Recap / Rick And Morty S 7 E 4 Thats Amorte

Once again, Morty tries to learn Rick's secrets and deals with his honesty screwing up everythingO's.

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Tropes:

• An Aesop: As Rick points out to Morty, he caused the episode's problems by telling his family, ruining spaghetti night for them, and then later the people of the Spaghetti Planet, who then try to profit off their Bizarre Alien Biology. If he had just kept quiet, neither of those problems would have occurred. Sometimes it's okay to lie because Ignorance Is Bliss.
  Morty: None of this would have happened if you had been honest about the spaghetti.
  Rick: Morty, I lied to protect you, you told the truth to hurt me. I can't travel the galaxy with you if every time we come near a fucked up system, you leap into its wires and electrocute yourself.
• The Atoner: Once MortyO's becomes a thing, Morty is disgusted about suicidal people being victims to it, except it turns out the brand is supported by former serial killers who happily accepted suicide to pay back to society (and see the Irony of providing meat) and even have holographic videos of said serial killers explaining so in each can. Except, this only makes the ethical lines for Morty even muddier.
• Awful Truth: Morty finds out that Rick's spaghetti is harvested from the corpses of humans from another planet where their biology turns their intestines and internal organs into noodles and bolognese in the event of a suicide. These aliens have no concept of spaghetti until Morty introduces it to them.
• Bait-and-Switch: You expect the cold open to be a dream or a simulation simply because the Smith-Sanchez family are seldom happy together. Turns out it's all real, but the thing that's making them all happy at the same time is where things get freaky.
• Being Good Sucks: When the origins of the spaghetti is revealed, this conversation follows:
  Jerry: First octopus, now this. H-Have we thought about just giving up and joining the fascist half of the country?
  Beth, Summer, and Morty: No!
  Jerry: Just saying, they get to do more!
• Better to Die than Be Killed: A variation. The two escaped clones believe they are better off killing each other than committing suicide and becoming food for other people.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: Spaghetti Planet's television programming has become all reality shows, "but not the good kind," according to Rick. "It's like their whole planet was bought by Discovery."
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The people from the other planet look and act much like humans, except their bodies turn into the most delicious spaghetti in the universe if they commit suicide. This only happens if they commit suicide, not if they die by any other means, and the more they suffered in life, the better the resulting spaghetti tastes.
• Blatant Lies: Morty promises not to drag it out any further if Rick tells him the names of the spaghetti people they ate, only to choose to go to their funeral out of guilt, despite only using that as a threat to get Rick to tell him their names, thus ruining spaghetti night for them.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The President of 41 Kepler B actively retools her civilization to be as depressing as possible so that people will be more inclined to kill themselves, while at the same time depriving them of any resources or assistance that would keep them tethered to life. Her reason for doing so was solely to prop up their economy. Also worth noting is that 41 Kepler B becomes over-industrialized once this plan goes into motion.
• Clone Angst: Part of the attempt to make suicidal clones for the spaghetti as they try to escape only to kill each other at the end to keep from turning into spaghetti.
• Clones Are People, Too: One of Morty's suggestions on how to produce spaghetti that does not come from people killing themselves is about using clones instead. Cue two clones making an escape upon discovering their fate where they decide to kill each other, thus defeating the purpose because mutual murder isn't technically a suicide.
• Connected All Along: Downplayed. Looking closely at Amber’s phone during Fred Bunk’s memory montage reveals that the deceased man at the funeral Morty attends at the start of the episode was her ex-husband. Their kids can also be seen in the front pews.
• Content Warnings: This episode features one at the very start of the episode supplied by the network (even before their logo), as it deals with topics and conversations of suicide, which can be quite disturbing and stomach-churning. As the show usually doesn't do viewer discretion warnings, you know you're in for it. As is standard practice in the UK, the broadcast on E4 had the episode's credits interrupted by a continuity announcer reassuring anyone affected to seek help with their help pack online.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Once again, Morty's Black-and-White Morality in a very gray universe leads to severe consequences he needs Rick to fix after previously insisting on doing the "right" thing. He even promises to stop doubting his grandfather on these issues at the end of the episode.
