Recap / Rick And Morty S 6 E 2 Rick A Mort Well Lived

Hello, hello, hello, my name is Morty
I'm a 14-year-old boy in a Video Game

Original air date: 9/11/2022

Rick ventures to rescue Morty from within the Roy game while Summer deals with terrorists Die Hard style.

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Tropes:

• Alien Blood: The alien terrorists that have taken over Blips & Chitz have blue blood, as Summer sees when she falls on and completely crushes one of them. She's rather mortified to (accidentally) discover that the blood actually tastes good.
• An Alien Named "Bob": The alien terrorists all have mundane names like "Frank".
• Ambiguous Ending: All of the Morty NPCs except "Marta", who went through similar stages in her relationship with "Roy" as Morty has with Rick, leave the game and return to Morty's brain. After waking up, Morty states that he "trusts Rick implicitly" and just goes along with whatever he says, indicating that the parts of him that were skeptical about Rick remained behind in the game as Marta to live out the rest of her life (as part of her "one condition" to Rick in exchange for getting everyone else out). Rick falsely claims to Summer that he got "every last bit" of Morty out of the machine, indicating that he might be planning to just leave Morty as-is, but then paid for the game itself to be placed in storage and powered remotely, hinting that Rick might be able to come back in the future to recover those parts of him. Whether or not he will is left open-ended (although the dialogue implies that he did more out of affection for Marta specifically and to allow her and her descendants to live the rest of their lives, particularly since the condition was to let them free, and while not out of character from Rick to ignore Morty's will it would make little sense in this particular situation, since wanting the skeptical parts to come back would require him to care enough to respect their wishes).
• Ambiguous Situation: Morty is divided into all the NPCs of Roy within a certain timeframe, who live and die, seemingly taking those pieces of Morty with them. The NPCs are capable of reproducing, but it's unclear if their children also contain pieces of Morty, though they do share his voice. The entire world's population of Morties also go to all-out war which kills millions, with no way of telling just how much of him is killed and what is left.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Marta calls out her father's attempt at Yiddish as a Second Language because, as a piece of Morty who was raised nondenominational Christian, he doesn't know any real Yiddish, instead just saying gibberish.
• Call-Back: This is the first time since Season 2's "Mortynight Run" that Rick and Morty revisit Rick's favorite arcade, Blips & Chitz, and this time, Summer joins them. Morty once again plays the game "Roy: A Life Well Lived", but his playthrough goes awry when the arcade is attacked by terrorists.
• Commonality Connection: Marta manages to convince many people of the truth by pointing out they all share the interests of a teenage boy like video games and masturbating.
• Didn't Think This Through: In The Stinger, the brother of the Big Bad tries to replicate the "McClane wears a racist sign" scene from Die Hard with a Vengeance, but the sign is the overly broad one from the Bowdlerized network TV version of the movie^note And also what was actually written on the sign Bruce Willis wore filming the scene, as the producers were afraid he'd be attacked if he really wore a racial slur in public ("I hate everyone") and it's being done outside an arctic outpost, so no one wants to brave the cold just to yell at some weirdo.
• "Die Hard" on an X: Parodied. The hostage situation in the arcade is patterned after the one in Die Hard, which Rick lampshades when he tells Summer to "do a Die Hard"... and then it turns out that the leader of the terrorists is from a culture that practically treats Die Hard like a religion and who is replicating it intentionally.
• Don't Explain the Joke: One of Summer's attempts to do a Bond One-Liner:
  Uh, your associate Frank is definitely not doing a "Die Hard." You might even say he's doing a "Die Easy." (Beat) Because I killed him, and it wasn't difficult.
• Dwindling Party: One mooks remarks how Summer is killing them off one by one.
• Eaten Alive: The fate of the Big Bad lead terrorist, courtesy of one of his mooks that Summer defeated earlier.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The terrorist in the stinger, re-creating Die Hard with a Vengeance, notes he misses his brother. This of course mirrors the brother connection between Hans and Simon Gruber, though Simon noted he hated his brother. ("There's a difference, you know, between not liking one's brother and not caring when some dumb Irish flat-foot drops him out of a window.")
• Fantasy Counterpart Appliance: The alien terrorists use a small creature as a walkie talkie, squeezing it to talk.
