Rick And Morty / Tropes E to L

Rick and Morty Trope Examples
A - D | E - L | M - P | Q - Z

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: "Get Schwifty" appears on Summer's MP3 player in the Point & Click web game before Season 2 premiered.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The short that the show was based on, "Doc and Mharti," had the title characters having totally different names, was animated much more sloppily, and was a parody of Back to the Future. The short also crossed the line much farther and was much more vulgar than its current incarnation. It also featured a fairly explicit display of "Mharti" giving "Doc" oral sex.
  • The first real episode has Rick spend the first several minutes in an incoherent stupor, constantly repeating Morty's name and stumbling around. While Rick continues to be a substance abuser, he's much more of a Functional Addict for the rest of the show.
  • The first episode has no post-credits stinger.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: In "Get Schwifty", the Cromulons destroy planets with a plasma ray when they fail their music contest or refuse to participate.
• Easily Forgiven: In "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat", when Morty follows a Death Crystal to find the path in life that results in him dying old by Jessica's side, he ends up single-handedly fighting the military until voluntarily being arrested and using the crystal to talk his way into freedom. News shows are ready to condemn him for what he did, but after hearing him stumble his way to say something for himself, immediately announce that they forgive him and "the reset button has been pressed."
• E = MC Hammer:
  • Parodied; an equation flies by in the opening credits to establish the sci-fi nature of the show, but it's "3 + 3 = 6".
  • In The Stinger of "A Rickle in Time", the testicle-headed 4th dimension aliens find Albert Einstein and beat him up, telling him not to mess with time. He mutters that he will mess with time, and writes the famous equation on a blackboard.
• Einstein Hair: Rick's. In fact, his hairstyle causes the Time Police to mistake the real Einstein for Rick from just seeing the back of his head. They give Einstein a beat-down and warn him not to mess with time, apparently inspiring him to create his famous E=MC^2 formula out of spite.
• Ejection Seat: Rick's car has a "Passenger Purge" button, which dumps everyone in the backseat out of the bottom of the car. Rick being Rick, it's entirely on him to do this in such a way that the passengers survive the landing.
• Eldritch Abomination: In the opening credits, the team is seen fleeing from a Cthulhu-esque creature with a smaller, baby version carried by Summer. It is unknown if this will end up as an episode, and whether or not they stole it from him, or the scene is implying darker subtexts.
• Eldritch Location: Parodied with Cob Planet in "The Wedding Squanchers". Everything is on a cob, down to a molecular level. Rick is terrified of the planet, but it's never explained why.
• Emotion Eater:
  • The Cromulons in "Get Schwifty" feed on the talent and showmanship of less-evolved lifeforms. Subverted when we learn that they don't actually feed on this shit, it's just part of their reality television.
  • A giant slug-creature at the alien spa in "Rest and Ricklaxation" has a symbiotic relationship with the spa visitors due to this; it genuinely loves swallowing stressed-out creatures and feeding on their negative feelings for 20 minutes, which in turn relieves these people of said stress.
• Enemy Without:
  • The marriage counsellors at Nuptia 4 use a device that manifests the user's unconscious perception of their partner into a living, breathing monster. Jerry's perception of Beth manifests as a giant, Xenomorph-like beast while Beth's perception of Jerry manifests as a pathetic slug-like creature. The two end up working together to escape and cause havoc due to the Smiths' codependent relationship.
  • Another case comes up when Rick and Morty visit an alien spa in "Rest and Ricklaxation" and undergo mental detoxification, which literally removes the worst parts of their personalities (or, at least, what they consider to be the worst parts), manifesting them as physical copies of the pair with all their negative traits cranked up to 11. Toxic Rick soon tries to murder his detoxified counterpart.
• Epic Movie: In-Universe. Two Brothers from "Rixty Minutes" definitely qualifies.

"A Mexican armada shows up. With weapons made from Two—tomatoes. And you better bet your bottom dollar that these two brothers know how to handle business. In: Alien Invasion Tomato Monster Mexican Armada Brothers, Who Are Just Regular Brothers, Running In a van from an Asteroid and All Sorts of Things THE MOVIE!"

• Establishing Series Moment: The cold opening of the pilot has a stinking drunk Rick barging into Morty's room in the middle of the night, dragging him off to a flying machine he built out of "stuff in the garage" and revealing he built a bomb and plans to make Morty and his crush the new Adam and Eve after he nukes the world. When Morty stops him, he tries to pass it off as a Secret Test of Character, then collapses drunk in the dirt.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Most of the human characters (and even some exceptions therein) place their sexual priorities a little too high. To give some perspective, Rick is one of the lightest examples on the show, and he spent almost the entirety of "Auto-Erotic Assimilation" having an orgy involving, among other things, a giraffe, a hang-glider, and a football field covered with redheads and the stadium seats filled with guys that look like Rick's dad. This trope is discussed to hilarious length in "Interdimensional Cable 2" when Jerry is approached by alien surgeons who want him to donate his penis to save the life of an important alien political figure, which of course leads to one of the greatest lines in cartoon history:
  Jerry: "I'm a good person, and I demand that you put my penis in that man's chest."
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Parodied at the end of "Meeseeks and Destroy".
• Everyone Has Standards: Rick's morality is pretty loose, but occasionally he finds his limits:
  • Despite out scamming the Zigerians, Rick was genuinely affected by their mind tricks and especially their imitating Morty. The Stinger shows him still sort of reeling from the deception.
  • In "Rick Potion No. 9", Rick calls Morty a little creep for wanting to use a love potion on his crush. He even compares it to roofies. Morty, however, answers back by noting Rick still agreed to make it for him, and the only protest he raised back then was that he considered it a waste of his time and talents.
  • In "Look Who's Purging Now," Rick gets excited to see some "purge" carnage, but something off-screen disgusts him so much that he regrets watching.
  • In "Rickmancing the Stone", Rick repeatedly tries to avoid telling Morty why they're bothering to stick around in the dimension they're visiting...until Morty points out that Rick is about to eat cooked human flesh in his efforts to do so and asks if it's really worth that. Rick decides that it's not, and just tells Morty what's going on.
• Everyone Is Bi: Morty is the only member of the family not to show both same and opposite sex attraction at some point.
• Evil Doppelgänger:
  • Naturally, Evil Rick and Evil Morty. While Evil Rick actually turns out to be a subversion since he was just being mind-controlled by Evil Morty^note And "our Rick" is a borderline Villain Protagonist himself sometimes anyway, this of course means that the latter plays it even more completely straight than it originally appeared.
  • Played with Toxic Rick & Morty, the result of the original Rick and Morty being purged of the "toxic" parts of their psyche, leading to Toxic Rick being a self-aggrandizing, abusive Jerkass, and Toxic Morty being a self-loathing ball of neuroses and cowardice, while "Healthy" Rick & Morty are far friendlier and more well-adjusted. Because there's no objective measure of what thoughts are toxic or not, however, the purging instead goes by what the person thinks the toxic parts of themselves are, leading to Toxic Rick & Morty retaining some more positive traits that Healthy Rick & Morty are now missing, such as Toxic Rick retaining his "irrational" attachment to Toxic Morty, and Toxic Morty retaining his moral compass.
• Evil Laugh: Mr. Needful usually has one after saying "you don't pay for anything in this store... not with money". Rick sarcastically joins in.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Rick is deliberately written as an awful person, but to keep him from being an outright Villain Protagonist, the writers give him some redeeming qualities and have said that they want the show to see him become a better person. For his many faults, Rick does love his family and tries to connect with them, but he's so fucked up it doesn't really work. What generally drives him to try and do good is ultimately either his family being upset with him for being such a dick, or, worse, when he thinks he's a bad influence (as in "Look Who's Purging Now", when he stuns Morty to stop him killing people.).
• The Evils of Free Will: Parodied; before Unity took over an entire unnamed alien civilization and made everyone live in hive-mind bliss, the planet was on the verge of tearing itself apart via an extremely volatile race war based on nipple shapes. Eventually, Morty and Summer conclude that the only problem with the situation is Rick being a terrible influence.
• Exact Words:
  • Mr. Needful's microscope lets you see things beyond comprehension. It makes you too dumb to understand anything. Unfortunately for him, Rick is too smart to fall for it.
  • When Morty asks Rick how many people Rick invited to the party in "Ricksy Business", Rick claims it's only six. A flying saucer then lands and out pours a few dozen blob-like aliens, which aren't technically people.
  • In "The Ricks Must be Crazy", Rick orders his car AI to keep Summer safe. What follows is an escalating series of exact adherence to her commands as she balks at the lengths it will go to protect her. First, it unceremoniously kills people that might be a threat to Summer. When Summer tells it not to kill anyone, it instead uses a precise laser beam to paralyze them from the waist down. When Summer orders it not to physically harm anyone, it resorts to psychologically scarring them. It then secures world peace... resulting in the most disgusting ice cream imaginable.
  • In "Mortynight Run", the telepathic entity called Fart remarks that he will cleanse carbon-based lifeforms once he returns through his wormhole. He then remarks on a conversation he had with Morty earlier, that Morty agrees life must be protected, even through sacrifice and, sensing Morty's thoughts, notes that he hasn't changed his opinion on that. As it turns out, Fart is correct... As Morty sacrifices Fart to save life.
• Executive Veto: In-Universe example. The Stinger of "Anatomy Park" had Rick's Pirates of the Pancreas ride axed by the Chief "Imagineerian".
• Existential Horror: The multiverse, which holds practically infinite numbers of other Ricks and Mortys, and for that matter other Beths, Summers, and Jerrys, is played as such. Imagine that you are just one of a near-infinite number of yourselves, some of which have died anti-climatically, unmourned, and unremembered, while others still are much more successful and well-off than you will ever be. Then there is other stuff, like the alien parasites that can fill your head with Fake Memories and make you believe you've known them your whole life, to the mere concept of Mr. Meeseeks. Safe to say, the show has plenty to choose from when it comes to existential nightmares.
• Expendable Clone:
  • Evil Rick (who turns out to be controlled by Evil Morty) tortures hundreds of alternate Mortys to hide in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind".
  • In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Rick murders a handful of younger clones of himself. With an axe.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Parodied. Rick irreversibly ruins Earth in one universe and travels to a different one. Rick doesn't care at all. Morty on the other hand is horrified. And in the stinger, Cronenberg Morty and Rick (referring to each other as such) come out of a portal in the abandoned world, having mutated everyone in their homeworld into "normal" humans, and abandoned it in the same manner.
• Expy:
  • Rick and Morty are expies of Doc and Marty from Back to the Future.
  • Scary Terry is basically Freddy Krueger. Rick even says that he's a knock-off of some '80s horror film. It is also pointed out that Terry has miniature swords, not knives, on his fingers.
  • The Pop-Tart living in the toaster oven looks like the one featured in current Pop-Tart commercials.
  • King Jellybean looks almost identical to the character Crumply Crumplestein in Roiland's previous short "Unbelievable Tales."
• Exotic Eye Designs: All the characters have somewhat jagged-looking pupils.
• Exotic Equipment: In "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate" Jerry can be seen watching alien pornography, which features unusual sex organs.
• Extradimensional Emergency Exit:
  • Thanks to Rick's portal gun, it's very easy for him to casually leap into another dimension if faced with danger - or inconvenience of any kind, really. As such, things only get complicated for him if his portal gun ends up being lost, confiscated or damaged.
  • Played for laughs in one of the Adult Swim commercials: Rick is forced to use the portal gun to quickly find a bathroom for Summer, first trying the dog dimension where the toilets are all fire hydrants, then in the chair dimension where the toilets are all inanimate human beings. Eventually, they finally find a normal toilet... but the dimension appears to be a nightmare realm populated by Cenobites.
  Summer: ...I'll hold it until we get back to Earth.
  Morty: This is why I let Rick put a catheter in me.
• Extreme Doormat: Downplayed by Morty - he may put up with a lot of crap from Rick with little to no objection, but he does have his limits, as he shows in the very first episode before any Character Development.
• Eye Awaken: Happens with Abradolf Lincler in The Stinger for "Ricksy Business". He even shouts "REVENGE!" right before getting slurped up by some testicle monsters.
• Eyepatch of Power: Evil Morty. And boy, is the "power" element literal. He used it as an interface to control Evil "Rick". When he goes into hiding, he simply takes it off to reveal an intact eye with some wires sticking out.
• Eye Scream: Ants-in-my-eyes-Johnson is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

