a walled-off section of the multiverse containing all the universes where Rick Sanchez is the smartest man alive, separating them from all the others where he isn't. What's more, across a huge portion of these infinite universes, the many incarnations of Rick in the Citadel engineered Morty's entire existence—via manipulating his parents to fall in love, sometimes even through Love Potions—and cloned countless more versions of him to act as their mail-order sidekicks whenever their Mortys died and they needed new ones, essentially making the Mortys of the multiverse a Slave Race to Ricks, with very few exceptions (though the main Morty of the show is one such exception). Needless to say, Morty is horrified to learn this, and his trust in Rick is shaken by it.
  • Crapsaccharine World: Despite the colorful art style and silly characters, this show is often very dark and existential.
  • Creator In-Joke: When Rick talks about his interest in watching a show about a world of intelligent dogs, it's a reference to Roiland's previous project Dog World that never aired. Earlier in the episode, Rick name-drops a character from the proposed series, Ruffles.
  • Creepy Child:
    • The little girl that haunts the centaur's dreams in "Lawnmower Dog" certainly qualifies. Doubles as a Shout-Out to "The Shining", even though there is only one of them.
    • The two children in the Strawberry Smiggles commercial from "Rixty Minutes" who tie down the leprechaun and cut his guts open just to get to the cereal that he'd already eaten. And then they eat it, covered in blood and guts and all.
    • Done in "The Ricklantis Mixup" by a Morty to Cop Rick. The Morty is by himself, crying, in a filthy room and asks if Cop Rick is "my new Rick." Cop Rick picks him up in a carry and it looks like there will be a tender moment, then Mood Whiplash strikes as the Morty stabs Cop Rick several times, forcing Cop Rick to shoot and kill him. Also of note is the crib present in the room, which Cop Morty explains being there as "a way to make you [Rick] feel bad."
  • Crossover Punchline:
    • This video teases a minor crossover with Gravity Falls. However, because Alex Hirsch and Justin Roiland are really good friends, it's probably just a joke. Although Gravity Falls' Big Bad, Bill Cipher, does show up on a screen at the marriage counselling clinic in "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez," strengthening the theory.
    • Rick and Morty also appeared in an extended Couch Gag in The Simpsons.
    • A background character occasionally appears in the show with rainbow suspenders and a football on his shirt with stitching that looks like Roman numerals. The corresponding letters of the alphabet were supposed to be part of a crossover hidden message along with Gravity Falls and Murder Police. Only Rick and Morty followed through with the plan, and given the fact that Murder Police was pulled from Fox's schedule before it ever aired, the crossover may never happen.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
    • Jerry is pretty on-the-ball when he's not being constantly emasculated.
    • Morty may be a neurotic, dim-witted wimp, but when push comes to shove, he can put up a surprisingly good fight. Mr. Jellybean, Evil Rick, and Nick learned this the hard way.
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus: The various Mortys in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind" offer a Chick Tracts-like booklet that describes "The Path of the One True Morty", which was available in physical form with DVDs of the first season and describes a religion which preaches them to never follow Rick and live a simple, independent life, after which they go to an afterlife filled with space motorcycles and all the Jessicas they can ever want.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Very frequently inflicted by Rick on his enemies, and sometimes by others as well. See here.
  • Curse Cut Short:
    • The head alien in "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" says, "This is going to be such a mind f——!" cut to commercial.
    • Morty reads a note that Jerry left for him in "Solaricks, and shouts "Motherfu—" before the commercial cut.
  • Cursed Item: In the episode "Something Ricked This Way Comes", the Devil opens up a store selling antique items that all have curses associated with them, such as making someone irresistible to the opposite sex, but also making them impotent. Rick quickly undermines this operation by inventing a device that can identify and remove all the curses, allowing people to use the items with no ill effects.
  • Cutaway Gag: A major plot point of "Total Rickall". The mind parasites manifest themselves in the form of flashbacks, which are presented as these.
  • Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Justified / deconstructed. Rick is often involved in various bizarre get-rich-quick schemes even though he could easily make himself wealthy simply by selling his inventions to the public or use them for more productive purposes...but that would require Rick to give a crap about other people or anything related to mundane adult life. This is best illustrated in "Something Ricked This Way Comes": Rick combats the Devil's shop of Be Careful What You Wish For cursed items by starting a shop of his own that de-curses the items, leaving just the benefits, but as soon as the reality of running a business rears its head and he finds himself at the butt end of a lot of paperwork, he loses interest and sets fire to the place.

    Not to mention, selling his inventions to people would only get Rick money for Earth C-137. Not exactly a big motive when he travels to all sorts of planets and dimensions and just wants to do things like spending the afternoon at Blips and Chitz.

    D 
  • Daddy's Girl: Beth is willing to abandon her marriage and allow her kids to go on "adventures" that repeatedly expose them to the threat of death and rape (as well as making them complicit in countless murders and other crimes), all so that her daddy won't leave again. Cemented in "Pickle Rick" when she flat-out ignores her children's emotional health in favor of bonding with Rick.
    • Later dialed back in "The ABCs of Beth" when details from Beth's childhood are revisited and she's forced to accept that Rick was a pretty awful father. It's dialed back even further by the end of "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri" when she meets Space Beth and it turns out Rick doesn't even know which one is the original Beth and which is the clone; in subsequent seasons, though Beth does still love him and still wants him around, she fully admits Rick is a piece of shit, is no longer an Extreme Doormat to him, and gets sick of his bullshit just as fast as the rest of the family.
    • To be fair, Beth was forced to admit that she was also a pretty awful child as well. One of the "toys" Rick made for her was a sentient knife. Who was worse is debatable, the child that requested items like "silent shoes" and "sleepy darts" so her father would pay attention to her, or the father that made these things for her?
      Knife: "Hi, Beth! You've gotten taller. Shall we resume stabbing?"
  • Dance Party Ending: A very unique one at the end of "Ricksy Business" to celebrate the end of Season 1.
  • Darker and Edgier: Acknowledged in-universe that Season 3 doubles down on the series' more upsetting elements, violence and black comedy. Toned back down in Season 4 and beyond, however.
    Rick: Oh, it gets darker, Morty. Welcome to the darkest year of our adventures!
  • Dead Alternate Counterpart: Rick takes advantage of this at the end of "Rick Potion #9"; when he causes a Cronenberg Apocalypse, he and Morty escape to a very particular universe where everything else is the same and all the events of the previous episodes happened there too, but their counterparts cured the Cronenberg plague and are killed almost immediately afterwards by an unrelated incident. They, along with the entire rest of their family, do the exact same thing at the end of "Solaricks" after an alternate Jerry releases a sentient alien virus that renders their home dimension's version of Earth uninhabitable, requiring them to hop realities and once again bury their dead counterparts in the backyard.
  • Deadly Game:
    • The Cromulons have a show called Planet Music, wherein they travel to planets looking for talent, teleport qualifying planets to their region of space, then force them to compete against each other. Losers and those who refuse to participate are disintegrated by plasma ray.
    • Rick creates one for the Vindicators while black-out drunk—which they would, for the most part, be capable of surviving if they really are as heroic as they claim to be—to prove to Morty that they're not real heroes and aren't worth admiring. Sure enough, by the end of the episode, all but one of them are dead, with the last one alive showing herself to be an utter psychopath. In fact, only two of the Vindicators are killed by the death traps in Rick's "game"; the other two are killed by infighting.
  • Death Is Cheap:
    • There are an infinite number of dimensions and an infinite number of Ricks and Mortys populating them, so no version of Rick or Morty is truly irreplaceable.
    • This is even true of the main Rick ("Rick C-137"), and he has all sorts of technology to keep his consciousness alive in the event of his death. Case in point: in "The Rickshank Rickdemption", his original body was killed by SEAL Team Rick, all while he transferred his mind from one Rick to another; then in "Rest and Ricklaxation," he's mauled to death by a monster, but "births" a new body shortly before that that either has all his memories or is used to transfer his consciousness; and finally, in "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", he suffers from The Many Deaths of You, but just Body Surfs into a cloned body with the Phoenix Protocol (see below). In other words, Rick's physical body has died numerous times during the series, but he's still alive thanks to preserving his mind with his tech.
