Recap / Rick And Morty S 5 E 1 Mort Dinner Rick Andre

Original air date: 6/20/2021

With a date from Jessica on the line, Morty saves his and Rick's lives by landing in the ocean. Unfortunately, this leads to the return of Rick's arch-nemesis, Mr. Nimbus, the master of the ocean, who insists on renegotiating the treaty between land and sea. Rick, uncharacteristically nervous, plays host when he has to prepare an important dinner for his ocean-dwelling nemesis, tasking Morty with getting the wine even though he's on a date with Jessica. The wine in question is aged in a Narnia-like pocket dimension where years pass in the span of a few moments, and Morty accidentally makes enemies of several generations of the people living inside.

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Tropes:

• Action Prologue: The episode jumps right into the pivotal moments of a dangerous Rick & Morty mission.
• Aliens Made Them Do It: Nimbus casually commands the police to have sex for a bit before commanding them to leave.
• And I Must Scream: Jessica ends up dragged into another dimension and frozen in goo for centuries, unable to move but still being aware of time passing. It causes her to Go Mad from the Revelation, then sane, then mad, etc., and she becomes convinced she's a "time god" and they should just be friends.
• Antagonistic Offspring:
  • Hoovy's son Japhet grows up to hate and kill him, believing that Hoovy abandoned his mother when she was pregnant with him.
  • A descendant of Hoovy becomes a king who clashes with his own son because he believes that Morty will return to torment his kingdom, while the son doesn't believe it, and eventually leads a revolt that kills the king.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: Chianti, the wine Rick stores in the other dimension, only gets better with age for a maximum of twenty years. After that point it either stays the same or starts going bad, making the extreme time difference counterproductive.
• Big Damn Heroes: Mr. Nimbus appears after Rick, Morty, and Jessica are surrounded, summoning the ocean to wash away their foes.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Mr. Nimbus is apparently extremely well-endowed, going by Beth's and Jerry's equally-eager reactions upon seeing his "package".
• Big Sleep: Hoovy's son dies an old man in the presence of his three sons with a dramatic head nod to the side.
• Body Horror: Happens to Rick in the very advanced world where he gets disarmed. Since his body contains mechanical weapon body parts, they're torn out.
• Breaking Old Trends: This is the first season premiere to have no explicit connection to the previous season's finale.^Explanation "A Rickle in Time" followed up on Rick freezing time at the end of "Ricksy Business"; "The Rickshank Redemption" was a result of the events in "The Wedding Squanchers"; "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat" had Beth making good on her claims about the changed family dynamic at the end of "The Rickchurian Mortydate". There is no explicit connection between the events of this episode and "Star Mort Rickturn Of The Jerri" however. It also doesn't end with a rambling rant about the adventures to come.
• Brick Joke:
  • Early in the episode, Rick sends Summer to the bottom of the ocean to get Mr. Nimbus's magic shell that will apparently allow Rick to defeat Nimbus somehow (without actually spelling out to her what she's supposed to do with it once she gets it). At the very end of the episode, just when Rick and Nimbus are starting to make amends, Summer shows up with the shell, asking Rick what she should do with it, and Nimbus, realizing that Rick was plotting against him all along, promptly beats the shit out of him and has him arrested.
  • On that note, when Mr. Nimbus first arrives at the house, Jerry calls the police on him, only for Rick to exasperatedly tell him that Nimbus can control the cops, which the latter indeed proves with Mind Control once they arrive. At the end, he does this again to have them take Rick to jail after beating him up, and Jerry tells Summer in annoyance that Nimbus controls the cops.
  • When scrolling through Interdimensional Cable, Morty lands on the Nintendo 69 channel, which is literal Nintendo porn. While arguing with Nimbus at the end of the episode, Rick mentions doing that particular sex act.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Nimbus towards Rick upon seeing just how shallow he has become.
  • And then at the end, just as it seems that they're going to bury the hatchet, Summer shows up holding the shell Rick asked her to get, re-infuriating Nimbus as he realizes Rick was going behind his back to defeat him.
