Recap / Rick And Morty S 5 E 3 A Rickconvenient Mort

Don't get too attached. It ends in tears.

Original air date: 7/4/2021

Morty learns that it may be too late to reduce and reuse after he falls in love with an environmental superhero. Meanwhile, Rick and Summer go on an apocalypse bar crawl.

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Tropes:

• All Your Powers Combined: Planetina gets summoned by the wearers of the four rings of Elemental Powers.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Planetina confesses her love to Morty under tears but he breaks up with her nonetheless.
• Animal Wrongs Group: Planetia is shown in a montage with Morty going from typical environment-saving heroics to eco-terrorism, with Morty getting increasingly alarmed.
• Apocalypse Anarchy: The three worlds about to be destroyed all have massive orgies going on, though there's also some mass-suicide action on at least one of them that Summer politely declines to join.
• Apocalypse How: Rick and Summer visit three different planets that are about to be destroyed by different means, in order to go on no-strings-attached benders with the citizens of each:
  • The first planet, Morglutz, is destroyed by its sun going supernova. Rick ends up bringing along Daphne, one of his hookups here, to the next two as well.
  • The second planet, Slartivart, gets sucked into a black hole.
  • The third one, Ferkus IX, was going to be destroyed by a giant meteor impact, but Summer is so fed up with Rick's fling with Daphne at this point that she destroys the meteor and averts the apocalypse (to the chagrin of all the citizens who now have to go to work tomorrow and, as we see in The Stinger, have to live with the consequences of their actions).
• Bait-and-Switch: When Rick takes Summer to visit three different apocalypses, he makes her promise not to get attached to anyone and just keep it at casual hookups, and she states this will be an easy promise to keep, seemingly setting it up for her to defy this later. Instead, Rick is the one who gets attached when he brings Daphne, an alien from the first planet they visit, along to the next two, only to discover later that she was just using him to survive.
• Beyond Redemption: Planetina, and by extension the episode comes to the conclusion that humanity is this trope.
• Beware the Superman: Planetina quickly reminds Morty, and the viewers, that she is an extremely powerful superhero when she murders hundreds of miners and decimates the surrounding area. Part of the rising conflict is Morty beginning to realize that she's going off the deep end and escalating her "heroics".
• Big Damn Heroes: At the site of the wildfire, the news reporter assures his audience that nothing will stop this fire. Cue Planetina arriving and putting out the fire with her ice powers.
• Bilingual Bonus: In the French dub, Diesel Wiesel is called "Fouine Diesel". "Fouine" is french for "Wiesel". It also has a close pronunciation to "Vin".
• Blatant Lies: When Summer calls out Rick on bringing Daphne along on their party crawl, Rick tries to claim she's not Morgluztion, with Summer immediately pointing that Daphne's the only blue alien on Slartivart.
• Both Sides Have a Point: When Morty is explaining why Planetina's methods are too beyond the pale for him to continue seeing her, he cites how she killed a bunch of people in her crusade, and she responds that he killed the Tina-teers. She is correct that she and Morty aren't so different in how they both are quick to resort to extreme violence against their foes; however, Morty is also correct when he points out that the people he killed were much bigger Asshole Victims than hers. The Tina-teers were basically using Planetina as a slave and were going to sell her like one, and Eddie outright tried to kill or at least seriously maim Morty, which is legitimate self-defense. By contrast, while the people Planetina killed were jerks who were causing harm to the planet and didn't care, they also weren't actively malicious or trying to hurt or kill anyone. Furthermore, there were apparently 300 casualties, according to Morty, and it's quite likely that not all of them were as big of jerks and, ultimately, were just people trying to survive.
• Break the Cutie: Morty has it really hard at the end where Planetina has a breakdown and curses at him before he breaks down sobbing.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Morty finally chews out his parents (primarily his mom) for how he's constantly made fun of and looked down at.
  Morty: My whole life, I've never fit in anywhere! Everything I have to say is always met with an eyeroll as if the act of hearing what I have to say is some exhausting chore! Nobody in this family thinks I can say or do anything right! I've been all over the universe, met hundreds of people, and Planetina's the only one I've ever met that makes me feel I belong, and you just kicked her out of our house! I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THIS!
• Character Development: Beth and Jerry show more concern with their children getting involved in their grandfather's schemes or going on dangerous escapades. Too bad it doesn't stick too long for Jerry when he is nonplused by the fact that Morty killed some guys.
• Coat Over the Shoulder: Morty tosses his jacket over his shoulder in order to look cool when meeting Planetina at the wildfire scene.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Literally no one (as far as we know) on Ferkus IX asked to be saved from the incoming asteroid, and the only reason why Summer did it is to prove to Rick that Daphne didn't care about him at all. The inhabitants drive them off their planet because now they have to live with the consequences of their debauchery.