F

• Fake Memories: The parasites in "Total Rickall" create happy memories in the minds of their victims, taking the form of a non-existent relative or some such, then assume the appearance of the subject of the memories. They breed by repeating this process ad nauseum. It quickly takes a turn for the ridiculous as the parasites assume ever-more implausible forms, such as fictional monsters like Frankenstein's monster, talking animals, and so forth, all of which the family accepts as commonplace because the memories tell them they are.
• False Cause: In "Get Schwifty", Principal Vagina forms a religion around the Cromulons, ignorant of the true reason behind their appearance. Beth even discusses it. Principal Vagina quickly lets the power go to his head.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: It bears noting that since this is an adult show, it doesn't have any compunctions about showing realistic firearms. Though this is subverted with Rick's various energy weapons - while a lot of them have a sort of Raygun Gothic aesthetic, Rick's favorite pistol loads like a conventional 21st-century automatic, and when shown, their effects are even gorier than one could expect from contemporary weapons.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Rick wearing BDSM gear in the Dream Land in "Lawnmower Dogs".
  • A lingerie-clad Summer jiggling her breasts and hitting on Rick and Morty in the same scene.
  • In general, anytime we get a Full-Frontal Assault from Rick (which is always accompanied by his dick being pixelated out), but especially in "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", where he's not only totally naked, but also drenched in blood from killing his own clones with an axe, and proceeds to spend the rest of the episode like this.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Implied in "Meeseeks and Destroy", where the giants seem to be very prejudiced towards "tiny people". Given that the villagers' only idea to get money boiled down to breaking into an innocent giant family's castle and stealing from them, this might be justified.
  • "Rixty Minutes" features a political ad for a universe where there are men with trunks surgically attached to their faces, which allows them to have sex with both men and women. They're fighting for the right to get married.
  • The episode "Auto-Erotic Assimilation" has two instances: Rick spray-painting gang graffiti on a starship bulkhead to make the police think that a certain group of aliens looted it, and the blue-skinned people differentiate race by the shape of their areolas and feel so strongly about it that a pogrom can be declared with no more emotional weight than a food fight.
  • Tumblr-like Federation videos mention the Galactic Federation "cubifying" some humans to make them more efficient. The normal humans find this disgusting and horrifying and go so far as to discriminate against "cubified" humans until the Federation passes laws preventing this.
  • The Aliens of the Galactic Federation seem to have disdain towards humans. The humans respond in kind by drawing-and-quartering aliens in School Courtyards and calling it patriotism.
  • Rick is racist towards Gear-people. He calls Revolio Clockberg Jr. "Gearhead" instead of his real name, which by itself could just be Rick being Rick and not caring enough about Revolio to even bother remembering his name, but he also openly calls Gear-people greedy to Revolio's face.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink:
  • In the words of Rick himself, there are "infinite worlds, infinite possibilities". Everything that could have happened in one world but did not has ASSUREDLY already happened, will happen, or is CURRENTLY happening in another world. Naturally, that means that in addition to clones and different versions of every person in existence being very real, there are also various species of sentient and asentient extraterrestrial life (familiar aliens and non-familiar), vampires, wizards, dragons, time travel, and more. Just about everything you could imagine, and more, probably exists somewhere.
  • Curiously, in Season 5 regular Earth seems to be one too: among other things, we discover that the oceans are ruled by a Namor-esque character, there are genuine superheroes, and there's a race of humanoid horses living in an underground kingdom.
• Fantastic Slur:
  • Glip-Glop for Travlorkians. It's like the N-word and C-word had a baby and was raised by all the bad words for Jews. Rick greets an entire saucer of them by calling them this.
  • When the dog Snuffles becomes super-intelligent and enslaves the family, he insists they call him Snowball because "Snuffles was my slave name". Technically it's more of an anthropomorphic slur.
  • Gearhead's real name is "Revolio Clockberg Jr." He states that Rick calling him "Gearhead" is like calling a Chinese person "Asia Face".
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: The episode "Anatomy Park" is a mixture of this and Jurassic Park.
• Fate Worse than Death: This is the punishment that the Council of Ricks has in mind for a rogue Rick believed to be responsible for a murder spree.
  "Earth Rick C-137, the Council of Ricks sentences you to the Machine of Unspeakable Doom, which swaps your conscious and unconscious minds, rendering your fantasies pointless while everything you've known becomes impossible to grasp. Also, every ten seconds, it stabs your balls."
• The Federation: The series occasionally mentions a Galactic Federation, which Rick is stated to have issues with. According to Bird Person, he and Rick are at war with the Federation and are considered terrorists. Earth joins at the end of Season 2, but the Federation collapses at the start of Season 3, thanks to Rick.
• Fetishes Are Weird; A few examples, though often Played With.
  • Invoked and Subverted in "Lawnmower Dog". Rick tries to help Morty get an A in math by "incepting" his teacher's dreams. After going deeper into Goldenfold's subconscious, they reach a dream-level that is entirely devoted to his sexuality (in the form of a giant orgy), where there's BDSM, fetish gear, gnomes, and animal-human hybrids. Both Rick and Morty are uncomfortable, but Rick quickly "blends in" and engages in some pet-play with the gnomes. The only thing that crosses the line for them is Goldenfold's fantasies about Summer, understandably.
  Morty: (nervously) Oh man, Rick, this is pretty weird!
  Rick: Don't judge, Morty.
  • Downplayed in the episode, "Mortynight Run", where Morty saves a sentient fart with telepathic powers. When they first meet, Fart reads his mind and accidentally reveals that Morty is randomly thinking about Jessica's feet. It's Played for Laughs, but nobody makes a big deal about it, probably because one is a gas cloud without a grasp of human behaviour, and the other is Rick.
  • A sex offender tries to take a picture of Morty and Summer's feet in "AutoErotic Assimilation" when he is released from Unity's control. The creepiness is more the fact that Morty and Summer are teenagers, but still.
• Fictional Currency:
  • The schmeckle. Twenty-five of them are enough for a boob job or a ride down some very tall stairs, and a sackful can bail a village out of poverty. According to Dan Harmon during a Reddit AMA, he said a schmeckle is worth roughly 148 USD.
  • The flurbo. Three-thousand of them is enough for two humans to spend an entire afternoon at Blips and Chitz!
  • The blemflarp. The cure to a highly infectious disease that you could call "space AIDS" is worth billions of them.
  • The repbul. A plumbus is apparently worth six repbuls.
• Five-Finger Fillet: In "How Poopy Got His Poop Back," after the gang does a bunch of drugs, Birdperson pulls out a knife and rapidly stabs the space in between his fingers. Squanchy then grabs the knife and immediately stabs himself in the center of his hand.
• Flat-Earth Atheist:
  • even though he's personally met Satan and a few demons, Rick is still a Hollywood Atheist. Although "Rickle in Time" gives us the "No atheists in a foxhole" gag, where Prayer Is a Last Resort is immediately laughed off when things start going the right way.