• Brought Down to Normal: The robots of Hoovy's world, having reverse-engineered Rick's technology and advanced into a futuristic society, are able to counter Rick's attack and strip the cybernetic enhancements from his body. Combined with Morty having used all his available weapons in his garage, Rick is easy pickings for Mr. Nimbus, who beats him up and has him thrown in jail with no way to escape besides presumably bail.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": "No, I'm not a talking beaver that believes in Jesus Christ. But, yes, it's like Narnia."
• Cargo Cult: In Hoovy's world, an entire myth gets built around a "dark child" that emerges from a portal only to attack on sight. This is only because Morty tries to get in to get the wine Rick left there and get out, and doesn't explain anything.
• Cassandra Truth: Hoovy's descendants fight each other due to their belief, or doubt, that a "dark child" has made their lives miserable, only because of how long in their time is between Morty's visits.
• Catchphrase: Summer tries to make one before her mission to the Marianas Trench, "Let's Lick Tits". It doesn't stick.
• Comically Missing the Point: Jerry doesn't understand why the 911 operator would ask that question. "I don't know why that matters, but we're white."
• Coming in Hot: Morty is able to crashland the heavily damaged shuttle in the ocean.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: When Morty saves Rick from a mission gone wrong and barely makes a safe landing, Rick tells off Morty for landing in the ocean because it violates his treaty with Mr. Nimbus. He says it's all Morty's fault they're in this mess and Summer is more reliable. Morty gets fed up and tells off Rick for making him an errand boy when this night is important to him. Plus, as he points out, Rick never told him about the guy.
• Contemplate Our Navels: The robot studying the captured Morty in the Hoovyverse, now that they have lost their purpose, begins questioning the state of their existence and why their creators were so willing to tear themselves apart in pursuit of killing Morty.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Beth and Jerry are still attending family therapy sessions with Doctor Wong^note who apparently still continues to see them and didn't dump them as clients even after Rick destroyed her office in the previous episode, who continues to give them solid advice.
  • Jerry says to Rick that he once had sex with a planet.
  • Morty wonders why every old guy is super jacked.
  • Rick mentions to Nimbus that he had sex with mermaids while visiting Atlantis.
  • Nimbus mentions Rick's ex-wife Diane, confirming that this is indeed her name.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Lampshaded by Morty:
  "Jesus Christ, why is every old guy super-jacked?"
• Crystal Prison: Poor Jessica in the third act.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: After Morty learns that the other world is bent on killing him and he needs more wine, he decides to go Crazy-Prepared using hi-tech weaponry that pretty much lets him raze a majority of the kingdom within seconds.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Japhet has a murderous hatred of his father Hoovy because he believes Hoovy abandoned his wife when she was pregnant with Japhet, but in reality, Hoovy unintentionally traveled to another dimension where time flowed much slowlier than in his own.
• Dark Messiah: The dog people of Hoovy's world come to view Morty as an eternally returning devil figure.
• Deus ex Machina: Name-dropped by Rick when he wrongly assumes himself to be Morty and Jessica's unexpected rescuer after they get trapped in the other dimension. Subverted when Rick is easily disarmed by the enemy forces. It's then up to Mr. Nimbus to save the day.
• Did Not Get the Girl: After being pulled through a portal and frozen for centuries, Jessica decides that it would be best if she and Morty remained friends. Morty is disappointed, but ultimately understands her point of view.
• Did Not Think This Through:
  • Even if Hoovy had no idea about the time differential between his world and Morty's, stepping through a portal is a bad idea if you don't know where it leads. Similarly, Morty allowing Hoovy to pass through the portal is a case of this because at least he knows about said differential.
  • Hoovy's future descendants are eventually all killed and replaced by the robotic lifeforms they manufactured to kill the child they hated. For whatever reason, however, the robots decided to imitate their creators' forms, to the point of having cloned genitals for their bodies, allowing Morty to deliver a Groin Attack after escaping capture.
• Dinner with the Boss: Yes, they're doing one of those plots.
