Recap / DEATH BATTLE! S10E14 "Rick Sanchez VS The Doctor"

Boomstick: Rick Sanchez.
Wiz: The Doctor.
Boomstick: These geniuses dominate the cosmos, but who would win an all-out brawl?

Death Battle's tenth season continues as, for the fourteenth episode, we take a look at two beings who have mastered time and space using dimension hopping technology. But now, the question comes of which of these two brilliant, yet eccentric, geniuses would win in a battle to the death.

[This recap is a work in progress]

Wiz: Challenge Rick at your will; he may look like a scrawny drunken septuagenarian (and he is), but somehow, he's also the greatest warrior in the universe.
Boomstick: And you can lick his balls!

Wiz: But a Doctor's job is never done; without witness, without reward, you'll never know when they'll show up to save the day. But if you happen to be up against the Doctor, there's really only one thing you can do: run.

After an advertisement for the episode's sponsor of Better Help online therapy, the dimension-hopping duo are ready to face off with each other, and it's time for a death battle!

Just outside Saturn's orbit, the Space Cruiser and TARDIS float in space as Morty anxiously apologizes for having rear-ended the police box, before Rick angrily silences him, raving about the TARDIS's lack of rearview mirrors. Poking his head out, the Doctor points out that they're the ones who hit him, before dismissing them as he goes back inside his craft and departs. Incensed at the Doctor seemingly ignoring him, Rick takes over the Space Cruiser's controls from his grandson and pursues the TARDIS.

FIGHT!

As both starships fly across the cosmos, Rick activates the Space Cruiser's lasers, landing two direct hits before the TARDIS begins to fade in and out of existence. Recognising the attempted jump, Rick fires the Space Cruiser's tow cable, successfully hooking onto the police box as both enter the Time Vortex Rick prepares his Portal Gun and orders his ship to keep his grandson safe before leaping out and grabbing on to the tow cable. The Space Cruiser severs the tow cable, causing it, Rick, and the TARDIS with The Doctor inside to exit the Time Vortex at different points.

Fading into existence on a planet similar to Earth, the TARDIS makes its' landing as its' acausal pilot exits to bemoan the damage the tow cable did to the police box before being interrupted by screaming, the source being arising screaming sun that brings a bemused grin on the Doctor's face. Just after, someone else's screaming, that being Rick's, interrupts the Doctor's amusement as the drunken scientist leaps out of a portal and tackles the Time Lord into a second portal that takes them into the Blips and Chitz space arcade. As both travellers recover, the Doctor offers alternative forms of combat only for Rick to have none of it and draw his Crow Sword, leading to the Doctor to draw a spoon as the pair clashes blade and kitchen utensil as they reach a nearby balcony, causing the Doctor to admire the arcade as he proceeds to disarm Rick of his sword. This small victory is short lived as Rick activates his cyborg implants to throw the Doctor around before the Time Lord pulls out his most iconic gadget, the Sonic Screwdriver, and uses it to disrupt and detonate Rick's implants, throwing them off the balcony while the Time Lord swipes Rick's Portal Gun and uses it to make two portals, the first takes them back to the Planet of the Screaming Sun, the second takes them to Wester Drumlins.

As Rick and the Doctor pick themselves back up, the Time Lord realises where they ended up and are surrounded by Weeping Angels, much to his horror. Knowing that Rick has never encountered these monsters before, the Doctor gives his foe erroneous advice on how to deal with them while he tries to activate the Portal Gun, Rick falling for the bait and realizing too late that he was tricked before the Doctor escapes, leaving him alone in the basement.

As the Doctor returns to the Planet of the Screaming Sun and re-enters the TARDIS, he's greeted by a large assortment of Ricks vandalising the police box, who then set their sights on the sole non-Rick in the room, swiping the Portal Gun out of his hands before chasing him across the corridors only for the Rick mob to be trapped by the TARDIS switching its' rooms around. As the Time Lord praises his ship for its' ingenuity he has it bring down a solution to his present Rick problem, the D-Mat, a brief moment of hesitation occurs before the Doctor notices a familiar green portal on his back, out of which comes Rick who shoots both of the Doctor's hearts which causes the Time Lord to slump against the TARDIS' console.