• Crossing the Burnt Bridge: In The Stinger, we see that the planet not getting destroyed, thanks to Summer, caused an alien who had gay sex with his dad left a very awkward situation between the two of them and, more importantly, caused the marriage between his parents to become strained.
• Cry into Chest: Morty cries into Beth's chest after his breakup with Planetina.
• Deadly Delivery: Morty dresses up as a pizza delivery guy to get into the meeting with the other Tina-teers. It's less a believable disguise than it is part of a bit, Morty "delivering" Eddie's head before he attacks the others.
• Decapitation Presentation: Morty lobs Eddie's mostly-charred skull onto the conference table where the other Tina-teers were planning to sell Planetina. The wielder of the Water ring is able to recognize the skull from the cheekbones alone.
• Deconstruction: The episode shows one of the biggest flaws of the original Captain Planet and the Planeteers show: not everyone who's causing destruction to the environment in real life is a Card-Carrying Villain polluting For the Evulz, many are just regular people who need to put food on their plate without having any better, greener income options available to them. However, Planetina still operates on the Black-and-White Morality of the Captain Planet setting, which is incompatible in a more morally complex setting, turning her methods into Black-and-White Insanity instead.
• Derailing Love Interests: After Planetina spends almost the entire episode as an earnest Nice Girl who uses her powers to stop disasters that harm the planet and help people, the montage of her and Morty near the end after they leave the Smith home shows her gradually taking crazier and more violent actions, up to and including killing people, practically out of nowhere, so that Morty is forced to dump her and end the episode single once again, maintaining Status Quo Is God.
• Devoured by the Horde: The shady buyer gets killed and eaten by his freed seal pups.
• Door Focus: The camera lingers of the door after Morty does his Door Slam of Rage for a second time but this time he doesn't repeat it.
• Door Slam of Rage: Morty repeatedly slams the front door after Beth refuses to pay for his travel to the "wildfire of the year". Later after his Calling the Old Man Out moment, he only does it once as he goes off with Planetina, signaling to Beth that things are serious this time.
• Downer Ending: Morty is forced to cut his losses with Planetina after she murdered dozens of coal miners in her ecoterrorist campaign.
• Dumbass Has a Point: When Morty is angry with Beth for not allowing Planetina to stay with them, he furiously lampshades his Butt-Monkey status, ranting about how no one ever takes what he has to say seriously and act like just listening to him is painful, and Planetina is the first person he's met who made him feel like he fits in. Beth noticeably looks surprised and guilty.
• Elevator Failure: When Planetina lets the miners fall to their death.
• Everyone Has Standards: Morty has killed, but all of his victims have come after him or got in his way. This is what terrifies him about Planetina, who will kill innocent people if they continue destroying the Earth.
• Exploding Fish Tanks: The aquarium with the puppy seals inside gets destroyed during Morty's rampage.
• Fingore: Morty bites the ring finger off of Eddie, the wielder of the Fire ring, when the latter is about to murder or at least seriously maim him. He then turns the ring on Eddie while it's still in his teeth.
• Foreshadowing: Eddie mentions that they don't show Planetina the news because it makes her upset. One of Planetina's texts also mentions how Xing doesn't let her watch the news. Once Morty frees her from the Tina-teers, we see why: when she sees the full extent of how bad mankind's ecological devastation of the planet really is, she goes into a rage and kills hundreds of comparatively innocent coal miners who were just doing their jobs.
• For the Evulz: Diesel Weasel is a parody of Captain Planet villains. In his only scene, he creates a cloud of acid rain for no reason.
• Full Moon Silhouette: Planetina and Morty kiss romantically in the sky in front of a huge full moon.
• Gag Censor: Daphne's all too naughty elbow titties are pixellated.
• Gibberish of Love: Morty struggles with words during his first encounter with Planetina.
• Graceful Loser: While Rick is indeed furious with Summer for forcibly ending his fling with Daphne (who was just using him to survive anyway), he concedes that stopping an apocalypse just to break up his shitty relationship was a very "Rick" thing of her to do, and acknowledges that he would have done the same thing if their positions were reversed.
• G-Rated Sex: When Morty and Planetina spend the night together, it's accompanied by a cartoony montage and a song called "Flowers". The imagery is way too specific to be coincidence; such as cloud-Planetina "blowing" a windmill-Morty.