  • Summer says "Pass the Parmesian", remembering to use the current world's pronunciation of the word.
• Crazy-Prepared: Rick has a "euthanasia chamber" at 41 Kepler B for some reason that he doesn't want to tell Morty much.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Morty's horror at where Rick's delicious spaghetti came from and his attempts to find less cruel alternatives sounds like a social commentary on the meat industry. The behind the episode video confirms this.
  • After Rick reveals where he got the spaghetti from, Morty insists on attending the funeral of the guy he ate and reveals to the public what happens to them when they kill themselves.
  • Even after the Smiths learn where the spaghetti comes from, they still want to keep eating it and blame Morty for ruining their satisfaction.
  • Morty is called to the Spaghetti Planet who decides to profit from the newfound discovery. They reassure Morty that the people he has been eating have fully consented to it which makes him feel a bit better and he tries to serve the ethical spaghetti to his family. This sounds like someone trying to ease their guilt about eating meat by relying on Ethical farming.
  • Unfortunately, in order to meet product demand, the whole Spaghetti Planet is remodeled to be as depressing to its citizens as possible in order to evoke mass suicides, like a horrifying version of Factory Farming.
  • Rick and Morty try to find new alternatives to the spaghetti that do not involve people, such as quickly-grown clones, only to find out those clones do not want to be raised just to be eaten.
  • Rick eventually develops a clone that is barely human enough to produce spaghetti. Unfortunately, this new spaghetti tastes terrible and it's still industrialized murder, so two different groups of protestors show up to stop them, one group who hates the taste and wants the original back, and another who did not like how the torso clones are being treated.
  • Outside of the meat industry analogues, the two aliens harassing a woman by repeatedly telling her to kill herself resembles online bullying.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: Rick takes over all TV sets on 41 Kepler B to broadcast Fred's final moments.
• Dramatic Drop: Morty drops his plate in shock when he sees Rick in the garage with the corpse.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: After the value of the suicide spaghetti is discovered, the planet's leaders decide to capitalize on it by mass-marketing it throughout the cosmos to neighboring planets. It starts going overboard as they begin encouraging their citizens to commit suicide by making their society as oppressive and depressing as possible so they can produce spaghetti in greater quantities, including changing the colour of their sun to "Institutional Gray", something Rick lampshades the difficulty of.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite everything they did to get spaghetti, everyone is disgusted the moment they see Rick tear open Fred's chest for it after they witness his whole life's story before he dies. Even Rick — who has no qualms about it at all — seems to lose his enthusiasm for the spaghetti as a whole in the aftermath of the whole conflict, preferring to pivot to whatever the "Salisbury steak" he harvests, despite the source somehow being even less ethical.
• Expendable Clone: Morty proposes this approach to make the suicide spaghetti more ethical. It doesn't work, first because the clones are aware enough not to want to become food, and the ones that only know to kill themselves taste terrible.
• Fictional Social Network: When Fred's life is flashing before his eyes, we see him using a social network called FriendBook to reconnect with Amber.
• Flatline: At the end, Fred dies by suicide on a flatline sound.
• Gaia's Lament: Both Played Straight and Invoked by 41-Kepler-b's government to make its citizen's lives all the more hellish and further encourage them to commit suicide.
• Gilligan Cut: Used twice:
  • First when Rick forces Morty to promise he won't get overwhelmed with more guilt and demand to go to the funeral of the spaghetti "donor" if Rick hands over the deceased's name.
  • Second when Rick and Morty's brainstorming takes a turn towards cloning, and Rick muses they could try creating a class of "not people" raised to want to be turned into spaghetti.
• Headbutt of Love: The two escaped clones perform this intimate gesture before killing each other.
• Here We Go Again!: In The Stinger, a race of vacuum people are disgusted to learn they get their bags from the decayed remnants of plant people.
• Hope Spot: Rick and Morty find a way to make lots of spaghetti without forcing lots of people to commit suicide, by cloning barely sentient meat sack torsos that only have the ability to kill themselves. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out, as the factory is immediately bombed by two different protesting groups: one, a group of natives who still find the killing of headless torsos unethical, and secondly a group of aliens that think the flavor of the new spaghetti is inferior to the old way of making it.