As Rick mocks his opponent for his idealism before telling him to get his Regeneration started so he can finish him off and get back to his grandson, the Doctor in turn tears down Rick's ego and nihilism as he uses his Sonic Screwdriver to disable Rick's laser gun and cause his Portal Gun to fire a portal into a nearby wall before fighting against his Regeneration, the resulting time energy damaging the TARDIS' interior. After Rick's failed attempt to escape through the freshly made portal, he uses his injector to inject his genetic info into the regenerating Time Lord before being crushed under debris. The Doctor screams out in pain as a clone of Rick, as naked as the day he was born, bursts out of his chest and picks up the discarded D-Mat and attempts to finish off his opponent, only for the barely alive Doctor to turn around and use the portal that was still on his back to redirect the D-Mat's beam through it and out of the second portal, causing Rick to be erased from time, the prior clones also fading away with him.

With Rick's erasure, we return to the beginning of the fight where the Doctor, no longer having to deal with Rick, compliments Morty on the Space Cruiser's design and asks him if he made it himself. No longer remembering Rick, Morty unsurely affirms that he did, causing the Time Lord to state that he has a bright future ahead and tells him (and the audience) to not be a cynic like his non-existent grandfather before departing with the TARDIS, leaving Morty alone in space until an AI ghost of Rick appears and threatens to haunt him if he forgets him, much to Morty's panic at the foul-mouthed stranger.

KO!

With Morty traumatized for the thousandth time, it's time to find out why Rick lost to the Doctor. Both did not have impressive physical feats despite being able to dodging lasers (barring the Doctor's super strength during his regeneration period), so Wiz and Boomstick look at the other aspects. In terms of weaponry, Rick definitely had more firepower and destructive weapons on a galactic scale, and could get the jump on the Doctor if he could have done so. However, the Doctor's technology could counter anything Rick threw at him, including hacking Rick's own tech with the Sonic Screwdriver. This includes Rick's Portal Gun, which has had a history of being hacked before. And while Rick did have Operation Phoenix to transfer to another body, the Doctor's D-Mat can eliminate that as it erases anyone from time. For vehicles, Rick's Space Cruiser was a beast of itself and could tow a Solar System with ease, but it could not match to the TARDIS' ability to defend itself from a universe destroying event. But the biggest deciding factor between Rick and the Doctor was their experience and intelligence. Despite Rick mastering space and time, the Doctor has done so longer than the former has. Also, the Doctor can quickly make plans on the fly, while Rick struggles to fight people that are on his own level of intelligence (like Rick Prime and Evil Morty). Ultimately, the Doctor's technology, intelligence, and thousand years of experience were too much for even the Rickest Rick of them all.

Boomstick: Ah, geez... I bet Rick was absolutely Morty-fied to lose!
Wiz: The winner is the Doctor!

Next time on Death Battle...

"Rick Sanchez VS The Doctor" contains examples of:

