Original air date: 9/5/2021
Things get dicey when Morty spills some portal fluid on his hand and Rick decides to replace him with two crows following a dispute.
Tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: When Nick has Morty pinned down and is trying to strangle him, Morty uses the nearby train to cut off his left hand (the one that has the portal on it) and tosses it into Nick's leg-portal to destroy him. Rick grows the hand back by the end of the episode.
- Ax-Crazy: Once Morty breaks Nick out of the asylum, it takes Nick almost no time at all to start committing violence and murder against innocent people just for the sake of getting more portal fluid and being able to do what he wants, and once Morty refuses to go along with it and tries to ditch him, Nick promptly catches up with him and attempts to strangle him to death.
- Bait-and-Switch Comparison: When Rick notices the fluid in his portal gun is "topped off" with Mountain Dew, he yells at Morty that he should know how toxic that stuff is...and he got it in his portal fluid.
- Berate and Switch: When Jerry finds Morty and Nick trashing the garage:Jerry: Son, have you fallen in with a weird stranger and are now trashing your grandpa's place? — Beat — 'Cause I'll help!
- Bittersweet Ending: Rick and Morty have each shown tremendous growth, but they end up separating.
- Blatant Lies: Rick tries to claim that the obvious bit of having two crows as his sidekicks decided by a roulette wheel that has outcomes like "sentient shit" is just a joke the crow aliens don't get. They immediately call him on his crap, because they're the ones that just taught him about empathy and compassion, so his sense of humor certainly wouldn't be beyond them.
- Break-Up/Make-Up Scenario: Subverted for this episode. Rick and Morty do "break up" in terms of ditching each other for other partners at the beginning (Rick gets two crows, and Morty gets Nick), but while they do at least patch up their anger with each other by the end, Rick refuses Morty's offer to get back together, recognizing how unhealthy it was, especially since Rick still has the two crows while Morty no longer has Nick. They don't properly make up until next episode.
- Brick Joke: The two crows decide to save Rick using the two lines he showed Morty, squawking "Bird Quaa... ludes".
- Butt-Monkey: When Jerry helps Nick and Morty destroy Rick's garage, he breaks a magical crystal that turns him into sentient water and they abandon him. Rick is predictably unfeeling in this scenario, so it's left ambiguous how he changes back into a human, since the next episode shows him being back to normal.
- Call-Back: After dumping the two crows on the bird planet, Rick briefly turns on the radio to play "(It's a) Rick Dance".
- Chekhov's Skill: The feat of Rick's crows performing the rope-head-chop trick in the garage comes back later when they do the same thing on the Crow mothership.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Nick gets sucked into the portal in his thigh, essentially imploding inwards on himself, after Morty amputates his hand and drops it in the portal.
- Continuity Nod:
- Rick's wheel of "Better Things Than Morty" has Kyle 2.0 as one of its options, likely referring to the same Kyle Mr. Nimbus mentioned in "Mort Dinner Rick Andre".
- After Morty amputates his own hand to defeat Nick, Rick offers him a variety of different hands he could give him to replace it, and one of the options is to "make it big, like that one time."
- Flying Cutlery Spaceship: The Crows spaceship and landing pods are designed this way.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The options listed in the wheel of "Better Things Than Morty" include: two crows, sentient shit, Gene (the neighbour) with donkey brains, garbage goober, bag of meat, half a Paul Giamatti, Kyle 2.0, and Jerry (spin again).
- Funny Background Event: As Rick and Morty argue in the garage, a birds eye shot from the top of the garage shows Garbage Goober in the upper left corner, belly full and with a satisfied look on his face.
- Harmless Liquefaction: Jerry decides to join Morty and Nick in trashing Rick's garage. Unfortunately, the first thing Jerry breaks is an alien crystal that promptly melts him into a puddle with his face protruding from it; fortunately, Jerry is otherwise unharmed by this transformation and is still capable of moving and speaking — enough to beg to be restored to normal, at any rate. By the next episode, he's back to normal.
- Heal It With Fire: After cutting off his hand, Morty uses his jetpack engine to cauterize the stump. The result is not pretty.