    • At the end of "Interdimensional Cable 2 : Tempting Fate", Jerry gets shot 57 times by alien bodyguards, with very graphic footage of the bullets going straight through his body and skull. Cue his family screaming in horror as the screen fades to black with Jerry lying face down in a pool of his own blood. What happens next? He opens his eyes to a TV commercial about butthole ice-cream as his family rejoices around his hospital bed. Turns out, getting shot down in a super-advanced alien hospital is no worse than getting a splinter removed from your finger.
    • "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat" reveals that, thanks to the multidimensional "Phoenix Protocol" project, when a Rick dies, he'll reincarnate in one of his clone tanks in his basement. In the event that all of his own clones have been destroyed (as is the case for the main Rick), he'll instead be uploaded into a clone body of a Rick from an alternate reality.
    • "Rickmurai Jack" shows that the Citadel, in addition to having many Phoenix Protocol clone tanks for the Ricks and Mortys there as well, purposely invokes this for Mortys of the multiverse at large. Because Mortys are ideal sidekicks for Ricks but die extremely often (be it accidentally on adventures or because their Ricks kill them or get them killed), the Citadel has created and cloned at least millions upon millions of them, acting as a Morty-making factory that sends new Mortys to any of the infinite Ricks in the Central Finite Curve who need one.
  • Death Glare: Rick pulls one after he realizes that Morty was almost raped in the bathroom. He later kills Morty's attempted rapist.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: Of Western Animated Fantastic Comedy.
  • Delivery Stork: In "Get Schwifty", Principal Vagina's head religion believes that undesirables should be sent up to the Cromulons by balloons, whereupon they'll be sneezed back as better babies.
  • De-Power Zone: In "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty", Rick follows the sorcerer who sold him Balthromaw back to his home dimension, intent on making him cancel the soul-binding contract. When the sorcerer refuses and threatens retaliation, Rick is confident that the sorcerer's magic will be no match for the "real power" of his technology. Rick then gets a rude awakening when he finds that, due to the nature of the dimension, none of his tech works there. Rick is forced to cobble together a Magitek device to fight back.
  • Depraved Homosexual: Played for Drama in "Meeseeks and Destroy" with King Jellybean, who outright attempts to rape Morty. It is also implied that he has done so to other young boys.
  • Destructive Romance:
    • Beth and Jerry's rocky relationship starts as darkly humorous squabbling before becoming full-on toxic by the middle of season 2, where it's shown just how badly their unhealthy dependence on one another despite being totally mismatched is more damaging than it first seemed. When Rick finally manipulates them into getting a divorce at the start of Season 3, one could argue he's doing them a favor.
    • However, this becomes largely averted once they reconcile at the end of Season 3. In subsequent seasons, while they definitely still have their rough patches and argue occasionally, they both put in a lot more effort at making their marriage work and overcoming their individual flaws that caused some of their previous problems, including regularly attending family therapy, and have a significantly healthier and happier relationship for it.
    • That being said, this is still the case for the vast majority alternate of Beths and Jerrys of the multiverse, who don't get most of the Character Development that the main versions do. "Rickmurai Jack" has a rather dark reveal of why this is: the Citadel of Ricks manipulated countless versions of Jerry and Beth, in countless universes, into hooking up and getting pregnant with Summer, sometimes even drugging them to do so, so they would get married and eventually give birth to Morty, whom the Citadel would then clone to make even more Mortys. Essentially, Beth and Jerry weren't necessarily meant to get together to begin with, and were basically forced to in many cases, all for breeding purposes. No wonder their relationship is so screwed up in most dimensions.