• Finger in a Barrel: Roy dissolves a standoff with Marta by extending his pointer finger into the barrel of her gun.
• Flatline: Marta's dad dies in his hospital bed on a flatline sound.
• Genre Savvy: Zig-zagged. The B-plot has the terrorist deliberately invoking Die Hard and Summer likewise pulling a "Die Hard" on an X. Summer hasn't actually seen the movie, however, so the terrorist attempting to predict her movements fails miserably and he realizes this makes her the "ultimate McClane". He then has to instruct his mooks not to be genre savvy in trying to kill her. Summer then gets genre savvy herself by reading the terrorist's book on the Die Hard phenomenon, specifically the part about having a gun strapped to her back, which she plays dumb about as a fake-out.
• A Glitch in the Matrix:
  • The episode opens with a group of teenagers hanging out by a convenience store. When they talk, they all speak with Morty's voice, even using his catchphrases and verbal tics. Then an NPC dressed like Morty comes up to try and proselytize them to a new religion where Roy preaches that everyone is really his grandson.
  • Rick's plan to save Morty involves wrangling the entire Morty NPC population into starships and deliberately flying into space, beyond the natural borders of the game. Once they hit that hard limit, the entire game will reboot, punting them both out in the process.
• Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: When Marta wants Rick to say he loves Morty, he hesitates for a few moments which another spectator takes as proof that Rick wouldn't mean it even if he said it then.
• Hostage Situation: The terrorist leader finds Morty and Rick hooked up to the "Roy" game, and based on the brief footage he sees on the monitor, surmises that "Miss Die Hard" is the boy's sister. He then uses them (particularly Morty) to get Summer to surrender, but unfortunately for him, Summer's had time to get caught up on the plot of Die Hard and still has an ace in the hole.
• Inexplicable Cultural Ties: The terrorist leader explains to Summer that Die Hard is a story recreated independently by various civilizations throughout the universe, each one having its own name for it. The coincidence even goes so far as to include the sequels.
• In Medias Res: The episode starts with Morty already inside the Roy game, but it's pretty clear from the get-go that something is wrong when every character in the game has Morty's voice. Roy then soon appears with Rick's voice. Roy/Rick then explains to the Morty-voiced NPCs what happened: he, Morty, and Summer were at Blips & Chitz and Morty was playing "Roy: A Life Well Lived" when terrorists attacked the arcade and the power went out; when it came back and the game was rebooted, Morty's consciousness was divided between all the NPCs, so Rick came into the game as Roy to try to get him out.
• Insistent Terminology: Rick repeatedly emphasizes in the Roy game that what he's explaining is not a religion, because God doesn't exist, but an objective truth.
• Irony: During the scene where Marta's father berates her for not being Jewish enough, there is a carved ham on the table. Ham is not kosher. This fits, given Morty was raised nondenominational Christian and that's the joke.
• Left the Background Music On: At one point we hear the triumphant "Ode to Joy" which turns out to be played by one the mooks on his stereo.
• Living Crashpad: During a fall Summer lands on an enemy who gets reduced to Ludicrous Gibs.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Summer landing on top of one of the aliens when they both fall one story causes him to completely explode like a water balloon and splatter his blood everywhere.
• Nay-Theist: Once again Rick denounces the very existence of God despite having literally met The Devil and killed an actual Zeus-like god.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Rick's callous willingness to leave behind 8% of Morty's mind turns Marta against him and sparks a war where more pieces of Morty's mind die.
• Not Helping Your Case: Rick as Roy is clearly barely making any progress in convincing all the Morty NPCs to leave the game with him, as he's just bluntly repeating the fact over and over. His callous pragmatism also makes them less receptive to leaving even if convinced of what he's saying.
• Not His Sled: Implied at the end when Rick refers to the terrorist leader's goon overcoming his past trauma over having accidentally eaten a child, reverting to his old man-eating ways, and devouring the terrorist leader before flying off as "classic Tower Man." Apparently, while the universe's various versions of the Die Hard myth agree on the broad details of McClane's exploits, they differ profoundly in how it ends.
• Off the Rails: In-universe, the Roy game does this through a combination of the damage caused by the terrorists and Rick hijacking the protagonist with his memories fully intact. He's able to single-handedly push Roy's world into the space age in order to break the game, and even after Roy is considered "dead", the game keeps running, with Marta taking over as the main character.