- Hidden Depths: The Garbage Goober has a medical degree (from Harvard!).
- Higher-Tech Species: The crow aliens vastly outclass Rick in terms of technology, capturing him in an inescapable tractor beam when he dumps two crows on their planet and actually manage to teach him empathy.
- Impact Silhouette: Apparently, Rick rammed a dam with his space cruiser on an alien planet which left an imprint of the ship's silhouette.
- Inescapable Net: Morty traps a guard at the asylum in a bedsheet.
- Jet Pack: Nick uses jetpacks to reach Morty after the latter crashes the car.
- Kill It with Water: A lava monster threatens a village after its gem "mysteriously vanished". Luckily, Morty drowns it in water and rushes off to fix the next of Rick's mistakes.
- Kinda Busy Here: Morty calls Rick on the phone when the latter is restained and about to be killed by the Crows.
- Losing Horns: A "womp womp" version plays when Rick and the crows arrive at the garage to find it in shambles after Morty and Nick trashed it.
- Made of Iron: Nick, by reaching through his portal, causes Morty to crash the car through a barrier, which throws him right through the windshield, and then Morty and the car both fall off a cliff at least a couple of stories and crash on the ground below. The car is completely totaled and flattened, but Morty survives with nothing more than some scrapes and bruises.
- Morality Pet: The crow aliens manage to force Rick to learn compassion and empathy from Two Crows, because apparently crows are highly emotionally intelligent.
- Multi-Part Episode: The first of the two-part Season finale, alongside "Rickmurai Jack".
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Defied and played straight by Morty in the cold open: he drained the portal fluid because he was secretly fixing problems caused by Rick's callousness.
- Played even more straight later on after Morty breaks Nick out of the psychiatric hospital in the belief that they are kindred spirits who were both wronged and used by Rick before being tossed aside (complete with each having a mini-portal on a part of their bodies that connect to each other). It doesn't take long for Morty to realize that Nick was in the psych ward for a very good reason, as he quickly goes off the deep end and starts murdering a ton of people in an effort to get more portal juice, and in the climax, even reveals that he lied about what happened between him and Rick, and he actually just tried to steal Rick's portal gun when they met at the bar. He then tries to murder Morty, who has to cut off his own hand to defeat him.
- On the Rebound: A non-romantic version for both Rick and Morty after their "breakup" with each other.
- Morty's rebound, Nick, even has a similar name to Rick, and they meet thanks to both having portals on different parts of their bodies created by Rick's portal fluid. Morty eventually realizes that Nick is far more Ax-Crazy and psychotic than Rick ever was, and is forced to kill him.
- Rick directly chooses his rebound, the two crows, by spinning a wheel. The sentient crow species clearly see that Rick's new sidekicks are rebounds, and even he himself seems to start to realize it, but after the crows choose to side with him and save him from their brethren, it renews his commitment to their partnership; it takes until the next episode for them to directly tell him he's rebounding and break up with him.
- Pet the Dog: Several right in a row from Rick near the end:
- As he's celebrating the fact that the crows chose to rescue him and their partnership is still intact, he sees a dejected, one-handed Morty walking home after falling out with and killing Nick, and immediately gets out of the ship, shows concern for him, and re-grows his hand.
- Right after this, Rick decides not to reunite with Morty when the latter expresses a desire to do so—not because of still being mad at him, but because he recognizes what a toxic influence he was, and wants to continue adventuring with the crows instead so they can help him learn to be better and more empathetic.
- And right after that, Rick gives Morty his own portal gun, arguably his most important (and certainly most-sought-after) technology he has.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: After Morty has cut off his own portal-hand to escape from Nick, we get this:Nick: What the fuck did you just do?!
Morty: Cut you out of my life. *Throws his amputated hand into Nick's portal, causing him to implode on himself* - Reality-Breaking Paradox: Since Morty can't completely escape Nick as long as their portals are connected, he decides to cut off his portal hand with the wheels of a moving train before dropping it into Nick's portal leg, creating a paradox that causes the fused portal to collapse into itself and suck Nick into oblivion.