• Disproportionate Retribution: At one point Morty notes that while, yes, he did inadvertently screw things up for Hoovy and cause chaos and death due to his carelessness with the time dilation, the other world literally devoting itself to destroying him in vengeance to the point where it elevates him to a mythological being and tears itself apart is nevertheless a very excessive response.
• Dramatic Thunder: Strikes at pivotal times in the other dimension, e.g. when Hoovy dies by the hand of his son.
• Everyone Has Standards: While Morty is mad that Hoovy's descendant attacked him out of nowhere, he stops pummeling him in retaliation on realizing that he's an old man and his children are watching. Morty apologizes but becomes upset again when the man tries to kill him again. Morty kicks him and makes his exit, unaware that he mortally wounded him.
  • When Jerry calls the police to try to get rid of Mr. Nimbus, he is perturbed when they outright ask if he's white before deciding to respond quickly (even though he is white).
• The Evil Prince: One of Hoovy's descendants is a prince who rebels against his father due to his lack of faith of the "Dark Child"'s return, overthrowing and killing him.
• Expy: Mr. Nimbus is a parody of Namor.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge:
  • The super jacked son of Hoovy pummels Morty for dooming his family. Not without shouting I'll Kill You! into his face.
  • Almost betrayed Mr. Nimbus beats Rick after Summer uses the super shell and accidentally makes Mr. Nimbus stronger.
• Evil Chancellor: The wizard who helps Hoovy's prince descendant kill the king, kills him as soon as he claims the crown.
• Flirtatious Smack on the Ass: Mr. Nimbus gropes Jerry's groin and smacks Beth on her behind during their first encounter.
• Foil: Nimbus is this to Rick, accord to this video made by the directors.
• For Want Of A Nail: Every time he goes through the time portal, Morty unintentionally triggers a chain of events that makes Hoovy's entire species develop a murderous hatred of him, evolving their civilization from pre-medieval into a cyberpunk world in the span of centuries.
  Morty: I just took some wine, I said I was sorry! What the fuck is wrong with you people?!
• From Bad to Worse: In a desperate effort to help Rick, Summer blows Nimbus's shell, which just makes him stronger and pummel Rick harder.
• Funny Background Event: In one scene we see a character in the background die from a Portal Cut because he didn't know about that very spot the portal door would appear.
• Generational Saga: As a subplot to an episode that might as well be in real time. Since the time portal Rick used to store the wine runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside, and Morty keeps trying to get wine for the dinner and Jessica, every time he goes in and comes out, a new generation passes and advances the mythology they've literally built around him.
• Genre Blind: Despite confirming with Rick that the portal runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside, Morty happily accepts the help of a being named Hoovy to carry the case and the man follows him. Hoovy then returns to his time years later, finding his wife dead and his child vengeful. He then forgets the concept because he is too busy surviving the descendents' attacks for his head.
• Genre Savvy: The Time Dilation of the other universe is almost immediately compared to The Chronicles of Narnia.
• Generation Xerox: Hoovy is fatally stabbed by his son after years of plotting revenge. Several generations later, one of Hoovy's descendants is murdered by his son in similar circumstances.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: After Morty slaughters Hoovy's people with high-tech weapons, he casually removes the metal glove he was wearing and tosses it aside before leaving through the portal. The aliens are able to reverse engineer the technology and propel their civilization from Medieval Stasis to a full cyberpunk world.
• God Test: Jerry doesn't believe that Mr. Nimbus can control the police until the king demonstrates when they arrive.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: When Jessica defends Morty by stabbing the soldier sent through the portal, she ends up getting taken back to the other side of the portal and is frozen in a strange goo, allowing her to remain unaffected by time over the centuries while still aware of her surroundings. While watching everything pass her by doesn't exactly make her crazy, it makes her question her very existence; enough to break things off with Morty. It does make her believe she is a time god, though.
• Grew a Spine: When Mr. Nimbus shows up at the Smiths' house, Jerry decides to call out Rick for being afraid of him, eschewing his normal cowardice. Mr. Nimbus takes notice of this.