  Rick #30: (as he flies through Uncertainty) I'm okay with this. Be good Morty. Be better than me. Bullsh*t. The other collar! I'm not okay with this! I am not okay with this! Oh, sweet Jesus please let me live. Oh, my God I—I've gotta fix this thing, please God in Heaven, please, God, oh Lord, hear my prayers.
  (fixes device) "Yes! Fuck you God! Not today, bitch."
  • And later:
  All Ricks Except Rick #30: "Please, God, if there's a Hell, please be merciful to me."
  Rick #30: "Yes I did it! There is no God! In your face. One dot, motherfuckers!"
  • "Childrick of Mort" in Season 4 confirms that gods actually exist. To be specific, Rick encounters one who both directly compares himself to Zeus. The god even directly gives Jerry divine powers. Rick calls him out for completely squandering the use of those powers for showing off what great power he has instead of actually curing cancer or doing something useful. He doesn't really care that gods exist, but it's the existence of God that has yet to be proven.
• Flipping the Bird:
  • Rick does it frequently.
  • In "The Ricks Must be Crazy", Rick taught his Pocket Dimension that this is the symbol for peace. He thought it was hilarious. Zeep also teaches his Pocket Dimension their equivalent of Flipping the Bird for the same reason. What makes it especially funny is the fact that is the symbol for peace in Rick's dimension. Rick also had some other language-based fun at their expense.
    Mayor: Fuck you!
    Rick: (grabbing the mayor by the collar) What did you say to me?!
    Mayor: F-fuck you! Y-you told me it means "much obliged"!
    Rick: Oh. Right. Uh, b-blow me.
    Mayor: No, no, no. Blow me.
• Flying Saucer:
  • Rick's homemade spaceship uses this aesthetic, albeit with wheels and headlights like a normal car.
  • The Travlorkians fly one to Rick's party.
• Foil: Jerry is a foil to Rick. Rick is intelligent while Jerry is ditzy, Rick is brave while Jerry is cowardly (or vice versa), and Rick is reluctant to bond with others while Jerry is quick to bond with others. The only similarities they have are that they're in the same family and they're both insufferably egotistical and miserable.
• Forced Perspective: In "The Wedding Squanchers," the family's first selection for a new home planet looks very Earth-like from a distance... until Rick tries to get closer and bonks the spaceship into the planet, revealing that it is much closer and much smaller than they realized.
• Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Despite Rick supposedly being away from the family for 20 years, one of Rick's memories and a picture in Birdperson's house show that Rick was secretly visiting Morty (who is now 14) when the latter was an infant. Morty doesn't remember this. This has led to some Wild Mass Guessing that "our" Rick and "our" Morty aren't natives of the same dimension, and that the baby Morty in these two instances is a different one than the Morty we follow. It's also possible that this is "our" Morty and Rick did come to meet him personally, but never officially returned into the rest of his family's lives until much later.
  • The episode Rickmurai Jack confirms that Rick is from a different dimension than Morty. Presumably the infant Morty in Rick's memory is one of the alternate Mortys Rick met before helping form the Citadel
• Formula for the Unformulable: Rick has worked out mathematical proof that both Morty and Summer are "pieces of shit" and is all too pleased to wheel out the whiteboard to show off his work.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: With Morty as the Optimist, Rick as the Cynic, Summer as the Realist, Beth as the Apathetic, and Jerry as the Conflicted.
• Frankenstein's Monster: One of the parasites in "Total Rickall" takes on the form of Frankenstein's monster.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • When Rick is flipping through the channels in "Rixty Minutes", one channel has Game of Thrones on, except all the cast members are dwarves. Except for Tyrion who is the sole tall person.
    • In the same episode, Weekend At Dead Cat Lady's House II is rated G.
  • "Something Ricked This Way Comes" has an unintentional one where a man is holding a "God hates fags" sign and it changes to "God hates you" for one frame. They changed it to "God hates fags" after the censors approved it, but they accidentally left it in that one frame.
  • In "M. Night Shaym-Aliens", there's a brief shot of the back of a Plutonian from "Something Ricked This Way Comes" during the anti-gravity sequence.
  • In "Close Rick-Counters", a notebook, a pen, and a mug with a question mark on it can be seen falling out of one of the portals Rick opened.
  • "Auto Erotic Assimilation" has the hive-mind Unity create a show just for Rick, which turns out to be Dan Harmon's previous show, Community. Also serves as a Stealth Pun.
• Freudian Threat: In "Lawnmower Dog", Snowball threatens to have Jerry neutered. Jerry assumes he's being threatened with a haircut.
• Freudian Trio:
  • Morty, the kid who doesn't want to hurt anyone and if anything cares too much (Id)
  • Rick, the mad scientist who claims that all love is an illusion (Superego)
  • Summer, the middle ground between the two (Ego)
• From Bad to Worse:
  • In "Rick Potion #9" Rick tries to cure a virus, which made everyone infected want to have sex with Morty, with a stronger virus mixed with praying mantis DNA. The result turned the infectees into mutated mantis people who still want to have sex with Morty and then bite his head off. And then Rick attempts to make a cure for both of these viruses (composed of the DNA of a myriad of different animals) which, although effective in making everyone stop being madly in love with Morty, Cronenbergs them into hideous, mutated monsters. Rick and Morty end up just abandoning the world to its fate and settling in an Alternate Universe where Rick of that dimension succeeded in fixing everything, only to then accidentally kill himself and his dimension's Morty in a lab accident just as the prime duo arrive to replace them.
  • The Strawberry Smiggles commercial opens with the cereal's mascot desperately rushing to eat his Smiggles before any kids steal it from him. It doesn't help. Oh, BOY does it not help.
  • In "The Wedding Squanchers", the wedding ends with the reveal of Tammy being a deep-cover agent for the Galactic Federation, and cops from the Federation storming the building. Birdperson is then killed and the Smith family goes on the run. Eventually, Rick turns himself in to spare his family from this life.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In "Ricksy Business", Morty tosses a bag of crystal narcotics outside into an environment full of giant testicle monsters. A tentacle immediately scoops the bag up, after which the monster can be seen tripping balls in the background.
  • In The Stinger for "A Rickle in Time", the two four-dimensional testicle-headed beings (played by comedy duo Key & Peele) find each other in the Ice Age, which startles a mammoth.
    • While the two bicker, a small rodent crawls into the creatures' time displacement bubble and ends up being carried with them through thousands of years of history and meets an unfortunate end when it leaves the time bubble just as it materializes over the sea.
  • In "Mortynight Run", when Rick and Morty are at Blips and Chitz playing Roy, you can see an Alien playing pinball with a Mr. Meeseeks next to him. After the alien beats the game, Mr. Meeseeks disappears.
  • The Gaussian Girl introduction below takes place during a rowdy party. A thrown beer bottle can be seen flying in the background and smashing into a wall, also in slow motion.
  • In "Close Rick-Counters of The Rick Kind", when Rick and Morty arrive in a universe where sentient chairs sit on people using pizzas to order phones, the chairs can be seen staring in utter shock at our equivalent of two talking chairs walking on the street.