• Human Aliens: The people of the other planet are indistinguishable from humans, except for the spaghetti thing. Their planet looks very much like modern-day Earth.
• Hypocrite:
  • Rick angrily tells Morty that he told the truth to hurt Rick (as opposed to Rick lying to protect him), shortly after missing several spaghetti notes and then smugly returning to ruin one of Morty’s once he found a can of Morty-O’s.
  • After watching Fred's life story, Rick himself can't actually bring himself to enjoy the spaghetti anymore, admitting there was an issue with the source of their food.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Morty's reaction when he finds out that the secret to Rick's famous spaghetti is a dead corpse from a planet where everyone who dies through suicide turns into spaghetti.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: Although Beth acknowledges Morty technically did the right thing by telling them where the spaghetti came from, she and the other family members really wish they didn't find out its origin so they could've continued eating it guilt-free. But now that they know, the guilt they feel prevents them from enjoying it. Rick weaponizes this at the end by having everyone see that the people the spaghetti came from had deep and meaningful lives rather than simply being products, making everyone too guilt-ridden to even consider eating it anymore (except Rick himself).
• Idiot Ball: Rick, the smartest brain in the universe, brings a corpse into his garage but keeps the door unlocked for Morty to accidentally walk in on and see him refilling the spaghetti tray with human remains.
• Impossibly Delicious Food: The spaghetti that suicidal people produce from their corpses is so delicious that even the knowledge they're made from the guts of suicidal people's corpses isn't enough to stop the Smiths from wanting to eat it, and it becomes coveted across the galaxy by many alien races. When spaghetti production is halted, they invade the planet to try and force the people to kill themselves to make more spaghetti.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Morty tries to blame Rick for not being honest about the spaghetti, but Rick points out he lied to protect Morty from the Awful Truth while Morty told the truth to hurt him. He reacts the same way and freaks out every time they travel the galaxy to planets with crazy systems and he keeps getting into trouble trying to fix them, which is why he lied in the first place, knowing how he would react and all the trouble it would cause. Morty admits his point and promises to stop if he fixes the mess his altruism made for spaghetti world.
• Karma Houdini: Rick never faces criticism or retribution for the fact he was stealing and desecrating corpses. Unlike other examples in the series, Rick didn't adapt to an already broken system, people on that planet had no idea about the phenomenon and were not used to eating corpses, something they actually are shocked by at first. He created the system by going behind everyone's back just for his own convenience, but the episode blames Morty for pointing it out.
• Kick the Dog: Rick is once again right about how Morty's attempted altruism has made a mess of things but his visible delight in revealing that fact pushes him into this trope.
• Lack of Empathy: Rick has absolutely no problems harvesting and eating the spaghetti despite knowing exactly where it came from.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Rick tries to use his memory wiper on a surgeon who caught him eating spaghetti from a dead body. However, he accidentally zaps himself with it, much to his embarrassment after Morty reverses it. Morty, left holding the bag, resorts to the more mundane tactic of threatening the surgeon with a gun to keep him quiet.
• Loophole Abuse: The spaghettification of the intestines is due to the aliens' bodies' reaction with a particular chemical released by the brain, but only in great amounts ("suicidal amounts", to quote Rick). The production of said substance seems to be based on whether or not it would fall under the legal definition of suicide more than anything: a murder-suicide pact doesn't work since they are technically killed by another person even if under your request and consent, but medically-assisted suicide and Rick helping Fred pass away does count, despite it also being a case of another person obliging your request to cause your death. It seems that the aliens' brains have a small lawyer overseeing the release of the chemical.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Rick weaponizes this by turning a dying Fred's full life story into a video so everyone watching it can't ever think about eating spaghetti out of extreme guilt. For Rick's part, though, he couldn't care any less.
• Never My Fault:
  • Even after the My God, What Have I Done? moment, Morty still tries to blame Rick for Spaghetti Planet trying to profit off their own biology when he was the one who revealed to them how their biology can be marketed to other species as food. Rick quickly points out that he lied to protect Morty while Morty told the truth to hurt him.