• Ominous Adversarial Amusement: As in Die Hard, Summer starts laughing for no reason during her confrontation with the leader of the terrorists. She then reveals that she did it because it happened in the original which she is now familiar with.
• On One Condition: Marta pulls this trope twice on Rick before she can allow him to send the 5 billion NPCs back to Morty: The first time, she wanted him to say he loves Morty, which didn't work. The second time, which did, was that she wanted to stay behind and live her life to the end, and Rick would collect her portion of Morty's subconscious later.
• Our Presidents Are Different: President Leland is initially presented as possibly being a President Jerkass, but reveals himself to be both a President Personable and a President Iron to Marta, as he has some reservations as to the way Rick seems to value the NPCs of the game world.
• Pet the Dog: Rick pays to have the Roy machine powered and preserved so Marta can live out her life within it, with the implication that Rick can retrieve it later to reintegrate the bits of Morty left behind.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Near the beginning of the episode, Rick tells Summer to "do a Die Hard". She has no idea what he's talking about, since she's 17 and has never seen the movie.
• Prefers the Illusion: Rick's dismissal of Morty is compounded by the fact that he's even more dismissive of Morty spread among NPCs. This convinces some of them to remain in the game, fully knowing it's fake, because at least it's a full life where they're not treated like a disposable butler by a callous jerkass.
• Pretty Little Headshots: The terrorist leader delivers a Pre-Mortem One-Liner to a hostage about losing his head that gets ruined when the laser gun he uses just pierces a neat little hole. He frustratingly asks his henchmen if he fired a gun or a surgical tool.
• Race Against the Clock: Rick, as Roy, has to get all 5 billion NPCs (each of which is a fraction of Morty's consciousness) out of the game so they can return to Morty's brain before the game ends, which will kill him. Naturally, Rick and Morty will both also die if their bodies in the real world are killed, so Rick tasks Summer with protecting them and taking down the terrorists.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: President Leland, the POTUS that Rick and Marta meet halfway through the episode, when Rick has 92% of the NPCs on his side. While initially presented as a bigoted obstacle to Rick's movement, he later reveals to Marta that while he represents the 8% that don't want to go with Rick, he does believe in Rick's message, but has some issues with how Rick values all of them, and by extension, his grandson.
• Serious Business: Evidently, several alien civilizations throughout the universe all know what Die Hard is and enjoy it enough to form a religion around it.
• Shout-Out:
  • The episode is of course one big one to Die Hard and the stinger is to With a Vengeance.
  • The episode's title is one to...Rick and Morty itself, as it's a play on the full title of the game: Roy: A Life Well Lived.
  • The aliens holding the arcade hostage resemble Jar Jar Binks.
  • Rick states that 8% of the Snyder Cut was Batman dreaming.
  • The end of the episode is a reference to the Secret Government Warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• So Proud of You: Towards the end, Roy admits to Marta that he is proud of Morty.
• Spotting the Thread: Marta points out an absence of details within the backstories of her family by pointing out they're supposed to be Jewish but barely know anything about Judaism because they're really a teenage boy raised in non-denominational Christianity.
• Stealth Pun: The Secret Government Warehouse ending scene lifted from Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Marta being left behind. She represents most of the character development Morty has undergone to become more independent of Rick. In other words the lost (character) "arc".
• The Stinger: The brother of the episode's now-deceased Big Bad and another alien attempt to plot another "Die Hard" on a snowy mountain base, as a spoof on the third film in the series, Die Hard with a Vengeance.
• Unwanted False Faith: Rick has a hard time convincing the other fragments of Morty that what he's doing is not a religion. It doesn't help that the fragments of Morty on Rick's side treat it like a religion.
• Voices Are Mental: One of the signs of Morty within the NPCs is that they all speak with Morty's voice, though none of them seem to realize it.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Summer's storyline is one to Die Hard, which is lampshaded and name-dropped by pretty much everyone.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Rick points out that he needs to be undisturbed while trying to save Morty from Roy as every second outside is a month within the game.

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