G

• Gasoline Dousing: In the episode "Something Ricked This Way Comes", Rick opens up a store called "Curse Purge Plus" which removes the curses put on items by Mr. Needful for a fee. In the end, Rick gets bored and brings out a gas can, dousing the store with gasoline and burning it down.
• Gaussian Girl: Parodied in "Ricksy Business". Jessica is introduced this way, only for Rick to scold Slow-Mobius for messing with time to create the effect.
• Genius Loci: "Childrick of Mort" shows that sentient planets exist, as Rick gets a call from Gaia that she is pregnant and that the children are his. The end of the episode shows there's an entire pornographic dating website called Planets Only, which Rick enjoys indulging in.
• Genius Serum: This is heavily implied to be the case with Mega Seeds, and that they are the main source for Rick's Super-Intelligence.
• Giant Spider: In "The Ricks Must be Crazy", the universe Rick, Morty, and Summer are visiting has giant, telepathic spiders.
• Girl of the Week:
  • While Morty's main Love Interest is Jessica, and she's usually the target of his affection in episodes that focus on his love life, he has occasionally shown interest in other girls too. Except for Arthricia in "Look Who's Purging Now" (for whom his crush is unrequited), he actually has managed to score with most of these girls, including Annie in "Anatomy Park", Stacey and Jacqueline in "Rest and Ricklaxation"^note (albeit as "Healthy Morty", with part of his normal personality removed), and a mermaid in "The Ricklantis Mixup." (And, depending on whether or not you count it or not, "Gwendolyn" the non-sentient sexbot/breeding chamber in "Raising Gazorpazorp").
  • Summer also has a possibly on-again-off-again sometime-boyfriend named Ethan (with their relationship really only shown in two or three episodes), but she gets some of these, as well. She's shown to have a crush on Frank Palicky in the pilot, has a brief relationship of some kind with her boss (the actual Devil) in "Something Ricked This Way Comes", gets together with and even marries Hemorrhage (before divorcing him) in "Rickmancing the Stone", and has a whole slew of these(thanks to a dating app), male and female, in "The Old Man and the Seat".
  • Rick usually doesn't bother with romance since it distracts him from his work, but he does get Unity, a New Old Flame whom he gets back together with, and who then later leaves him again, in "Auto Erotic Assimilation".
• A Glitch in the Matrix: All over the place in "M. Night Shaym-Aliens". The simulation isn't that high-quality to begin with, and Jerry's section is running on 5% processing power.
• Godwin's Law:
  • In the pilot, Morty tells Rick he's worse than Hitler (since even he cared about Germany, "or something") when he shows no empathy over Morty breaking his legs.
  • At the end of "Rick Potion #9", when Morty is freaking out over having to replace his Dead Alternate Counterpart in another dimension, he asks Rick "What about the reality we left behind?" Rick responds by telling him "What about the reality where Hitler cured cancer, Morty? The point is, don't think about it."
  • Jessica's boyfriend invokes it on Abradolf Lincler. He probably gets this a lot. Though, to be fair, Lincler played the Lincoln card first. He was asking for a rebuttal.
• Gone Horribly Right: In the season 1 finale "Ricksy Business", Beth and Jerry go to a fancy Titanic-themed cruise line, complete with a crash into a prop iceberg that's supposed to result in the ship sinking in a safe, controlled manner to give the passengers a chance to reenact scenes from the movie. The ship misses the iceberg and doesn't sink. This is treated like a disaster.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Rick sends Beth and Jerry off to an alien couples therapy retreat to fix their marriage. It works by taking the couple's unconscious perception of each other and manifesting it as monsters which they can then observe. Monster!Beth proceeds to use Monster!Jerry's gelatinous form to blend in with the wall and escape her cell. By the time the real Beth and Jerry solve the problem, the entire retreat is destroyed.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: In "Rixty Minutes", Summer overhears her parents state during an argument that they planned to abort her, and only didn't do so because of a flat tire on the way to the clinic. Summer is so upset about this (and about the fact that her existence made her parents give up on their dreams) that she almost runs away until Morty convinces her not to by explaining that everyone is an accident. At the end of the episode, we learn that the alternate dimension versions of Jerry and Beth are miserable and regretful.
  Alternate Dimension Jerry, having a breakdown: "Beth Sanchez, I have been in love with you since high school. I hate acting, I hate cocaine, I hate Kristen Stewart. I wish you hadn't gotten that abortion, and I've never stopped thinking about what might've been."
• Gorn: Graphic violence is quite frequent, mostly involving aliens. It reaches its zenith in "Look Who's Purging Now."
• Groin Attack:
  • The Machine of Unspeakable Doom swaps your conscious and unconscious minds, rendering your fantasies pointless while everything you've known becomes impossible to grasp. Also, every ten seconds it stabs your balls.
  • When Rick is sold out by Gearhead, he kicks Gearhead in the crotch, rips out his "gearsticles", then swaps them for his mouth gears.
  • Rick and Zeep do this to each other in "The Ricks Must be Crazy", Rick with a kick and Zeep with a punch. Rick, surprisingly, just powers through it.
  • In "Wedding Squanchers", Rick warns his family that the Galactic Federation will torture them by hooking their testicles/labia up to the alien equivalent of a car battery.
• Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: In "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", the Rick we follow throughout the show (Rick C-137) is arrested by the Citadel of Ricks, accused of murdering other Ricks. His portal gun history seems to corroborate this charge, and in any case, his refusal to have anything to do with the Citadel of Ricks makes him suspect among the others. He's only let off the hook when he escapes and tracks down the actual culprit.