  • Devil, but No God: Zig-zagged:
    • Seemingly played straight when Rick's established as a Hollywood Atheist in the pilot, when he tells Summer "There is no God, gotta rip that Band-Aid off now, you'll thank me later." When the Devil shows up in "Something Ricked", there's no mention of God, and Rick's only reaction is to figure out how to defeat his evil powers with science.
    • On the other hand, different episodes imply that Rick believes in or at least considers/fears the existence of a God since he says "Jesus Christ, our savior, was born today" about Christmas in "Anatomy Park", and starts praying to God when he thinks he's going to die in "A Rickle in Time" (though he then immediately takes it back and says "Fuck you, God! Not today, bitch!" once he's saved).
    • Jesus shows up in Season 4, but its as a direct result of Rick exploiting Story Lord's fourth-wall-breaking technology to intentionally sabotage the show by turning it into unwatchable Religious Edutainment.
    • The beginning of Season 5's "Mortyplicity" has Rick and Morty preparing to kill God, who has apparently been asleep for thousands of years. Though considering that they turn out to be clones/decoys, who knows how reliable that is.
    • In "Rick: A Mort Well Lived", all the Morty-minded NPCs in the game think that Roy (Rick) is trying to sway them to some kind of new religion, and he responds with:
      Rick-as-Roy: There's not even a God in the real world! God is double-fake in here!
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: At the end of "Something Ricked" Rick and Summer get their revenge on Mr. Needful by bulking up and beating the shit out of him in front of thousands of people at the n33dful.com product launch.
  • Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Rick nonchalantly "buys" an ironically-cursed item from Louis Cypher (you don't pay for items in his store... not with money), analyses it, takes out the curse while keeping the supernatural benefits, and offers to do the same for other "customers" of Satan's store in exchange for cash. This drives Satan to attempt to commit suicide, only being saved by the timely intervention of Summer and a Monkey's Paw.
  • Dirty Old Man: Rick. It's first seen in the pilot where Rick spends a large amount of time having sex with beautiful women in another dimension, to the point where his portal gun has no charge left. In "Lawnmower Dog", he's shown to have a fetish for BDSM. In "Auto Erotic Assimilation" he makes a lot of rather bizarre sexual requests to Unity, including a giraffe and stands of men who remotely resemble his father. Furthermore, he has no problem with being completely butt-naked in front of his family (including his still-underage grandkids) or even in public, sometimes completely covered in blood.
  • Disney Acid Sequence: Fart's "Goodbye Moonmen" song is accompanied by bizarre visuals whenever he sings it to Morty. Though, the second time he does it, it's abruptly interrupted when Morty kills him.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Rick, petty bastard that he is, does this incredibly often, and it rubs off on his family over time as well.
    • Also the case for the all-female Gazorpian society in "Raising Gazorpazorp". A simple faux pas like one's hair being messy is treated as a Felony Misdemeanor and carries the sentence of "The Silent Treatment". Death sentences can be earned from things like farting and being a man.
    • Headism, the religion that springs up around the giant head-shaped rock aliens in "Get Schwifty", involves sacrificing "undesirables" via tying a bunch of balloons to them and having them float away into the sky in an attempt to appease the giant heads. Some of the people deemed to be undesirables are goths, people who talk during movies, and people who tell inappropriate jokes.
    • Rick's car/spaceship, containing an AI that was created by Rick himself, is naturally also prone to this. In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy", she slices and dices, paralyzes, and psychologically tortures people who get too close to the car as part of her directive to "keep Summer safe", and she promptly incinerates all of the Changeformers who make fun of her in "Amortycan Grickffiti" (though they're big enough assholes that it's hard to feel bad for them).
    • A lighthouse keeper in "Look Who's Purging Now" agrees to give Rick and Morty santuary if the latter will listen to his screenplay (which turns out to be completely awful) and provide honest feedback. Morty offers some very light, actually-constructive criticism, and the man promptly tries to kick them out and calls Morty a terrible person.
    • Rick claims to Morty in "The Rickshank Redemption" that he manipulated Jerry and Beth into divorcing just to get revenge on Jerry for wanting Rick to turn himself in to the government in the previous episode. How much of that Rick actually planned isn't completely clear.