• Heroic Second Wind: After the ship is all but destroyed making it through the portal, Morty believes there is no hope and he and Rick are about to die. So he uses what little time he has left to confess to Jessica. However, Jessica states she would be interested in going on a date with him, causing Morty to do whatever he could to survive the crash.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Rick, as usual, is this. It turns out that while Mr. Nimbus is mad about Rick and Morty inadvertently violating the treaty that they had established, all he wants to do is negotiate over dinner. While Rick has a point that the dinner will be a disaster because Mr. Nimbus has no manners whatsoever and bosses around Morty to get more wine, Morty retorts accurately that Rick seems to create a lot of his archnemeses and he could just talk to the guy. Morty ends up being proven right; Mr. Nimbus is more than willing to reach a compromise because he considers "Richard" one of his friends and understands that Morty didn't know about the established treaty. Rick shoots himself in the foot during the negotiations when it's revealed that the dinner was a distraction for Summer to steal the shell that controls Mr. Nimbus's powers. After Mr. Nimbus wins their fight and gets Rick arrested, he points out that Rick always goes for the shallow and selfish approach.  
• Hope Spot: Just as Mr. Nimbus and Rick are about to finally reconcile, Summer returns with the shell Rick sent her to retrieve. Mr. Nimbus sees this as a betrayal and their rivalry begins anew.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: 60-year-old Japhet is very jacked and beats up Morty with ease. However, by the time Morty returns, Japhet is 90, extremely frail, and incapable of stopping Morty from pushing him, dying soon after from the fall.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: In the Action Prologue, Rick is severely wounded and begs Morty to leave him behind. But Morty is too much of a hero to let that happen.
• Jerkass Has a Point: As much of an annoying jerk he is, Mr. Nimbus's "Reason You Suck" Speech he makes to Rick while preparing to leave the Smith residence about how miserable and pathetic Rick has become isn't without merit.
• Karmic Death: The Hoovy descendant prince is murdered by his Evil Mentor as soon as he murders the king and takes over his kingdom.
• The Kingslayer: The Hoovy descendant prince, who murders the king, and the wizard who murders him as soon as he dons the crown.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After being an Ungrateful Bastard to Morty despite him saving their lives, Rick gets his just deserts from Mr. Nimbus because Summer, whom he ironically said to Morty's face that he trusts more to avoid any screw-ups, shows up with the super shell just before Rick and Nimbus could make peace, enraging the latter, and accidentally makes Nimbus stronger by blowing on the shell, which leads to an Extreme Mêlée Revenge and Rick getting taken by brainwashed police. Then again, Rick forgot to tell Summer what to do with it.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • While Jessica—a supporting character in the series whose primary purpose in the story has been Morty's Love Interest and motivation for some of his actions—was frozen in time and questioning her existence, one question she asked herself was if she's just "an object of someone else's story".
  • When Mister Nimbus asks what Diane would think if she was around to see Rick now, Rick snaps and shouts "Don't fucking establish canonical backstory with me, you Red Lobster motherfucker!"
• Leitmotif: Ominously For the Damaged Coda plays as Jessica describes the insights she acquired from being in stasis, which is usually Evil Morty's leitmotif.
• Let's Just Be Friends: Due to being imprisoned in another dimension for centuries on account of Morty and going slightly mad from the revelation after being frozen in time during all of it, Jessica decides to break things off with him.
• Literal Metaphor: Mr. Nimbus controls the police, not in the way that the police are all corrupt and working for him, but in the very literal sense that he has mind control powers that seemingly only work on police.
• Magic Versus Science: Jerry assumes this is why Mr. Nimbus is Rick's nemesis, as Rick has shown disdain for magic in the past. Evidently, this is indeed the case, as Mr. Nimbus is powered by a magic conch shell and appears to have magical control over the ocean and police members.
• Maybe Ever After: Though Morty and Jessica remain friends, she does tell Morty that there will be more times in the future, implying that they will eventually get together.
• Missing White Woman Syndrome: The police apparently asked Jerry what the color of his skin was, with the implication being if he hadn't said white, they probably wouldn't even have bothered to show up as quickly as they did, if at all.