• Always Someone Better: While Rick has more or less done the same things the Doctor has, the key difference here and what nets the Doctor his win is experience. The Doctor, as a Time Lord, has hundreds, if not almost a thousand years traveling the universe and dealing with hostile alien threats. The Doctor's abilities and tech also cancel out most of Rick's advantages (his sonic screwdriver can disable most if not all of Rick's tech and the Doctor can resist any of Rick's attempts to screw with time).
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • A pop-up notes that Rick has referenced Doctor Who, but this doesn't necessarily mean he's fully versed in Doctor Who lore. As such, he name drops Time Lords and knows to shoot the Doctor in both hearts, but is fooled by the Doctor's lie about how Weeping Angels work, and it's unclear whether he was planning to Coup de Grâce the Doctor mid-regeneration or had something else in mind.
  • Regarding the Doctor using the D-Mat Reality Erasure on Rick. While its made clear Rick himself no longer exists in any capacity (save his ghost AI aboard the Space Cruiser), it is uncertain whether this also goes for Rick's multiversal counterparts, and if so, whether Evil Morty is still running around.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When Rick follows the TARDIS through a wormhole, he's flung off at the last second. Upon arriving on an alien planet, The Doctor steps outside and hears screaming. But it's not Rick screaming, it's a sun with a face. Rick jumps out of a portal and tackles him moments later.
  • Upon reentering the TARDIS to find it now flooded with numerous Ricks, the Doctor looks around seemingly baffled about how Rick had done this. Then, when he sees a Rick hiding in the central console he has a realization and runs off to the real central console, revealing that his confusion had been about the subtle differences within the decoy the TARDIS had used to deceive the Ricks.
• Batman Gambit: The Doctor's final play has two prongs of behavior prediction he sets up with his sonic screwdriver and destructive surge of regeneration energy, either of which offered a path to victory.
  • By creating a portal at the far end of the room and then starting to bring everything down on top of them, the Doctor lured Rick towards that portal as a possible escape route, only for the rubble to cut him off and crush him. However, Rick evaded death by shooting the Doctor with the chestburster gun right before getting crushed.
  • By disabling Rick's laser gun, the Doctor forced him to use something else to try for a killing blow, such as the D-Mat Reality Erasure conveniently knocked onto the ground by the destruction into a position where the doctor could spin around and use the portal on his back and the portal at the far side of the room to redirect the shot back at Rick.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: The Doctor is well established as not carrying weapons and using his intelligence to outwit foes rather than killing them himself. Seeing the multiple Ricks trashing the TARDIS makes him realize that using the D-Mat is the only way to permanently deal with Rick. Even with the threat Rick presents, the Doctor still visibly hesitates to take the weapon out of the casing, giving Rick an opportunity to ambush and mortally wound him, and Rick ends up using it himself.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Doctor tricking Rick into using the Reality Erasure on himself undoes the Doctor's injuries and the entire episode, thus negating the need to regenerate. As Rick's existence has been erased, all his contingencies and presumably even his evil counterparts are erased as well, meaning Evil Morty never comes into existence. The only downside is that Morty grows up without his grandfather, much less not realizing he's been erased from existence, though even that's slightly negated by the fact that Rick is still around, except only as a ghost AI.
• Book Ends: The fight starts with Rick and Morty crashing into the TARDIS and Rick ranting about the Doctor's carelessness. After Rick is erased with the D-Mat, the same scene plays out, this time with the Doctor complimenting Morty for being able to build a spacecraft.
• Breaking Old Trends: Starting with this episode. the hosts stop giving the combatants fancy subtitles when introducing them (i.e. Scooby Doo, the Miraculous Mutt of Mystery Inc.), instead just introducing them by name (i.e. Rick Sanchez; The Doctor).
• Bring It: When The Doctor accepts Rick's confrontation.
  The Doctor: Alright, fine. Queensberry Rules? A bit of Venusian karate?
  Rick Sanchez: Keep quipping, asshole. Maybe you'll find a good joke on the ground next to your teeth.
  The Doctor: En garde!
• The Cameo: During the Blips and Chitz sequence, several past Death Battle combatants like Harley, Jinx, Dimitri, Vader, Guts (who's still in his Died Standing Up pose), Cole, Megatron, Frieza and even Death Race combatant Thomas the Tank engine can be seen in the lobby. Bill Cipher also makes an appearance on an arcade machine whose title decodes to "IT'S BILL CIPHER!".
• Can't Move While Being Watched: At one point, Rick and the Doctor end up in a dimension full of Weeping Angels. Knowing this, the Doctor gives Rick the worst possible advice against them: "Blink as much as you can. They're scared of rapid movement." Rick follows the "advice" and a Weeping Angel quickly closes in on him, making him realize he's been tricked.