H

• Happy Marriage Charade: Beth and Jerry only got married because Jerry got Beth pregnant after prom. Their fragile marriage is a recurring theme, and they are quite aware of it, but it's usually resolved at the end of the episode, and the marriage seems to improve somewhat over the course of the first season. The first episode of the third season ends with them splitting up, but they end up getting back together (happier and with it no longer being a charade) by the season finale.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • "Mortynight Run" drove home the point that the universe doesn't function according to Black-and-White Morality and that if you don't fully know the details of the situation, it's best to not get involved at all because you can make everything a whole lot worse.
  • "Autoerotic Assimilation" says that just because one has free will, it doesn't mean they will use it to make good decisions and that racism will exist no matter where or who you are.
  • "Look Who's Purging Now" shows that no matter how much of a good person one claims to be, they can be pushed to becoming as monstrous as the "evil" people they criticize. Also, that people will always be aggressive to each other one way or another and not learn from their mistakes.
  • The fact that the only Rick in the multiverse that's a Nice Guy is The Ditz, Morty being Book Dumb, and Jerry being a loser gives off the impression that either smart people are assholes or nice people are idiots. Rick even brings this up in his improv wedding speech in "The Wedding Squanchers".
  "Look, I'm not the nicest guy around, because I'm the smartest, and being nice is what stupid people do to hedge their bets."
  • This is elaborated more in "The ABC's of Beth" where Rick's speech seems to outright state there's no difference at all between being intelligent and being a morally bankrupt sociopath.
  • In "Pickle Rick", Dr. Wong delivers it: attending therapy and getting help is a choice, despite it being a potential help if your relationship with your loved ones is downright toxic and hateful. She can only offer advice, but can't make him or Beth take it. As she puts it, Rick's choices constantly prefer to go for death-defying adrenaline adventures, rather than Boring, but Practical maintenance.He turned himself into a pickle to get out of therapy, which led to him being covered in rat blood and cockroach limbs and human feces, as well as nearly vegetating. He may prefer to court death over repairing his family, and ultimately the choice is up to the individual.
  • "The ABCs of Beth": Sometimes your parents don't know what they're doing, especially if they're trying to rebuild their life after a drastic change. Also, refusing to take responsibility for your actions means that ultimately collateral damage will ensue, whether to loved ones —in Jerry's case — or to strangers — in Beth's case.
• Harmless Freezing: As fitting for a sci-fi show, it's Averted overall. While it's shown that the target will be fine if they're unfrozen quickly, such as in "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind" when one of the Ricks freezes Jerry and unfreezes him a moment later, if it lasts for two long or the frozen person is damaged while in that state, they won't fare so well. Examples include:
  • Frank Palicky in the first episode. Rick had insisted he'd be fine, but the frozen Frank fell over and shattered.
  • In the Simpsons crossover, Flanders is frozen, then knocked over and shattered when the spaceship takes off.
  • In the season 3 premiere, SEAL Team Ricks freeze the original Jerry, Beth, and Summer from the "Cronenberged" dimension. Three seasons later, Jerry—the only survivor—reveals that, despite a mutant creature licking them free from the ice, Summer and Beth both died from it.
• Has a Type:
  • Morty sure seems to. His main love interest, Jessica, is a redhead, and in "Morty's Mind Blowers", one of the removed memories shows that he used a magnet that can attract anything to pull in a bunch of women, all of whom had red hair.
  • He might have inherited this from his grandpa; when Rick briefly gets back together with Unity, one of his sexual requests to it is a stadium full of redheaded people that it's possessing (seemingly of both genders) for him to bang.
• Hellhole Prison: A few times:
  • In the Galactic Federation's Prison, the prisoners are chained to slabs and stacked like Jenga blocks.
  • In Time Prison, the most feared part of prison still happens but it goes on forever.
  • The G-Fed prison where Bird Person's and Tammy's daughter ends up throws in young children together with adults, and the guards have no problem with hurting the kids.
• Heroic BSoD: Morty suffers one at the end of "Rick Potion #9" as he tries to cope with his entire world going to hell, and then suddenly finding himself in a world where nothing went wrong except that he just replaced his own self, who had died just moments before.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In the second season premiere, at least one out of 64 versions of Rick was prepared to sacrifice himself (and the other 63 Ricks) to save Morty, though Rick managed to survive anyway through sheer luck.
  • An invoked example occurs in "Analyze Piss". Rick stages one while masquerading as Piss Master to give the man a more dignified death in the eyes of the public, and his daughter, than his true death by suicide. It's mostly successful, since only Rick's family and the Galactic Orbship find out the truth, while nobody else does.
• Hidden Depths: There's a lot more to Rick than just a drunk asshole who's good with science. We have yet to see all of it, but you can tell it's there. Directly referenced at the end of "Ricksy Business", where an embittered Morty says that Rick "isn't that complicated" and Birdperson states that he's wrong.
• High-School Dance: In "Rick Potion #9", Morty's school holds a "Flu Season Dance."
  Principal Vagina: Please note: if you have the flu, do not attend this dance. It's about awareness, not endorsement. You don't bring dead babies to Passover.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: The horrors that Rick has put Morty through (not to mention the constant verbal abuse) would be enough to drive any full-grown adult insane, much less a 14-year-old boy. Morty seems to take it most of the time though.
• Hobbes Was Right: In the climax of the Season 3 premiere, the value of the Galactic Federation's centralized fiat currency, whose value is apparently set by its own value, gets set to zero by Rick. Literally moments after learning this, the Federation's president kills himself and the entire Federation collapses into complete anarchy due to disagreements over who gets paid to do what, and abandons Earth.
  Alien: [offscreen] HE WHO CONTROLS THE PANTS CONTROLS THE GALAXY!
• Hobos: Reuben from "Anatomy Park" is one. Justified since you don't agree to have a theme park built inside you if your life is going great, though he is a more modern variant.
  Robot Reuben Tour Guide: My story begins in the Dot Com Crash of the late '90s...
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In Season 3, Rick's constant belligerent attitude to his family results in three things during the finale:
  • The first is that Morty finally grows a spine and as a result leaves Rick, and takes his family off to a retreat in the woods. While Rick does find them, Morty is finally able to say no to his grandfather's demands.
  • The second is that Beth is told in no uncertain terms that she is not the clone discussed in the previous episode, but the completely flippant way that Rick disregards her fears only makes it worse, and as a result drives her back to Jerry, who she sees as simple and predictable.
  • The third is that Rick's inability to stop his grandiose A God Am I complex causes a falling-out with the President that results in an all-out battle that results in the first point happening and placing Rick at the bottom of the family hierarchy. Essentially, Rick's mad rant at the beginning of the season? Completely null by the end.
• Holiday Episode: A few:
  • "Anatomy Park" (Season 1), "Rattlestar Ricklactica" (S4), and "Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation" (S6) are Christmas Episodes. All three of them did actually air quite close to Christmas in real life (respectively, 9, 10, and 14 days before, to be exact).
  • "Rick and Morty's Thanksploitation Spectacular" (S5) and "Bethic Twinstinct" (S6) are Thanksgiving Episodes. Unlike the above-mentioned Christmas instances, both of these were Out Of Holiday Episodes that aired months before Thanksgiving.
• Honorary True Companion: As of the end of Season 4, Space Beth (who is either a clone of Beth, or vice versa) is this for the rest of the Smith-Sanchez family. She spends most of her time off-world saving the galaxy and having her own adventures, so the "whole family" adventures usually just consist of the five main characters. However, she gradually becomes an increasingly-recurring character, and whenever she's present, she's treated by all as the sixth member of the family.
• How We Got Here: Parodied in "Look Who's Purging Now." Morty listens to a screenplay that begins with a trite scene of danger and then flashes back to "Three weeks earlier." Morty groans.
• Huge Holographic Head: The Cromulons are an entire race of partially transparent floating heads.
• Humble Goal: When Rick introduces the problem-solving Meeseeks to the family, he tells them to keep their requests simple. Summer asks to be more popular at school, and Beth asks to be a more complete woman. Trying to heed Rick's warning, Jerry just asks to take two strokes off his golf game. Guess which problems are solved easily and which one turns into a huge ordeal.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: In "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy" this is applied, not to hyperspace, but wormhole travel. During a fight, a shield that protects part of a starship from the crazier aspects of wormhole travel is damaged, meaning everyone in proximity experiences a mind-bending acid trip that, according to the characters, lasted "a thousand lifetimes."
• Hypocrite:
  • The Citadel of Ricks, and the Council that leads it, was formed because of government attempts to control other Ricks, yet they enforce their will on all Ricks regardless of whether or not they have joined. "Our" Rick, C-137, calls them out on this.
  • In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" Rick calls Morty gay despite being openly pansexual himself.
  • "Raising Gazorpazorp"; while it does result in Morty learning that parenting is a thankless job, the attitudes of his parents do little to help the situation. Beth and Jerry both criticize Morty over his attempt at raising Morty Jr. while failing to reflect on their own actions while raising their own kids. Beth drinks, the couple fights, Summer has gotten a black eye (accidentally but due to Beth hitting her with a wine bottle), not to mention they allow their underage son, who has poor attendance in school, being dragged across dimensions with his 60ish alcoholic, sociopathic grandfather... neither of them are Parent of the Year themselves and they're basically acting like spoiled brats because Morty called them out on their own behaviour.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "Total Rickall" the house becomes infested with alien parasites who embed themselves in memories and act like old friends and family. Rick warns his family to "keep an eye out for any zany, wacky characters that pop up". He then accepts help from a strange creature called "Mr. Poopybutthole" we've never seen before. It turns out this isn't so hypocritical, as Mr. Poopybutthole is shown to be real at the end of the episode.
  • "The Ricks Must be Crazy" has Rick bemoan that the Pocket Dimension powering his car, in turn, invented and then copied his scam. When Morty brings up the hypocrisy, Rick merely realizes that he can use this to convince the one from his creation to switch back to the original power source. Then it goes a layer deeper as instead of the scientist just realizing that he's a hypocrite, he realizes they're both hypocrites, and thus that Rick is probably doing the same thing he is but one universe higher.
  • "The Ricks Must be Crazy" also has this bit:
    Morty: What's wrong, Rick? Is it the quantum carburetor or something?
    Rick: "Quantum carburetor"? Jesus, Morty, you can't just add a *burp* sci-fi word to a car word and hope it means something. Huh, looks like there's something wrong with the microverse battery.
  • "The Wedding Squanchers" has Beth's conversation with Birdperson. While he opens up with secret details about Rick's past, she ignores him and keeps complaining about how Rick was a wayward father. After Birdperson leaves, she mutters that it's "like talking to a brick wall."
  • In "Morty's Mind Blowers", Morty is shown a memory where he and Rick are on a planet called Venzenulon 9 with the car broken down. Rick panics, saying the night temperature reaches 300 below and they need to find shelter. Morty suggests finding a cave, to which Rick replies "you've seen too many movies". Rick then proceeds to cut open their Animal Companion so they can hide in its warm innards.