• Mood Whiplash: A heartwarming conversation between Hoovy and Morty - where the former gives the latter romantic advice - is immediately followed by Hoovy returning to his home to find his wife dead and his son resentful. Things don't get better from there.
• Motive Rant: The treacherous mentor of Hoovy's descendant attempts this, calmly explaining his worldview and what he had gone through because of the great lie that the descendants perpetrated. He doesn't go far before Morty shows up and guns him down then proceeds to level the entire castle.
  Hoovian Sorcerer: I was born in the pits that made these stones. I lost my years building a temple to a lie. So I made lies my power. And what is power but a lie we... [the portal reopens and an extremely annoyed and heavily armed Morty emerges] Oh shit, he's real! He's real! I was wrong, so wrong! God is real-! [Morty shoots him]
• Mundane Utility: Rick uses a portal to a world that runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside just to age wine by hundreds of years in a matter of hours.
• Narnia Time: Both Rick and Morty name-drop this when using the portal. However, the concept itself ^note inconsistent use of time differences between dimensions for the sake of the plot is averted. While time flows faster in the Hoovy dimension, it does so consistently.
• Never Say That Again: Morty mistakes Japhet for Hoovy, who yells at Morty not to say his name, then attacks him.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Summer bursting in with the conch shell that is the source of Nimbus's powers infuriates him and goads him into giving Rick a savage beating and having the police haul Rick off to jail.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Hoovy notices Morty struggling to lift a heavy crate of wine and offers to help him carry it, walking through the portal and giving him romantic advice. This leads to him being away from home for decades. When he returns, his wife had long since died and his son kills him for being abandoned and swears revenge on Morty.
  • The Hoovian who alerts the others when Morty returns after Japhet's death is crushed by the siege equipment aiming to kill Morty.
  • Jessica, despite not being an Action Girl, tries to defend Morty when she sees an advanced alien creature from the portal attacking him. This just gets her abducted, pulled through the portal herself, and frozen in time for centuries, where she Goes Somewhat Mad from the Revelation.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Rick is on the receiving end of one of these after a furious Nimbus discovers he was playing for time so Summer could steal the conch shell that is the source of Nimbus's power.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Morty gets mad that Rick has so many archnemeses. He asks why the guy can't just avoid a fight. During the Cycle of Revenge with Hoovy, Morty realizes he's going down the same path.
• Not-So-Final Confession: In the Action Prologue, Morty thinks his time has come as the shuttle tumbles towards Earth so he calls Jessica to confess his love. Her positive reaction makes him change his mind about dying and he manages to land the shuttle safely.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Most of Summer's adventure under the ocean to retrieve Nimbus's magic shell is this. We're very briefly shown footage of her fighting and slaying some of Nimbus's underlings when Rick watches it on his phone, but that's the only glimpse we get. But Rick seems to have been right to call her reliable because she is able to pull off an adventure into the Marianas Trench to get the source of Mister Nimbus's power by herself.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In the opening, Rick wakes up to find that he and Morty aren't dead after their recent adventure. He then freaks out when told that Morty landed in the ocean, unknowingly invoking the wrath of Mr. Nimbus because they broke a then-unexplained treaty between the two adults.
  • The Evil Mentor of Hoovy's descendant has this reaction when he realizes that "[Morty]'s real", after dismissing his existence. Morty shuts him up with a headshot.
  • Morty when he realizes that Hoovy's descendants are dead serious about killing him.
  • Rick when, after seemingly burying the hatchet with Nimbus, Summer bursts in with the conch shell and an outraged Numbus starts pummeling him.
  Summer: Grandpa Rick, I got the shell!
  Rick: Oh shit! Nimbus, listen-!
  Mr. Nimbus: You son of a bitch! Betrayal!
• Out with a Bang: One of the items on the Sex Contract with Nimbus is he isn't held liable for "Death by Orgasm".
• Parental Abandonment: Hoovy's child kills his father after his return because of this. Whereas the father was only gone for a few minutes in Morty's world, it was years after the child's mother died.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Jerry and Beth happily describing their newly "sex-positive" lifestyle, including watching porn together, elicits several of these reactions from Morty and Summer. In an inversion, Rick walks in to hear the tail end of it and has a similar response.