    • What does Morty do in response to Ethan breaking up with Summer in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy"? Forcibly turn Ethan into a horrible living abomination.
    • In "One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty", Rick is pissed with Miles Knightly for beating him and Morty to a grave-robbing, so he goes through the trouble of getting into HeistCon, including assembling an entire crew, just to try to upstage him. And the events of the entire episode—including creating a robot that apparently destroyed entire planets—are manipulated by Rick to make Morty disillusioned with heists because he felt Morty was focusing too much on writing his script for a heist movie and was afraid of losing him.
    • Everything after the first act of "The Vat of Acid Episode" happens because Morty complains about how needlessly complicated Rick's "vat of acid" trick was and that Rick refuses to take any of Morty's suggestions for inventions. Rick responds by creating something Morty wanted in the most Jackass Genie way possible, which includes Morty unknowingly killing countless alternate versions of himself and having to fake his death in a fake vat of acid, just to teach him the lesson of "never criticize my ideas, ever".
    • Played for Laughs in "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri", where Rick's Pre-Mortem One-Liner before killing Tammy is "You made me go to a wedding." He then adds the Bond One-Liner of "And you killed my best friend," and notes that he should have led with that.
    • The whole conflict of "Night Family" is started when Rick refuses to do a better job of rinsing off the dishes even at the Night Family's request, and makes an even bigger mess just to spite them for asking.
  • Distracted by the Sexy:
    • In "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate", alien doctors need Jerry's penis in order to save an old ruler. When Beth is given a catalog of prosthetic penises to choose from, she reads it like a Playgirl magazine.
      Jerry: Hi, honey, so, here's the thing... these guys... they want to completely remove my penis and use it as an alien's heart. And we just need you to sign off on it.
      Beth: What?!
      Jerry: (to the Alien Doctors) Uh-oh. Maybe we got a problem here after all, guys. Yikes.
      Alien Doctor: (to Beth) His penis will be replaced with a sophisticated prosthetic. Now, there's a wide range of options to choose from. They're all in this catalog. (gives Beth the catalog)
      Beth: I don't care about prosthetics. This is insane. What do you people think you're doing?
      Alien Doctor: I understand your feelings, Mrs. Smith.
      Beth: Oh, I don't think you do. I-I bring my husband in for emergency treatment, he's gone an hour, and now you want his penis, (opens catalog) and you hand me some... catalog. (sees catalog's contents) It's-it's-it's-it's-I mean...
    • Morty enters a store in "Solaricks" looking for his original family in the Cronenberged dimension, only to see a magazine with a naked girl on the front and start leafing through it.
  • Distress Call: In "Auto Erotic Assimilation", Rick insists that you always answer these. Nine out of ten times, it leads to a ship full of dead aliens waiting to be looted. (And a bunch of free shit, Morty!)
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?:
    • The monsters in The Stinger for "Ricksy Business" seem to be getting a lot of pleasure from shoving people into each others' holes. The human teen seems to enjoy it, too. Abradolf, not so much.
    • Also, from the same episode Squanchy was always looking for a place to squanch. We never find out explicitly what that is, but it sure looks a lot like auto-erotic asphyxiation.
    • The mining of Pluto in "Something Ricked This Way Comes" is a pretty clear allegory for oil drilling and global warming.
    • The entire Citadel of Ricks as portrayed in "The Ricklantis Mixup" runs on this:
      • The fact that the Mortys of the Citadel are treated as second-class citizens inferior to the Ricks, and sometimes end up shunted to the slums and subjected to Police Brutality (sometimes even from other Mortys) while most of the Ricks aren't interested in helping them, serves as a parallel to racism in the United States, with Mortys serving as a stand-in for people of color while Ricks represent white people.
      • Furthermore, the portrayal of many Ricks being forced to work menial jobs and being passed over for promotions they deserve in favor of others who got the position for petty reasons, while a select few Ricks hold all the power and authority despite often not deserving it more than any of the other Ricks do, is a clear allegory for classism in western society.