• Catchphrase Interruptus: The Doctor starts to utter Ten/Fourteen's signature "What? What? What?!" when he sees Rick's robot decoys vandalizing the TARDIS, but stops himself when he notices Rick hiding in the central console before being jumped by two of the decoys, forcing him to flee.
• Chekhov's Gag: Rick making fun of Time Lords in the beginning seems to just be a joke about his Jerkass personality, but he actually shows some knowledge about them near the end of the fight when he shoots the Doctor in both of his hearts.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • On the planet of the Screaming Sun, the TARDIS' door is left open when Rick tackles The Doctor into a portal. Sure enough, after the Doctor manages to portal back from the Weeping Angels' dimension, the TARDIS has been invaded by a Rick army because the door was open.
  • Rick shoots the Doctor in the back with his portal gun, allowing him to pursue the Doctor for the climax of the fight. The Doctor later uses the portal in his back while regenerating to turn the D-Mat back on Rick for the killing blow.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Space Hawaii can be seen in the opening to the fight's background.
  • Once again, the fourth-wall aware combatant uses their awareness to find out how to defeat their opponent. And much like last time, it doesn't work.
• Crazy-Prepared: Rick has several contingencies in place in the event he gets killed, ranging from decoy copies of himself to actual clones, all of whom believe themselves to be the real Rick. Unfortunately for him, the Doctor had several methods of getting around this by flat out erasing Rick from existence.
• Curse Cut Short: Rick delivers one when he is left behind in the room with the Weeping Angels.
• Deadly Dodging: The Doctor takes the win by turning his back right when Rick fires the D-Mat, redirecting the ray into the portal Rick placed earlier and sending it flying out the other end right at Rick himself.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Death Battle happens because Morty accidentally ran his and Rick's spaceship into the TARDIS. While the Doctor is willing to let bygones be bygones and go about his merry way, Rick perceives it as the Doctor "ignoring him" which incenses him to the point he chases after the Doctor in what turns into a fight to the death.
• Full-Frontal Assault: At least one of the Ricks trashing the TARDIS do so while naked. Near the end of the fight Rick uses his clone gun to escape death when the Doctor's regeneration destroys the roof of the TARDIS by implanting a clone into the Doctor. The resulting clone body of Rick is formed without clothes and continues the fight in the nude.
• Genius Loci: That the TARDIS is alive and sentient comes up, as does its ability to alter time and space within itself during the analysis. It does so during the fight, as several Ricks pursue the Doctor out of the control room through its corridors, the TARDIS swaps rooms so they end up in a dead end (With a sign telling them "Exciting Changes are coming your way"), while the Doctor is re-routed to the non-decoy control room.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: The background gag at the Blips and Chitz shows previous DB combatants hanging out with their formerly mortal enemies, like Blake and Mikasa, the Dragonborn and the Chosen Undead, and Frieza and Megatron.
• Grandfather Paradox: The Doctor uses the D-Mat to erase Rick from existence and time, but Morty, his grandson, and his cruiser still exist, with the explanation being that Morty built it himself.
• Hack Your Enemy: The Doctor uses his ever-handy Sonic Screwdriver to hack into Rick's gear, destroying his extendable robotic arms and disabling his gun. As most of Rick's admittedly greater arsenal of weaponry was vulnerable to hacking, it is a major boon in the Doctor's favor.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Rick attempts to use the Doctor's D-Mat to finish him off while he's regenerating, only for the Doctor to use the portal in his back to turn it back on Rick and Ret-Gone him instead.
• Informed Attribute: The Doctor appearing in this episode is supposedly the Fourteenth Doctor, but his outfit is closer to theTenth Doctor's blue suit, while his TARDIS interior and Sonic Screwdriver are also based on Ten's. (The latter can be excused by the fact that Fourteen's Screwdriver and TARDIS hadn't yet been revealed while this episode was in production.)
• Killed Off for Real: Downplayed, but this is essentially what happens to Rick. The D-Mat Reality Erasure, as its name implies, erases anything it touches from existence and time. The Doctor tricks Rick into firing it at himself, using the portal Rick attached to his back and a portal in the TARDIS to redirect the D-Mat's blast. As a result, all of Rick's clones and decoys are erased from existence and Morty's knowledge of his grandfather is erased. The only thing left of Rick is his ghost AI, who Morty doesn't recognize.
• Last-Second Word Swap: While Rick is chasing the TARDIS with his car, he says, "Holy— Ship, keep Morty safe!"