• Patricide: Happens twice in the other dimension. First Hoovy gets killed by his son who was avenging his abandoned mother. Later on, another descendant stabs his father after laying a Kiss of Death on his forehead.
• Police Are Useless: Jerry calls the police when Mr. Nimbus arrives, but Nimbus is able to control them to leave him alone (and to fight and rape each other). Jerry had to see with his own eyes to confirm the king's claim.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Rick tells Summer to head to Mr. Nimbus' home to retrieve a special shell, but he never tells her what to do with it. She blows on it while Mr. Nimbus attacks Rick, making him even stronger, and when Rick tells her that she's supposed to destroy it, she lampshades this, asking how she was supposed to know that.
  • Throughout the episode, Beth and Jerry discussed their invitation to a threesome with Mr Nimbus. They assume to each other that they want this to happen and support one another. In The Stinger, they finally confess that they want no part of it. Unfortunately, they are seduced by Nimbus before they can leave.
• Portal Cut: One of the Hoovians is killed when Morty returns and he is standing in the place where the portal is summoned.
• The Power of Hate: The shift of the Hoovians from being peaceful farmers to becoming a nation of warriors was fueled by a single purpose: take revenge on Morty. Lampshaded by Cyborg Hoovy:
  "I have often wondered who would we be without you, Morty? Are we anything beyond our hatred?"
• Precision F-Strike: Jessica, a girl who hardly ever swears, tells a guys hitting on her to "fuck off".
• Properly Paranoid: The more times Morty travels through the portal to retrieve more wine, the more the Hoovians become this, making every precaution to prepare for his return. Unfortunately, this becomes a Cassandra Truth for some, leading to infighting and war that weaken them before Morty comes back. They eventually manage to wipe out their race in a far-off future after accidentally abducting Jessica.
• Rage Breaking Point: After returning through the portal and finding an entire castle prepared to kill him, Morty snaps. He dives back through the portal, arms up, then returns to slaughter them all just to get his wine. He does this again later after Jessica is pulled to the other side.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Both Rick and Mr. Nimbus deliver one to each other towards the end, calling their opponent an embarrassment.
  • Morty gives one to the Hoovians, calling them out for literally basing their entire culture around their hatred of him—even if, yes, he did inadvertently kill Hoovy and his descendants the first time around, the downright absurd levels of animosity that they went through just for a single boy who occasionally emerges from a portal was just too far.
• Remember the New Guy?: Parodied. Despite Rick introducing Mr. Nimbus as his archnemesis, none of the Smiths have heard of him until today, which Morty, Beth, and Jerry lampshade.
  • In the Inside the Episode video, the writers explain that they've actually intended to introduce Mr. Nimbus for a while, and they did figure out how he figures in to the timeline of Rick's backstory, etc. - the problem is that the original episode that was going to introduce him in a prior season was ultimately scrapped, so they had to rework his introduction. Nonetheless, he truly isn't a one-shot character they came up with only as they were writing this specific episode.
• The Reveal: Somewhat. We finally get confirmation that the name of Rick's ex-wife and Beth's mom—first mentioned in Rick's fake memory in "The Rickshank Redemption—is indeed "Diane". She's also apparently dead since Nimbus asks what she would think if she were alive to see him now.
• Running Gag: Beth and Jerry watch porn (together) as a way to be more sex-positive in their relationship. They feel like letting everyone know that whenever they have the chance.
• Ship Sinking: Morty and Jessica.
• Shout-Out:
  • The episode's title is a reference to the film My Dinner with Andre.
  • In one of the giant death crystals shown in the Cold Opening, Rick and Morty are seen dressed like the character Blade. Rick even lampshades the reference.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia is referenced when explaining the Narnia Time of the other universe.
  • The Chair Reveal scene showing that Hoovy's son kept the corpse of his mother in his house is lifted straight from Psycho.
  • Hoovy's descendants building a violent Medieval Fantasy civilization as a defence against Morty's return, then falling into disbelief, infighting, and treason parodies A Song of Ice and Fire.