      • It's worth noting that the political undertones of the episode are very intentional, as the writers themselves outright stated.
  • Donut Mess with a Cop: In "Rick Potion #9", several donuts can be seen on the ground next to the dead police officer when Jerry grabs his rifle.
  • Doting Parent: The one person Rick is rarely seen disrespecting or swearing at is his daughter Beth (with the one major exception being when they finally have it out and talk about their issues with each other in "The ABCs of Beth"). He even calls her "sweetie" sometimes. He was absent for a large portion of her life, but it's hinted that he is actually deeply ashamed of this. More accurately, this Rick, specifically, did not abandon his daughter since she was murdered in childhood, but he is full of self-loathing for failing to protect her, and knows that many alternate versions of himself did abandon their Beths, including the Beth he currently lives with. Even after he's cloned Beth and has two versions of her in his life, he loves them both and considers both to be his daughter.
  • Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: Rick's relationship with Unity in "Auto Erotic Assimilation". Unity is a hive mind that possesses the bodies of everyone on the planet it's conquered, which she uses to have sex with Rick. The thing is, whether they are aware of it or kept unconscious for the whole time, they are being used for sex while unable to give consent. What makes it striking (and disturbing) is that none of the characters—not even Summer, who initially disapproves of Unity and its actions—seem to even remotely consider the possibility that this might be a form of rape.
  • Downer Ending:
    • "Rick Potion #9" is up there with "Jurassic Bark" and "You're Getting Old" as one of the biggest downer endings in the history of adult animated sitcoms. Rick and Morty accidentally destroy civilization with a plague and have to move to an alternate timeline where they fixed everything, but died shortly afterwards. They had to leave behind their family from the original timeline, but in the post-credits scene, it's shown that, in the original dimension, Jerry and Beth got over their marital problems and are happy without Rick and Morty around. It's a fairly disturbing ending since it still involves real characters dying (only to be replaced just like that). But as Rick says, just don't think about it. Ironically, if either 1) Morty had just passed the screwdriver Rick wanted in the first place, or 2) Rick hadn't screwed up as badly as he did (i.e. if he had managed to cure the Cronenbergs instead of abandoning the world to its fate and travelling to a universe where his counterpart succeeded instead), then they (the original Rick and Morty) would be the ones who died and were replaced instead.
    • Rick gets his first downer ending in "Auto Erotic Assimilation", in which he runs into an old lover of his, Unity the hive mind. They get back together until Summer convinces Unity that Rick is a bad influence on it, and it leaves him. At the end of the episode, we see him drunkenly prepare to commit suicide via a disintegration ray aimed at his head. However, he passes out just before it fires, and it misses, leaving him unconscious on his desk while uncharacteristically emotional music plays in the background.
    • "The Wedding Squanchers" serves as this for the entirety of Season 2. It turns out Tammy is an undercover agent for the Galactic Federation and was planning on using her wedding to Bird Person to trap as many of Rick's friends as she could. The Smiths manage to escape, but Bird Person was killed and Squanchy's fate is unknown. Rick has a Heel Realization and decides to turn himself in so that his family can resume their lives on a now-alien-occupied Earth, but only Jerry (who is Rick's most vocal critic and benefits greatly from the Federation taking over Earth) ends up happy because of this. Oh, and Mr. Poopybutthole molested a pizza guy in The Stinger. Season 3's got a hell of a starting point.
    • Pretty much the entirety of "The Ricklantis Mix-up". Factory Worker Rick snaps and attempts to escape the Citadel, inadvertently killing Simple Rick in the process. He's then captured and forced to replace Simple Rick in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Cop Rick's innocence and idealism is shattered when he's forced to kill the corrupt Cop Morty. Campaign Manager Morty is killed after unsuccessfully trying to stop Evil Morty from winning the presidency. Then Evil Morty kills the cabal of Ricks secretly running Citadel, seizing full control of the station. The only non-evil characters that get a decent ending are the Stand By Me Mortys, except for Slick Morty, who essentially committed suicide by jumping into the "Wishing Portal".