• Medium Awareness: Downplayed. Just because both combatants are aware of the fourth wall (the Doctor has been to the real world and met his own actors in the comics, and the Meta Plane is a facet of reality that Rick can visit and disdains), doesn't mean they can get a meaningful advantage over the other with it. Rick and Morty is too cynical and gruesome of a show for the Doctor to ever get invested in it, meaning he hardly knows who Rick is. Similarly, Doctor Who is too idealistic for someone like Rick to tolerate, even if he has referenced it before— at best, Rick probably Googled "how to kill a Time Lord" for his knowledge of the two weaknesses of the Doctor's that he exploited (shooting two hearts and killing him mid-regeneration), but knew nothing about how to counter the sonic screwdriver or the Weeping Angels. Bill and Discord, by contrast, each had a form of omniscience that they could use to instantly binge-watch each other's shows and find each other's Achilles' Heel.
• Mythology Gag:
  • This isn't the first time the TARDIS has had an arrow shot into it.
  • As the Doctor squares up against Rick, he references the Third Doctor's Venusian aikido.
  • The Doctor fends off a Crow Sword-wielding Rick with a spoon.
  • Much like the Tenth Doctor before him, the Doctor says "I don't wanna go" before beginning to regenerate, which once again wrecks the TARDIS's console room.
• Never My Fault: Played with, as it's implied that Morty was actually the one who rear ended the TARDIS, but Rick pins all the blame on the Doctor.
• No-Sell: One of the Doctor's advantages is that Rick's ability to screw with time doesn't work on the Doctor as it's noted in the analysis that the Doctor has resisted time-related phenomena before, though Rick makes no attempts at this within the animation.
• Oh, Crap!: Downplayed. While he uses their presence to his advantage, the Doctor is noticeably alarmed upon realizing that he and Rick just landed in the middle of a nest of Weeping Angels, and makes sure to leave as quickly as he can while leaving Rick in their grasp.
• Pet the Dog: Despite Rick cussing out Morty for rear-ending the TARDIS, once the fight begins he instructs the Cruiser's AI to keep Morty safe. Similarly, after the fight is over at Rick is Ret-Gone, The Doctor isn't mad at Morty for rear-ending him and instead compliments him on apparently building the cruiser himself and departs with some friendly advice while telling Morty he has a bright future ahead of him.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: The Doctor quips "Allons-y!" as he turns the D-Mat back on Rick.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Doctor's not impressed with Rick's "the multiverse is so vast that almost nothing truly matters" outlook, and verbally serves him before he begins to regenerate.
  The Doctor: I know your type. The nihilist know-it-all. But through all this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey rubbish, there's one thing you never quite understood: I'm the Doctor. And I don't wanna go.
• Red Herring: Toward the end of the fight, Rick manages to deliver fatal injuries on the Doctor, forcing him to regenerate. Since this is when the Doctor is most vulnerable and can permanently die, not to mention Rick gets his hands on the Doctor's D-Mat Reality Erasure gun, it seems as if the Doctor will be rendered Ret-Gone... only for him to turn around and use the portal Rick stuck to his back against him, turning the D-Mat's shot on Rick and killing him instead, wiping him from existence.
• Ret-Gone: The D-Mat Reality Erasure doesn't just inflict this on whoever's unlucky enough to be on the other end of its muzzle, it permanently erases them from time itself, ensuring they are Killed Off for Real. It's ultimately downplayed in Rick's case as he's shown to be still be around, albeit as an AI ghost. Morty thankfully doesn't recognize him thanks to the D-Mat's effects.
• Seen It All: The Doctor stares at the Screaming Sun with an amused smile on his face. Likewise, despite a Bait-and-Switch suggesting otherwise, the numerous Ricks don't phase him either.
• Schmuck Bait: When Rick and The Doctor are surrounded by Weeping Angels, The Doctor gives Rick the exact opposite of his famous advice on how to deal with them and tells Rick to blink as fast as he can, saying Weeping Angels are scared of rapid movement. Rick takes the bait and starts blinking, getting surrounded by the angels while The Doctor escapes, leaving Rick to be stranded in another time.
• Shout-Out: DUMMI trying to figure out exactly how the mechanisms of the D-Mat Reality Gun works causes him to suffer a Logic Bomb, similar to how GIR suffered one over the Time-Object Replacement Device in the Invader Zim episode "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy". A clip of GIR thinking it over from the episode is visible on the screen in the studio at the time.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: The Doctor's parting words to Morty are "Don't be a cynic!"
• Technical Pacifist: Downplayed. Throughout the whole fight initiated by Rick, The Doctor never once attacked him (aside from one playful jab with a spoon) and stayed on the defense; even Rick's death was a Hoist by His Own Petard. The worst thing The Doctor did (besides hacking gadgets for self-defense) was giving wrong advice about the Weeping Angels.
• Tempting Fate: After landing some fatal hits, Rick claims that his grandson won't die an idiot like the Doctor. Just under a minute later, the Doctor tricks Rick into wiping himself from existence.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: Had Rick just shrugged off The Doctor's willingness to forgive him this battle wouldn't have happened. Unfortunately, Rick just had to be an impulsive egomaniac who perceived said forgiveness as a diss and couldn't let it slide. This ultimately results in Rick not just dying, but getting erased from time and space completely.

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