  • Their technological advancement after Morty leaves a futuristic glove behind and they reverse-engineer it references the development of Skynet from one of the T-800's arms at the end of The Terminator.
  • Adam's Training from Hell and being selected to Set Right What Once Went Wrong recalls After the End sci-fi films like Edge of Tomorrow and 12 Monkeys.
  • Jessica's pink Crystal Prison resembles Princess Zelda's at the climax of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
  • The robot Hoovies taking over after the extinction of the original Hoovies mirrors the end of I, Robot and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
  • Jessica being frozen while civilization collapses resembles Fry's fate in the pilot of Futurama.
• Shrouded in Myth: Because of the long periods of time between visits, Morty's existence fades into myth while Hoovy's realm is still in the medieval phase.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Subverted. The Sorcerer starts giving his Motive Rant after killing the Prince, but he drops it and says he was wrong the whole time as soon as Morty reappears. Morty kills him anyway.
• The Singularity: After reverse-engineering the technology in the gauntlet Morty left behind, the aliens first become a high-tech society before completely converting all their people into cybernetic beings.
• Skewed Priorities: When Mr. Nimbus name-drops Rick's ex-wife, asking what Diane would think of the state he's in if she were alive today, Rick is pissed off—not because Nimbus mentioned his ex-wife, or that she's dead, but because he's "establishing canonical backstory" with Rick.
• Snap Back: This episode doesn't explain how Rick reconciled with his family after the way the season 4 finale ended, or where Space Beth is.
• The Stinger: Jerry and Beth stand outside Mr. Nimbus's door when they arrive for the threesome, but both admit that they were really agreeing to it because they thought the other really wanted it. Just as they're about to head home, Nimbus opens the door and asks if they're getting cold feet; they sheepishly deny it, but when he drops his toga, they like what they see and promptly rush into the room.
• Stopped Caring: Rick basically says something like this regarding his rivalry with Mr. Nimbus when the two have a spat.
• Suicide Pill: Rick casually reveals that he installed suicide pills into everyone's teeth in response to Beth and Jerry talking about their sex life.
• A Threesome Is Hot: Beth and Jerry, thanks to taking advice from Dr. Wong, have become quite "sex-positive" lately, and Mr. Nimbus notices and offers them a threesome with him. They both seem tentatively interested, but in The Stinger, right as they're outside his door, they each admit that they were only agreeing to it for each other's sakes. They nearly leave, but when Nimbus opens the door and unveils his "package", both of them are more than happy to go through with it after all.
• Time Is Dangerous: Much like "Rattlestar Ricklactica", this episode explores the dangerous implications of temporal mechanics, only instead of time travel it addresses Narnia Time dilation between two worlds (which is lampshaded as such). Due to an inversion of the trope where someone from the parallel world returns to find that time has drastically shifted forward, a cycle of revenge sets off that elevates Morty from a boy into a diabolical figure of ruin. At one point they send another person over through the portal opened from their side, still tethered to his native timeline. When Jessica damages this tether, his body rapidly fluctuates through his entire lifetime before he gets sucked back in, taking Jessica with him. She gets put into a conscious stasis where she gets to observe their world evolve over the eons into The Singularity.
• Time-Passes Montage: The flashback montage of Jessica frozen in place and seeing time passing by in front of her eyes.
• Teleporter Accident: A Hoovian rebel soldier is dismembered when he stands on the portal as it is opened by Morty.
• Took a Level in Badass: To show how adept Morty has become, he navigates a burning ship back to Earth through a portal and even scores a date with Jessica that motivates him to land safely. When he gets fed up with Hoovy's children firing on him because he wants a damn bottle of wine to share with Jessica, he suits up with Rick's gear and proceeds to mow them down and blow up their castle before grabbing the wine.
• Training from Hell: The Chosen One descendant of Hoovy's receives hard training from his mother because she is convinced You Are Not Ready.
• Transforming Mecha: There is one chasing Morty and Jessica in the cyberspace future of Hoovy's dimension.
• Treacherous Advisor: In the Hoovy dimension, one of the descendants gets trained by a mentor who then kills his pupil after the latter usurps the throne.