    • "The Old Man and the Seat" gets a surprising downer ending: Rick visits his new friend Tony, the guy who was using Rick's special private toilet without his permission (whom Rick refuses to admit is his friend), at work...only to find out that Tony died in an accident after quitting his job to live a happier life. The episode ends with Rick sitting on his toilet, dejectedly watching the message he'd left for Tony to see the next time he came there to relieve himself (which consists of many hologram versions of Rick mocking Tony good-naturedly about how lonely he is and how nobody wants to be around him).
    • "A Rickonvenient Mort": Morty finds what seems to be true love with Planetina, who falls for him and loves him for who he truly is. He even saves her from the Tina-teers, who were going to sell her like a slave to the highest bidder, and sets her free from the rings. However, prolonged exposure to all the horrible damage that humans are inflicting on the Earth drives her to Black-and-White Insanity as she becomes a progressively-more-violent ecoterrorist, culminating in her killing hundreds of coal miners who, despite not exactly sympathizing with her, were mostly doing their jobs. A heartbroken Morty can't abide by this and reluctantly dumps her, and both of them are completely crushed by the breakup, culminating in Morty sobbing in Beth's arms afterward.
  • Dramatic Ellipsis: In "Lawnmower Dog", when Rick and Morty go from the completed A Plot to the developing B Plot.
    Rick: Out of the frying pan, dot dot dot, eh Morty?
  • Dream Within a Dream: In "Fear No Mort," Rick and Morty jump down a hole and enter a dream state that brings to life their worst fears. After conquering that fear, they wake up, but then realize they have another fear, and after dealing with that, wake up again. This is repeated half a dozen times. Eventually Morty realizes R Ick isn't even in the hole with him.
  • Driven to Suicide:
    • Mr. Lucius Needful, a.k.a. The Devil, in "Something Ricked This Way Comes", until Summer saves him.
    • Rick sticks his head into a disintegration ray at the end of "Auto Erotic Assimilation" in complete despair after Unity breaks up with him because he's a Toxic Friend Influence. It only fails when he passes out at the last second. It's especially noteworthy in that, in a show that runs off some of the blackest Black Comedy out there, this is played completely humorlessly.
    • In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy", the scientist who created the teenyverse in the hope of harnessing its energy commits suicide when he realizes his own planet was created by another scientist for the same purpose.
    • The "Stand By Me" Mortys from "The Ricklantis Mixup" each toss something important to them into the "Wishing Portal" to make a wish for something they want. Slick Morty wishes that life in the Citadel could get better for them, and throws himself into it.
    • In one of Morty's erased memories from "Morty's Mind Blowers", Mr. Lunas did this after being falsely accused of being a pedophile. Morty and Rick themselves both try to do this after accidentally erasing their memories and trying to replace them with the Mind Blowers (which are all awful experiences that convince Morty his life totally sucked), making a Suicide Pact with each other, but are stopped when Summer enters the room.
    • Through the use of a death crystal in "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", Morty gets a judge to let him go free by convincing her that her dead lover is speaking through him. She immediately runs off to commit suicide and join him, as noted on the news ticker on TV immediately after.
    • Whatever the secret of the talking cat from "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty" was, it was apparently so disturbing that almost caused Rick to kill himself.
    • Morty forms a heartwarming, months-long, serious relationship with an unnamed girl in "The Vat of Acid Episode", only for Jerry to mistakenly hit Morty's "do-over remote" and erase the whole thing. Morty then tries to start over with the girl, but scares her and she maces him, causing him to accidentally hit the "save" button on the remote and ruin any chances of salvaging the situation. He's so distraught that he then uses several "do-overs" to jump into a cage full of crazed gorillas and get ripped apart, several times.
    • Some of the decoy family members in "Mortyplicity" resign themselves to this when they discover that they're just clones.
    • Professor Shabooboo jumps off a wall to his death in "Rickdependence Spray" when it's clear that his plan to combat the monster sperm is going to cause the creation of an incest baby.