• Green Aesop: Parodied in this episode, as Planetina starts off with normal aesops until she's driven to murderous extremes by the shortsightedness of the human race.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Implied. The Tina-teers are Corrupted Character Copies of the Planeteers, and have grown up from heroic teenagers fighting to protect the environment into jaded, amoral adults who use Planetina to line their pockets, while also lacking a Heart member, implying that their absence made them lose their way. Similarly, Planetina, the Captain Planet Expy, goes from a well-meaning superhero to a ruthless eco-terrorist, possibly also due to the lack of Heart power.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Eddie is killed by his own Fire ring. More broadly speaking, most of the Tina-teers are killed by their own rings being used against them as Morty kills and takes their rings from them, except for the wielder of the Air ring who gets caught in the crossfire when security tries to gun Morty down.
• Humans Are Bastards: One of the most damning examples of this trope from the show so far. Humanity is actively contributing to crimes against nature (poaching, coal mining, forest fires, etc), voting for propositions that allow for these things to occur/for congressmen to enact harmful policies, and barely, if at all, give one iota of a shit. They superficially praise Planetina as some celebrity and ignore her messages. Oh, and her closest friends use her as a slave and were planning to sell her off for more profit. It's no wonder she's finally had enough of us.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Jerry and Beth after Morty angrily leaves the house to go meet up with Planetina against Beth's wishes, and Summer goes off on an adventure with Rick against Jerry's wishes.
  Jerry: *sighs* I'll get the wine.
  Beth: Thank you.
• It Is Beyond Saving: The aesop of the episode is that Earth is this. Humans are too greedy and short-sighted to ever give up their defilement of the planet.
• Inevitably Broken Rule: The rule that Rick and Summer agree upon with their apocalypse partying is to not get too attached and try to be a hero, his tendency to do so being why Rick wanted Summer to come instead of Morty. Ironically, it's Rick who breaks this rule by hooking up long-term with an alien from the first planet they visit.
• Ironic Echo: Planetina's catchphrase leans to the fourth wall, referring to the viewers that they are "the solution to Earth's pollution"; working on clean ethics to help the environment. Near the end, her catchphrase takes a dark turn: the solution to Earth's pollution is to directly deal with the problem at its source, for better or worse.
• Karmic Death:
  • The Tina-teers being brought down by their own powers, Eddie in particular.
  • The Arab being eaten by the seal pups he intended to serve for dinner.
• Love at First Sight: Morty falls for Planetina the instant he sees her.
• Love Cannot Overcome: Morty genuinely does love Planetina and is just as heartbroken about breaking up with her as she is about being dumped, but no matter how much he cares about her, he simply can't condone her extreme methods of murdering people to try to protect the planet.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: When Planetina sees just how badly humans are fucking up the planet and how little they give a shit, she becomes increasingly more extreme in her views until she eventually decides the death of humans is the best solution to the environmental problems.
• Mama Bear: Beth repeatedly makes it clear that she doesn't like Morty dating an older girl, and refuses to let Planetina stay with them. At the end, when Morty is crushed about having to break up with her, Beth comes to his room and comforts him.
• Molotov Cocktail: Planetina uses one to burn down the home of a senator, with him still inside.
• Mugging the Monster: Eddie really doesn't know what he's getting into when he threatens Rick's grandson. It ends with him burnt alive and a room full of dead people.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Planetina's eventual conclusion.
  Planetina: There's only one solution for Earth pollution!
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Morty rescues Planetina from being sold to a shady Arab, but without the Tina-teers monitoring her moves, she goes crazy with worldwide news of environmental destruction and excuses murder as an answer to save the planet, which ends with Morty breaking up with her.
  • Summer saves Ferkus IX out of frustration with dealing with Rick getting manipulated by Daphne, but this earns her the ire of the planet's citizens because they will all have to go to work tomorrow knowing they made a gigantic orgy (with some of them doing so between family members).
• Obviously Evil: Every villain in the first half of the episode: a weasel who causes acid rain, a forest fire, an ambiguously ethnic arab who wants to purchase/enslave Planetina... Planetina in the second half...
• Or My Name Isn't...: Diesel Weasel gives us:
  "My acid rain will destroy all things green and natural or my name isn't Diesel Weasel."
• Pinky Swear: Summer and Rick do this to swear on Rick's rules for the apocalypse bar crawl.
• Pop-Up Texting: Used to show the text messages Morty and Planetina exchange.
• Precision F-Strike: Planetina responds to Morty's breakup with her with a tearful "Fuck you" before leaving.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Morty hits his when Eddie gloats to him that he and the other Tina-teers are planning to sell Planetina like a slave to someone else and tries to maim Morty's face with fire simply for being her boyfriend. He successfully frees himself, steals Eddie's Fire ring, kills him, then wipes out the rest of the Tina-teers along with her would-be buyer and the security guards.