• Turned Against Their Masters: At some point, Hoovy's world develops Artificial Intelligence, which leads to a Robot War where the robots win. The robots still retain the grudge against Morty anyway, but likely because now they believe it is the only purpose that they have left.
• Unexplained Recovery: Morty is left with a black eye from the opening adventure but it's gone in the evening when Jessica comes over.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Despite Morty saving Rick's life, Rick is far more frustrated that Morty landed in the ocean because it was forbidden for Rick to be in it by Mr. Nimbus and so constantly demeans Morty for that the entire episode.
• The Unreveal: As Rick scolds Mr. Nimbus about establishing character backstory regarding Rick's dead ex-wife Diane, the scene abruptly cuts to Morty magically chained up in Hoovy's world.
• Unknown Rival:
  • Unbeknownst to Hoovy, his son Japhet develops a murderous hatred of him because he wrongly thinks he abandoned his mother when she was pregnant with him.
  • Hoovy's descendants build a civilization out of hating Morty in between his visits to get more wine.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Hoovy helping Morty carry the wine past the portal leads to his wife thinking that he abandoned her, and his child (who hadn't been born yet when he disappeared) resenting him. As a result, the land at the other side of the portal turns into a dystopian land hell-bent on taking down the "Dark Child". However, the true fault lies with Morty, who closed the portal behind them after Hoovy stepped through, thus unlinking the time between the two locations and causing the discrepancy.
  • Morty boofs it again when he drops some of Rick's supertech in order to grab more wine, allowing the Hoovians to reverse engineer it, developing into a super-advanced society capable of neutralizing Rick's cybernetic implants.
• Villain of Another Story: Morty, since every time he steps into the time portal after the first he causes harm to one of Hoovy's descendants, leading them to treat him as some prophecized child that can appear at any time that only means them harm.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Morty and Jessica don't get a full Relationship Upgrade into becoming boyfriend and girlfriend, but Jessica is clearly quite interested in Morty for most of the episode, and attacks the alien that came through the portal when she sees it trying to hurt him.
• Visual Pun: The Hoovians are anthropomorphic dogs, referencing the Common Knowledge that one dog year is seven human years.
• We Used to Be Friends: Nimbus casually drops dialog at dinner about "Diane" (Rick's wife) and tells Jerry and Beth in The Stinger that "Oh, he knows" with an eyebrow waggle, all of which suggests that he and Rick used to be close and fell out.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Space Beth never appears, and it's never explained what happened to her.
• White Void Room: Morty's final venture into the portal has him appear in a white void with an older version of himself tending to a tree in the otherwise empty space. It's just a ruse by the robots of the Hoovyverse to get him to let his guard down.
• Worf Had the Flu: Rick is a very competent fighter with his gadgets and cybernetic upgrades, but Morty used up all of his weapons when destroying the castle of Hoovy's descendants and Rick later gets disarmed of his cybernetic upgrades by the A.I. that the descendants end up creating by reverse engineering a piece of tech Morty left behind. As a result, Rick cannot defeat them without help from Mr. Nimbus, nor can he defend himself when an enraged Mr. Nimbus beats him up for trying to betray him.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Morty finally scores a date with Jessica and it is all but stated that she's into him, but events conspire throughout the episode keeping him from getting some quality alone time with her, and by the end of the episode she decides it would be for the best if they just stayed friends. She does at least leave the door open for another date down the road.
  • Right when Rick and Nimbus were about to patch things up, Summer shows up with Nimbus' shell that she was tasked with stealing, causing Nimbus to beat the crap out of Rick upon learning he was about to be betrayed.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Rick drops wine in a time portal to rapidly speed up the aging process. He and Morty acknowledge how similar it is to Narnia. This becomes a huge problem for Morty because each trip for wine causes even bigger problems for the other side thanks to his direct involvement, intentional or otherwise.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: As Jerry puts it, how is Rick scared of an ocean-man that is part-fish and a Large Ham? He points out that Rick had sex with a planet and went toe-to-toe with a God.

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