    • When Rick tries to restore Bird Person to life in "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort", BP resists his efforts and tries to destroy his own mindscape, which will kill him. He later reveals to Rick that he's in enough despair over Tammy's betrayal and death that he just wants to die like he was meant to on his wedding day. It takes Rick revealing that he and Tammy had a daughter together to change his mind and convince him to live for her sake.
    • The Night Family of the titular episode, after hijacking their "Daymanoids"' bodies and going on a hedonistic spending spree, go broke, get tired of having to deal with tedious day-to-day aspects of life like finances, and decide to end their existence to escape the consequences, destroying the Somnambulator and restoring the family to normal.
    • Piss Master in "Analyze Piss" tries to pick a fight with Rick and makes a lewd comment about Summer, prompting Jerry of all people to fight him to force him to apologize to her. Jerry wins, Summer records the footage and posts it online, and it goes viral; Jerry becomes famous throughout the universe, while Piss Master is subjected to such scorn and ridicule (even becoming estranged from his daughter) that he kills himself in the bathtub, leaving behind a suicide note blaming Jerry for it and claiming that all he ever wanted was respect, but everyone else just wanted to see him fail.
  • Drowning My Sorrows: It becomes more and more obvious as the first season goes on that Rick doesn't just drink because he wants to. In "Ricksy Business", Bird Person flat out states that he does it to cope with a dire amount of emotional pain. Rick no doubt feels remorse over his failures as a father and a grandfather as well as the traumas he's seen.
    • A particular example is seen when Unity breaks up with him. Rick hits the bottle hard, and is so distraught that he actually tries to disintegrate his own head with a laser, but passes out before he can so thanks to having already drunk so much.
    • Jessica references that Rick did this offscreen in "Rest and Ricklaxation" after Healthy Morty ditched the family; Rick apparently missed him so much that he kept drunk-dialing her and crying about it.
    • It's also shown when Rick is forcibly returned to his home in his native universe, where his original Diane and Beth died, and encounters an AI "ghost" of Diane that he designed when he was younger to "haunt" himself. Rick immediately starts hitting the bottle, hard.
    • Beth is also a Lady Drunk in earlier seasons to deal with her abandonment issues, unhappy marriage, and dissatisfaction with her life. She gets a moment of this onscreen after shooting Mr. Poopybutthole (mistakenly believing he's one of the memory parasites), and immediately rushes to the kitchen in horror, tears streaming down her face, and pours and chugs multiple glasses of wine with very shaky hands.
  • Dude, She's Like in a Coma: In "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" Jerry has sex with a stalled simulation of Beth and seems to find it more enjoyable because she wasn't moving. Or, knowing Beth, because she's not making comments about how disappointing he is.
  • Dumb Is Good:
    • Jerry is acknowledged by pretty much everyone in the family to be a total idiot, but he's a Kind Hearted Simpleton who, even later into the series, still holds onto an innocence and good nature that even Morty has started to lose.
    • Doofus Rick - ten times dumber than our Rick, but at least a hundred times nicer. Perhaps having all the other Ricks making fun of him constantly has made him compassionate.
  • Dysfunctional Family:
    • Rick is an alcoholic sociopath, Morty is a neurotic teenager who gets broken several times, Jerry is hopelessly insecure, Beth is thinking about leaving him and is slowly regretting marrying him, and Summer is starting to feel unwanted. Even worse than the Simpson family.
    • And later, Jerry and Beth divorce for a season, Rick spirals even harder into his nihilism, Morty and Summer grow more and more cynical thanks to Rick's Toxic Friend Influence, and Beth fears her father may have cloned her and she might be the clone that he'll dispose of if she becomes self-aware.
    • Notably, though, they really begin to work on this starting at the end of Season 3, when Beth and Jerry reconcile. They still remain this trope and probably always will since it's a staple of the series, but they become happier together and grow into being a Family of Choice who, despite learning that they're from mostly different universes, choose to stick together anyway.

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