  • Planetina's breaking point landed after dealing with a couple of careless, greedy coal miners who mock her for her supposed "privileges" and her "people" not getting enough votes to prevent these crimes.
• Rain of Something Unusual: Diesel Weasel makes it rain acid in the opening.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Jerry and Beth, though the latter moreso than the former. They show clear concern over what their children are getting into and try to put a stop to it (keyword here being "try"). Beth, in particular, is clearly uncomfortable with Morty, a 14-year-old, going out with Planetina, whose age is never specified but clearly looks like an adult, and immediately objects to Morty wanting her to move in with them.
• Rejected Apology: Morty offers one final apology to Planetina for breaking up with her. If Planetina's Precision F-Strike was any indication, she wasn't having it.
• Short-Distance Phone Call: During Morty and Planetina's breakup scene, she is revealed to be texting him from outside the window.
• Shout-Out:
  • Of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Planetina is based on Captain Planet, the Tina-teers are based on the Planeteers (minus a Ma-Ti Expy) and Diesel Weasel is based on Verminous Skumm.
  • The episode's title is a parody of the Oscar winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
  • Rick initially describes Firkus IX's doom as being Deep Impacted by an asteroid.
  • One of the doomed planets is Slartivart, a shoutout to Slartibartfast, a planet designer from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• Sickly Green Glow: The acid rain in the opening scene.
• Skewed Priorities: In the Cold Opening, when Rick and Morty are hit with acid rain, Rick's first instinct is to tell Morty to protect the custom shirts they made.
• Sleep Cute: Morty and Planetina are seen cuddling with each other... right when Planetina is summoned by the Tina-teers.
• Snipe Hunt: During their planet crawl, Summer asks two suitors to look for her (non-existing) purse in order to sneak away.
• Sole Survivor: Daphne becomes this when she leaves her planet with Rick and Summer shortly before it's destroyed when its host star explodes, killing everyone else there. She decides to exploit this until Summer gets involved near the end.
• Status Quo Is God: Morty is once again left single and Did Not Get the Girl. Compared to past episodes, this case is more genuinely heartbreaking.
• The Stinger: The alien father and son of the race that Summer prevented from being killed go in for work and say that due to their incest party, their mother is distancing herself from them.
• Stylistic Suck: The not-at-all-a-rip-off-the-Captain-Planet-whatsit that Morty shows his family on his phone is covered in scan lines like it was copied from a VHS from the 90s.
• Sweeping the Table: Rick wipes Jerry's egg plate off the breakfast table in order to make room for his planetary map.
• Take That!: People who cause environmental crimes (poaching, indifferent congressmen, coal miners, etc.) and people who use the pretense of caring about the planet to make a profit and the people who buy into it don't get off easy.
• A Taste Of His Own Medicine: One of the reasons Rick brings Summer along with his Apocalypse Party-Bender is because unlike Morty, Summer doesn't care enough to try and ruin it by trying to save people. When Rick violates the rule not to get attached by bringing Daphne with him as a long-term booty-call, Summer ruins the fun by saving Ferkus IX from an incoming meteor. While Rick is pissed with her, he begrudgingly respects her because that was the kind of thing he would have done if the roles were reversed.
  Rick: ...I have to admit it was pretty Rick of you to have averted an apocalypse in a tantrum of cynicism just to destroy one dumb relationship.
  Summer: Still, sorry.
  Rick: Eh, I would have done the same for you.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Morty reaches the 200-miles-distant wildfire by the same time flying Planetina does. Given how tightly Planetina was being reigned in by the Planeteers, they wouldn't unleash her until they (traveling at Mortyish speeds) were on the scene.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Morty kills the Tina-teers to save Planetina from a life of slavery and even seemingly disposes of the rings so no one else can control her. It turns out the Tina-teers, and the rings by extension, were the only thing keeping her in check. Without the tight leash they kept her on, she's eventually driven to homicidal rage by the actions of humanity.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: In the opening scene, defeated Diesel Weasel exits through a manhole.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The rings that the Tina-teers use to summon Planetina were taken by Morty to free her from their control. However, we never know if Morty still has them or destroyed them to give her true freedom, though it's likely the former seeing as Morty is seen using them as part of his Bruiser style in Multi Versus though without summoning Planetina herself.
• With My Hands Tied: Morty holds his own against Eddie while tied up.
• Women Are Wiser: Implied by Beth when comparing the maturity level of 17-year-old girls to 26-year-old men.
• Your Head A-Splode: Morty uses the Air ring to kill the Tina-teer wielding the Dirt ring by shoving his hand into her mouth and exploding her head with the air pressure.

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