  • The leader of the Spaghetti planet blames Morty for screwing everything up, even though she is the one who decided to market the spaghetti, shift her planet's economy to rely on selling the spaghetti, and retool her entire society around encouraging people to commit suicide.
  • Rick insists that it's not his fault for lying, desecrating corpses and exploiting suicide, and blames Morty for simply uncovering his ruse and ruining a good thing. The episode even rewards him by letting him do it again but with the family's blessing.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The president of Spaghetti Planet is loosely based on Vice President Kamala Harris.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Morty tries to pay his respects to the guy his family ate spaghetti from, which culminates in the alien planet using his face to promote their spaghetti brand across the universe.
• People Farms: Morty's initial suggestion for more "ethical" spaghetti is mass-cloning people and indoctrinating them into wanting to kill themselves and turn into spaghetti. It works about as well as one might expect, so then Morty tries to find how loose the definition of "people" could be to mass-produce spaghetti, with Rick eventually arriving at a headless, boneless torso with only rudimentary motor functions, so it's just barely alive, and a single arm which it can kill itself with. It works, but apparently the spaghetti it produces is suboptimal in flavour (the torso bodies appear to contain some sort of dark, greenish grime, which can be seen briefly when they are cut open during the factory scene).
• Pet the Dog: While Rick's secret spaghetti may have a harrowing origin, ultimately he just wanted to share some delicious food with his family. Rick also tries coming up with ethical alternatives at Morty's suggestion which only goes wrong because of factors beyond his control.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Apparently the recipe for the best spaghetti in the universe involves people committing suicide. The more suffering they endured in their life the better the spaghetti they produce.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Want to know the secret of Rick's famous spaghetti that he has been serving to his family for weeks? It is actually the remains of people whose entrails turn into noodles and Bolognese sauce when they commit suicide.
• Silence Is Golden: Once again, a life story laid out over several minutes of screen time is told via imagery only.
• Skewed Priorities: The entire episode deals with the fact that people from a different planet have their insides turn into the best spaghetti in the universe if they commit suicide. Morty has a very bad time trying to juggle the very flimsy ethical lines that come from revealing the fact to said people on said planet, who end up turning themselves into a source of spaghetti being sold in "every Space Wal-Mart." The rest of the Smiths are even worse at it, unsure whether to be disgusted at the Awful Truth or angry at Morty for ruining Spaghetti Friday by revealing said truth.
• The Stinger: On a vacuum cleaner planet, a deceased plant man sitting in an assisted suicide chair just like Rick's has a vacuum cleaner bag extracted from his stomach by a Vacuum-version of Rick and all the vacuum cleaners watching the broadcast vomit dust everywhere upon learning where vacuum cleaner bags come from.
• Suicide Attack: Two fractions of protesters with bombs strapped to their bodies invade the manufactory. It doesn't end well for them.
• Suicide Dare: Played for Laughs, when Morty's botched attempt to replace the spaghetti from people who took suicide with living torsos is quickly met with criticism by other customers, the planet's living population is subjected by angry customers trying to force them into suicide to keep the food coming.
• Suicide Pact: The two escaped clones specifically kill each other to avoid becoming spaghetti, as the process only works when the death is self-inflicted.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: When the public learns of Fred's fulfilling life, they start vomiting on-screen.
• We Are Not Going Through That Again: At the end, the Smiths replace their spaghetti with Salisbury steak, which also turns out to be extraordinarily delicious. When Rick asks the others if they want to know where this food came from, saying that it also has a very unpleasant origin, the others unanimously agree that they don't want to know.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Morty and Rick try to answer that question when Morty tries to find an alternative to spaghetti that does not involve people killing themselves. Rick accepts the challenge and engineers a series of clones with varying degrees of sentience to make one self-aware enough to kill itself but not so aware as to dread such a fate. Finally they settle on human torsos with an arm to stab themselves with, which is apparently just human enough to produce the intended biological reaction. This still draws the ire of protesters, one group that protests the use of the torsos as a food source, and another that protests the quality of the torsos as a food source. Two groups of suicide bombers simultaneously attack the factory and kill each other in the process.
• You Do Not Want To Know: The second dinner Rick has made, the family makes it clear they don't want to know where he got it, and he hints that it is even worse than the suicide spaghetti.

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