I

• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Many episode titles are based on a movie title or common phrase with "Rick" and/or "Morty" inserted into it somewhere. It is even lampshaded by Rick in one of the promos.
  Rick: What's [the episode] called?
  Morty: "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind"!
  Rick: What, really? That's horrible! What kind of formula is that?! Take a movie title and arbitrarily shoehorn my name into it?
  Morty: I don't think they put a lot of thought into it, y'know. I think they save their creative energy for the show.
• Idiot Ball: Oh boy, do Rick's enemies ever hold it. Among the most noticeable ones, the Federation not using the most recent Brainalyzer to deal with Rick, who they know to be the "smartest mammal in the universe", the Citadel of Ricks for having a system for moving the whole structure around that can be activated easily by a single person (which also raises the question of why would a room full of Rick be needed for it) and without any security measures to avoid it materializing into anything solid or the blue ape aliens from "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy" that try to kill Rick before he's out of the immortality field. It's actually surprising when villains dodge it, with some of the only ones so far being Zeep, the memory parasites, and, supposedly, Concerto (who, however, still doesn't outright kill Rick and Morty when he has the chance).
  • One not from the antagonists is from Krombopulous Michael, an alien Professional Killer who hands out cards that can be used to track him. Fittingly, it ends up being the cause of his demise.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight:
  • At the climax of "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Morty and Summer have to do this with Rick who's trapped in a younger clone of himself that's taken over his personality.
  • Parodied in "Morty's Mind Blowers". One of the removed memories shows that Rick, Summer, and Beth once had to do this with Morty when he got possessed by an alien worm-creature, telling him how much they love him and encouraging him to fight it...except that it takes so long for Morty to barf up the alien worm that they have trouble actually continuing to encourage him and not just start cracking jokes at his expense instead.
• I Love the Dead: One alternate version of Jerry wrote and directed a film called "Last Will and Testameow: Weekend at Dead Cat Lady's House II", a film about how nine cats move their owner's putrefying corpse to make her seem alive. The film also features a guy having a romantic relationship and sleeping with the dead woman, thinking she's still alive.
• Immediate Sequel: Interestingly played with for the second season relative to the first. This is averted for Rick, Morty, and Summer, for whom six months have passed between the two seasons; however, since they "froze time" for the rest of the world and it's remained frozen during that six months, this is played straight for everybody else once they un-freeze it since from their perspective, no time has passed and they're not even aware that anything happened at all.
• Implied Death Threat: When Evil Morty becomes president of the Citadel of Ricks, he has a meeting, while having a barber cut his hair, with some of the most important Ricks, who tell him they are going to be The Man Behind the Man and he will not have real power. He kills the most vocal of these Ricks, after which we get this:
  Barber: Is... is that enough taken off the top?
  Evil Morty: I don't know. Is it?
  Surviving "top" Ricks: Yes! Yes! Goddamn, yes!
• Impossible Pickle Jar: Jerry's inability to open a jar results in Rick giving him the Meeseeks box, sparking the B-plot of "Meeseeks and Destroy".
• Improbably High I.Q.: Word of God puts Rick's IQ at 350.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Played for Black Comedy in "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy" when Rick takes Jerry to an amusement park that has an immortality field that revives anyone who gets killed. Jerry calls bad parenting when a couple of kids run around with the brother repeatedly blasting his sister in the head. When the immortality field is destroyed, later on, the boy shoots his sister again and this time kills her for real.
• I'm Standing Right Here:
  • In "Mortynight Run", Rick suggests to Morty that they kill Fart and go home. Fart is telepathic and says as much, to which Rick retorts that he was being polite.
  • This is a Running Gag with Summer and Unity, as the latter always points this out to Summer when she tries to complain about it assimilating the planet into a single Hive Mind.
• Inexplicable Cultural Ties: "Look Who's Purging Now" and "Rick: A Mort Well Lived" confirms that both The Purge and Die Hard and all of its sequels are all universal constants that are replicated in nearly every major civilization across the universe. It's unavoidable for them to eventually be conceived.
• In-Joke: Rick makes a fake one referring to "Redgren Grumbholdt" at Jerry's expense, and calls Morty and Summer out when they laugh along.
• Individualism vs. Collectivism:
  • Rick Sanchez is portrayed as the logical conclusion of Individualism at its most egoistic. While the various collectives he antagonizes (The Galactic Federation, The Council of Ricks, etc.) definitely have it coming, his motives are entirely selfish. While he claims that he acts out of Enlightened Self-Interest, it is very clear that much of his behavior is just schadenfreude born out of an existential ennui brought on by his nihilistic-materalist view of the multiverse and a knee-jerk opposition to any kind of authorty that isn't him (him him, not his infinite alternate universe counterparts). He will routinely convince himself that any sense of morals beyond "It's All About Me" is a spook and should any of his adventures create too much of a mess (as in apocalyptic), he abandons everyone to their grim fates and hops to a different universe to start over.
  • Unity from the episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation" deconstructs the authoritarian metaphor inherent in the Hive Mind trope. They are a Hive Mind that has assimilated an entire planet and has plans to assimilate the rest of the universe. While Unity robs those it possesses of their individualistic identity and free will, it becomes clear that after some of the people she possessed are freed when they go on a bender, they immediately devolve into a senseless race war over a defining physical trait (in their case, their nipple-shape). This is in direct contrast to how they behave when they are under their control, the people they possess living better lives and the planet joining the Federation. When Rick (who is established as the Individualist to their Collectivist) reenters their lives, his short-sighted, hedonist ways prove detrimental to the stable life they built and she dumps him when she realizes this.
• Indy Ploy:
  • Rick is forced to resort to this occasionally. One particular example is in "The Rickshank Redemption"; his original plan was to Body Surf his interrogator, get the Level 9 access codes, and bring down the Federation from the inside with that. But then the Citadel of Ricks' SEAL Team Ricks invades the Federation to kill Rick C-137 ("our" Rick) to keep the Federation from finding out what he knows and succeed at killing his original body, forcing him to Body Surf again and improvise from there. It ends with Rick causing severe damage and massive casualties to both the Federation and the Citadel.
  • "Rest and Ricklaxation" begins with Rick and Morty going on what Rick intends to be a quick, 20-minute adventure. It then turns into a 6-day epic that results in them becoming heroes for an entire civilization. When they finally leave and get a chance to catch their breath, they freak out from the stress. Rick admits that he had no control over any of it; they were flying by the seat of their pants.
• Informed Attribute: The council of Ricks is made of this trope. They are theoretically all versions of Rick and all equally intelligent (as they will tell you repeatedly), and yet in their very first appearance we see Rick able to out-think all of them (and being able to predict how they will move based on the fact that they are all Rick, while not a single other Rick is able to predict his moves the same way). It only gets worse from there, with not only their intelligence, but by "The Ricktlantis Mix-Up" the very fact that they are all versions of Rick becomes informed, with them effectively being a series of entirely different people who just happen to share the same name and face.
• Informed Flaw: Morty being an idiot. While he's not on Rick's level, to be sure, Morty seldom does anything that could genuinely be called stupid. In fact, in Season 3 we establish both that he's smart enough NOT to mess around with alien devices when he clearly doesn't know what they do AND has taught himself how to disarm Neutrino bombs that Rick makes while black-out drunk.
• Inherently Funny Words: Many alien names and terms used by the show fall under this category, but it reaches critical mass with the entire Plumbus skit in "Interdimensional Cable II" which is made up almost entirely of goofy-sounding nonsense words.
• Ink-Suit Actor: When Tricia Helfer and James Callis show up for the Season 2 finale, they're voicing characters who are dead ringers for their most famous previous roles. As a bonus, they turn out to be homicidal cyborgs. Jerry and Beth also strongly resemble their own actors.
• In Medias Res: Discussed in "Look Who's Purging Now". A man wrote a screenplay using How We Got Here, a version of this trope, and asks Morty for feedback:
  Morty: I feel, you know, we should start our stories where they begin, not start them when they get interesting.
• Insane Proprietor: Ants in My Eyes Johnson. Though, his low prices are not due to insanity, but rather due to blindness caused by the ants in his eyes.
• Insane Troll Logic: In-Universe. Drunk Rick's second puzzle in "Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender" asks the Vindicators to choose a location that they would "never visit"; naturally, they assume he means a place with which they have a dark history. The answer is Israel, and the Vindicators would indeed never go there...because, since they're not from Earth, they don't know what that is.
  Morty:It's just something Rick starts talking about when he's blackout drunk.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Many aliens see "Ee-arth" and its inhabitants as undeveloped, primitive and simple by comparison. Those who've attended Earth parties note that Earth cultures are built around bad sex jokes. The Federation believes they all eat spaghetti and pray to kangaroos. Tourism to Earth wasn't common until its acquisition by the Federation, amidst the search for Rick.
• In Spite of a Nail: Most realities have a Rick, and most Ricks have a Morty. Even some of the really strange realities, like the one where Morty was an anthropomorphic hammer for some reason. Maybe not a perfect example, since there are an infinite number of universes. For the infinite number of universes that have a Rick and a Morty, there are theoretically also an infinite number of identical universes that have no Rick and no Morty, and another set of identical universes with only one or the other. Most of the universes we see have a Rick and a Morty, because most of the alternate universes we see are because of different versions of Rick interacting.
• Insufferable Genius: Rick, the smartest man in the universe, is not even remotely modest or shy when it comes to boasting about it. Morty's quote at the top of this page, especially the "all you know is that you know nothing and he knows everything" line, sums it up pretty well.
• Insult to Rocks: In the pilot, after Morty breaks both his legs and Rick observes him in a matter-of-fact fashion as he writhes on the ground, Morty accuses him of being "like Hitler, but at least Hitler cared about Germany or something."
• Intercontinuity Crossover: With Gravity Falls in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind". After Rick opens multiple portals to distract his pursuers while he and Morty hop between universes, one of the portals spits out a pen, a notebook, and a cup with a question mark◊, the same items sucked into a portal◊ during the stinger of an episode of Gravity Falls that aired over half a year after "Close Rick-Counters".
• Intergenerational Friendship: Seemingly not, as Rick often curses at Summer and Morty and treats them like crap, but he does love them deep down and supports them and protects them from other threats(besides himself). He enjoys spending time with them and treats them more like his friends than his grandchildren, and does get a large number of Pet the Dog moments with them.
• iPhony: The logo on Rick's laptop◊.
• Irony:
  • The Council of Ricks wanted to escape the government, so they "became a freakin' government" themselves. "Our" Rick lampshades the hypocrisy.
  • Rick favors Morty over Summer despite genuinely caring for both, but it is shown several times that he actually has more in common with his granddaughter than with his grandson.
• Is the Answer to This Question "Yes"?: In "Get Schwifty", the U.S. President, when asked if he can fly a Blackhawk, asks in turn if the Pope's member can fit through a donut in place of answering with "I'm not sure".
  Morty: Uh, I don't know?
  Mr. President: Exactly.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • While flipping through channels in "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate", the entire Smith family sans Jerry stumble upon the following scene: Jerry, in an operating room, with his pants down, keeping the doctors hostage with an alien dildo for a weapon, demanding that they remove his penis. Naturally, their immediate reaction is that it must be an alternate reality where this sort of thing is normal.
  • Heck, this trope happens a lot, and "alternate reality" or "alternate dimension" explains most of the instances.
• It Only Works Once: Rick tells Morty that they can only do the jump into another reality after irreversibly ruining our own thing three more times, four tops. He knows the viewers wouldn't be impressed if they did it more than that across the series.
• It's a Wonderful Plot: In "Rixty Minutes", Beth and Jerry use one of Rick's devices to learn about alternate versions of themselves, and find out how their lives might have gone differently if Summer had never been born.
• I Work Alone: Rick claims this as a reason he hasn't joined the Citadel of Ricks.