- Replacement Goldfish: Rick warned Morty that he could replace him at any point, particularly if he broke one of the "sidekick rules", or messed up too many times. When Morty finally calls his bluff, Rick spins a wheel to choose a suitable replacement for Morty, and ends up landing on "two crows". Morty, in turn, replaces Rick with a guy from a psych ward named Nick.
- Season Finale: Technically this episode and "Rickmurai Jack" both constitute as the Season 5 finale, since they're marketed as being part of a 1-hour special.
- Series Fauxnale: Parodied and Played for Laughs. The episode apparently wraps up Rick and Morty's Character Arcs in a deliberately anti-climactic, overly neat, and sappy manner, and has Rick finally move on with his life, ends with a typical Award-Bait Song and Behind The Scenes segment treating it like Rick and Morty's final break up...and is followed by a promo reminding the audience that this is only the first part of an hour-long season finale.note
- Shout-Out:
- The episode's title is a reference to the 2008 rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Similar to that movie, Rick and Morty have a "break up" at the beginning of the episode, and, having realized how toxic their relationship was, Rick rejects Morty's desire to reunite at the end, rather like how Sarah eventually wants to get back together with Peter in the movie only for him to reject her.
- At the start of the episode, Morty kills a lava monster created after Rick stole its gem.
- The guards at the asylum like to lick the faces of the restrained patients.
- When Rick fires the Crows, he states that if he wanted another bleeding heart, he would inject Re-Animator fluid into an actual bleeding heart.
- Birds starting to attack humans in the streets.
- To The Dark Crystal:
- The Crow Aliens are modeled after the Skeksis.
- Before killing one of the crows, Rick flat-out says the interior is "Dark Crystal meets Hot Topic".
- The large egg in the spaceship surrounded by the crows brings to mind the Dark Crystal from that series being surrounded by the Skeksis'. They also wanted to harness the power of the crystal for their own benefit (Immortality versus creating more crow hybrids).
- Soft Glass: Morty goes headfirst through a car windshield... then off a cliff, and all he's left with are a few bruises.
- The Stinger: Garbage Goober's Wet Blanket Wife tries and almost succeeds in persuading him to give up his job of eating garbage for Rick, but after Summer calls for him and tells him they have more trash waiting, he can't help himself and leaves to go eat it.Harold's (Goober's) Wife: You are a doctor for god's sake!
- Take That!: See Bait-and-Switch Comparison above.
- Telefrag: In the opening scene, Morty splits a character in half when his portal opens up in his place.
- Took a Level in Badass: As the season has been demonstrating, Morty's grown to the point where he's nearly unstoppable. He stops by to clean up a dozen messes Rick left behind in his adventures, then cuts off his own hand to take out a psycho.
- Track Trouble: Double Subverted. During Morty's confrontation with Nick, which takes place by train tracks, it briefly looks like Nick is going to get hit by the train as he menaces Morty, but entirely avoids it, and doesn't try to throw Morty in front of it, either, and instead starts strangling him next to the tracks. Morty ends up using the train to cut his own portal hand off.
- Tractor Beam: Rick is pulled down a planet by a powerful tractor beam.
- Truth in Television: Nick states that the guards like to beat the residents of the mental asylum up once a week, and lick the faces of the restrained patients. While this is meant to be Black Comedy, abuse of patients in mental asylums, be it physical, mental or sexual, is a real problem.
- Uplifted Animal: The crow aliens being sapient humanoids is independent from them being aliens, as they acquired their form and intelligence from a giant glowing artifact resembling a hatched egg.
- Walking the Earth: Rick turns down Morty's request to reunite and become partners again, having realized what a bad influence he's been, and decides to leave Earth to journey across the universe with the two crows in order to become more compassionate and empathetic.
- Wardens Are Evil: Apparently, the guards at the asylum mistreat and lick the faces of the restrained patients.
- Weaponized Teleportation: How Morty and Nick fight their opponents.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: After defeating and killing Nick, Morty uses his jetpack to cauterize his wound and flies off in it. When he shows up next, Rick sees him returning home on foot, with the jetpack nowhere to be seen.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Rick gets called out multiple times. By Morty, by the crows, by the Crows, by Nick, even though Nick's an asshole...