J-K

• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • In "Rick Potion #9", Rick calls Morty out for using a love potion to force a girl to fall in love with him, at one point comparing it to roofies. But Morty fires back by noting that Rick still made it for him (and his only initial objection was that it was a waste of his talents), while also noting that Rick wound up turning the whole planet into David Cronenberg-ian monstrosities through his own carelessness and a lot of bizarre assumptions in regards to biology.
  • Later lampshaded by Rick and then defied by Morty in "Vindicators 3":
    Rick: I knew you were sucking the Kool-Aid out of the Vindicators' dick, so the fact that I was right must be pretty hard to admit.
    Morty: Yeah, it is. You know why Rick? Because when you're an asshole, it doesn't matter how right you are, nobody wants to give you the satisfaction!
  • Vance Maximus Renegade Starsoldier in that same episode is an idiot, a coward, and an intentional Shallow Parody of superheroes (specifically Star Lord and Iron Man) that calls Morty the disabled id they drag along for PR. However, Vance is completely right when he points out that Rick needs his claim that good and evil are just social constructs to be true because it how he justifies his actions.
  • "Look Who's Purging Now" has a rage crazed Morty saying they should just kill a girl that already double crossed them when she beseeches them for help in ending the annual Purge. He's irrationally angry at the time but he and Rick had been betrayed once already so trusting the girl again would be a bad idea.
  • The President in "The Rickchurian Mortydate" is a control freak who tries to assert some authority over Rick and Morty, sending them on relatively unimportant jobs while brushing off Morty's request for an autograph, and later practically declaring war on them after they abandon their task. However, considering that the pair's reckless actions have caused massive, irreversible destruction before, there's a case to be made that some more accountability and oversight is currently amiss. Additionally, given how Rick and Morty use their power for almost entirely selfish purposes, they can hardly argue that their work is more important or valuable. Not to mention that the President was willing to let them leave peacefully and Rick escalated the situation out of spite.
• Jerk Jock: Morty runs into one in "Rick Potion #9" when trying to ask out his crush, Jessica, to the Flu Season Dance. He's actually pretty self-aware:
  Brad: Dude, stay in your league! Look at how hot she is! You don't see me going to a bigger school in a wealthier district and hitting on their prettiest girl!
  Jessica: Gee, thanks Brad.
  Brad: I throw balls far. You want good words, date a languager.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Decidedly more gravitated toward the "jerk" part of a spectrum, Comedic Sociopath Rick is shown on occasion to have a bit of leftover humanity in him, occasionally reaching out to Morty in a more thoughtful, sympathetic manner than usual (usually with traumatizing results). Although Rick acts like he doesn't care about most things, his actions repeatedly imply that this is at least partially an act. We constantly see hints that he's tried to be involved with his family in the past, for example. (Baby pictures of Morty, mostly.)
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Though with the season 3 premiere, it seems as though Rick is veering into this, though it's hard to tell because he's such an Unreliable Narrator. He manipulates everyone to get what he wants, manipulates Summer and Beth into loving him, manipulates Beth into divorcing Jerry when Jerry crosses Rick, and then in a mirror of the first episode's ending, tells Morty that he is going to help Rick get what he wants and if Morty tries to cross him, he will turn Summer and Beth against him as well. Throughout Season 3, he seems to vacillate between "Heart of Gold" and "Heart of Jerk".
• Just a Flesh Wound: Rick gets shot in the liver with his laser pistol and yet seems pretty good to go (even though it's "the hardest working liver in the galaxy"). A few scenes later he puts some science gunk on the wound, which apparently heals it.
• Just One Second Out of Sync:
  • In the second season opener, "A Rickle in Time", the time-screw from the end of the first season causes deviant timelines that involve thecharacters acting in character, but slightly out of sync; sometimes in times, sometimes in space, sometimes both.
  • In "Mortynight Run", Rick and Morty go to a "cross-temporal asteroid" which seems to exist in all timelines at once, yet isn't perceptible unless you know where to look. One version of Rick set up a Jerry daycare there in case other Ricks needed somewhere to dump their Jerrys for a while.
• Karmic Nod: Mr. Goldenfold's reaction in "Something Ricked This Way Comes" upon learning that the "gift" the Devil gave him that made him irresistible to women also made him impotent. Though it's less of a nod and more of an all-out Scenery Chewing.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: Played for Laughs at the end of "Rickmancing The Stone". Summer develops a relationship with the leader of a band of Mad Max-ian post-apocalyptic humans but eventually creates a new civilization when Rick reveals that the MacGuffin that was causing the episode's conflict could be used to power everyone. Summer's relationship with the leader falls out, and she leaves him heartbroken. Before Rick jumps through the portal, he steals the MacGuffin and robs them of electricity just because he can.
• Kissing Warm-Up: When Morty falls asleep at the breakfast table after one of Rick's escapades, his mother asks him if he's feeling well, and then asks if he's been kissing the pillow that the dog sleeps on.
• Kleptomaniac Hero:
  • The Adventures of Stealy follows a strange creature who steals from everyone and chloroforms people who get in his way.
  • Rick has also been known to steal randomly, as seen in "Total Rickall" and The Simpsons crossover.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • Mr. Jellybean, who completely unironically attempts to rape Morty in "Meeseeks and Destroy".
  • Evil Morty. In his debut episode, "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind", it's built up that Evil Rick is the main threat and he's just a lackey. Then, in the end, it turns out that Evil Morty was the mastermind all along. Throughout the episode, he shows little signs of emotion, and only gets two lines, both of which are completely devoid of humor. This clip really sets it in though just how serious the character is compared to the rest of the show, and appears to be hinting at the bigger picture. This is reinforced by his next appearance two seasons later in "The Ricklantis Mix-up", in which he manipulates the members of the Citadel of Ricks into electing him as their new president, with his first act as the new leader being to have almost the entire Shadow Council murdered, and the bodies of numerous dead Ricks and Mortys (and one Morty who was still alive but knew too much) Thrown Out the Airlock.

L

• Lack of Empathy: One of Rick's primary character traits; he rarely ever gives a shit about anybody other than himself, to the point where "Just don't think about it" is practically one of his catchphrases. Character Development, however, has shown that not only is this attitude only a little more than skin-deep, but also it didn't occur without provocation. By the end of Season 1, he's officially in Jerk with a Heart of Gold territory.
• The Lancer: Morty is decidedly a foil for Rick, described by the latter as "as dumb as [Rick is] smart." This is actually one of his key motivations for bringing Morty along on adventures.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: "Morty's Mind Blowers" flashes back to memories of experiences that Rick erased from Morty's mind. Most of them were too horrific for Morty to live with, but Rick also wasn't above abusing the technology when he made a fool of himself and didn't want Morty to remember.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • "Meeseeks and Destroy": King Jellybean attempts to rape Morty and Morty beats the crap out of him, and later Rick kills him.
  • "Something Ricked This Way Comes": Mr. Needful/Lucifer scams Summer, then Rick and Summer beat the shit out of him.
  • "Ricksy Business": Lucy almost rapes Jerry at gunpoint and Beth beats the crap out of her, and later she gets run over by a car.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
  • In the pilot, during the first establishing shot of Interdimensional Customs, Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot (without legs) and Gypsy can be seen as silhouettes in the crowd of aliens. In a later scene, the silhouettes of Oderus Urungus and Beefcake the Mighty can be seen as Rick and Morty escape from the customs agents.
  • In the episode "Rixty Minutes," the characters in Hamsters in Buttland resemble the 30 Second Movies bunnies.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In "Rick Potion #9," Rick states that they can't replace themselves in another dimension "every week" and should only do it "three or four times, tops." This is an insinuated promise by the writers to not hit the Reset Button too often.
  • In "Mortynight Run", when Jerry gets frustrated playing poker with other Jerrys at Jerryboree, he says "I can't believe Rick did this. This is the eighth to the last straw!" The episode was the eighth to the last one of the season.
  • At the beginning of "Interdimensional Cable Part 2," the Sequel Episode to "Rixty Minutes," someone asks Rick what he's doing, and Rick responds, "A sequel." He then mutters about how he doesn't know whether it's really warranted because he "kind of nailed it the first time." The original episode was one of the most popular episodes of the first season.
  • At the end of "Look Who's Purging Now," Rick mentions the candy bars "that we got in the first act."
  • The Stinger of "The ABCs of Beth" is a string of messages on Jerry's answering machine, the last of which is a message from an antique phone rental place, saying that they intend to let Jerry off the hook for the $70 late fee and allow him to keep the answering machine because 'nobody really uses those anymore except to provide exposition on TV shows anyways'.
• Legacy Character: Season 7 reveals Rick's garage and car A.I.s were deliberately created with voices that sound like Rick's deceased wife Diane.
• LEGO Genetics:
  • Played for Laughs in "Rick Potion #9". First Rick tries to use praying mantis DNA to counter-act vole DNA (with the theory that mating once and then killing your mate is the opposite of living only to mate), then he admits genetics is more complicated than that, and so develops another cure:
    Rick: It's koala, mixed with rattlesnake, chimpanzee, cactus, shark, golden retriever, and just a smidge of dinosaur. Should add up to normal humanity.
    Morty: I don't— that doesn't make any sense, Rick!
  • Rick also tries it in "Ricksy Business" with Abradolf Lincler: a genetic combination of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler who was intended to be a morally neutral super-leader. Turns out he's just a jerk who can't deal with his conflicting emotions.
• Life-Saving Encouragement: Morty is on trial for murder, and he uses the Death Crystal to determine that the only way to avoid the death penalty is to tell the judge "I will always remember our time in Peru." The judge believes Morty is her reincarnated loved one and releases him.
• Like Father, Like Son: Morty and Jerry — both are insecure, neurotic, emotional, and tend to put up with a lot.
  Scroopy Noopers: Is everyone in your family an idiot?
  Morty: For sure, me and my dad are.
• Listing the Forms of Degenerates: Why Pancho released tuberculosis in "Anatomy Park"
  "That's right, baby. A lot of people would pay top dollar to decimate the population. I'll take the highest bidder. Al Qaeda, North Korea, Republicans, Shriners, balding men that work out, people on the Internet that are only turned on by cartoons of Japanese teenagers — anything is better than working for you, you pompous, negligent, iTunes-gift-card-as-a-holiday-bonus-giving..."
• Literal Metaphor: In "Pilot", the "two plus two" part of Rick's rant about school sounds like it's just a metaphor but then it turns out that Morty's math test really consists of simple calculations like that.
• Logic Bomb:
  • Three regarding golf in "Meeseeks and Destroy". Square your shoulders and keep your head down. Choke up and follow through. Try to relax.
  • Rick makes the first level of the simulation shut down in "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" by talking to a crowd of people and making them do increasingly more complex things.
• Lotus-Eater Machine:
  • The parasites in "Total Rickall" can implant happy fake memories in their targets, then assume the identity of the focus of those memories. The parasite can then in turn inspire more memories, allowing its offspring to assume the forms within. The targets never question this because, to them, the parasites are trustworthy friends who have never done them wrong. Morty manages to snap everyone out of it by realizing the flaw in their deception: the parasites are incapable of fabricating negative memories. Because their family has no shortage of personal issues between them, it doesn't take long for them to weed out the parasites. Except for Mr. Poopybutthole; he was, in fact, just that nice of a guy.
  • Poor Simple Rick is kept in one of these in "The Ricklantis Mixup". He's stuck in a loop of experiencing the same happy memory over and over, and the positive endorphins his brain secretes because of it are used as flavor for a wafer. When Factory Worker Rick frees and accidentally kills Simple Rick, the former is given a massive Hope Spot before being shot unconscious and made into the new Simple Rick instead, using said Hope Spot to provide the happy memory.
• Louis Cypher: In "Something Ricked This Way Comes" the proprietor of the cursed items shop, who is actually the devil, goes by the name "Lucius" Needful.
• Love Potion: In "Rick Potion #9" Morty has Rick make one so Jessica will like him. Unfortunately, due to it being flu season the potion is transmitted through air, quickly causing the school (and eventually the entire world) to be in love with Morty. Rick later points out how Morty essentially asked him to make roofies. Morty answers back by noting that Rick still agreed to make said potion for him regardless, and that the only objection he offered at time was that doing so was a waste of his time and talents, rather than any moral scruples.
• Lovecraft Lite: It's only "Lite" for lack of a better word, but mostly the show's science-fiction is highly Lovecraft-inspired. Humanity is a speck in an infinite cosmos and beings which appear godlike are entirely different to our civilization and alien in intelligence, and to the extent they comprehend us, or we comprehend them, it's as a joke (the Cromulons who see Earth as merely a reality-show contestant).
• Lower-Deck Episode: "The Ricklantis Mixup" begins with Rick and Morty going off to visit the lost city of Atlantis, but the entire episode focuses on the various lives of the thousands of Ricks and Morties that live at the newly reconstructed Citadel of Ricks.