Wubba Lubba Dub Dub: Is Evil Morty Returning?

On Sept. 4, the beloved Adult animated sitcom “Rick and Morty” premiered their highly anticipated sixth season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. This show, created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland in 2013, has garnered a lot of attention from Millenial and Gen-Z sci-fi fanatics as they use a grandpa-grandson duo to address some of science’s biggest questions and impossibilities through fantasy and comedy. After taking almost a year exactly from the last episode of season 5, the show returns with the same layers of meta humor, pop-culture references, and Rick’s pessimism that viewers love. But what is to be expected going forward?

Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith, both voiced by Justin Roiland, are a duo that go on classic adventures and jump through timelines via a portal gun. Rick is regarded to be the smartest man in the universe and obviously so while his grandson is, well, the opposite. This season is supposedly the continuation of the grand plot of Evil Morty’s existence and possible return after destroying the Citadel, a government of Ricks from different dimensions, at the end of season five.

Evil Morty is recognized as a version of Morty’s original character that turned to the dark side after multiple betrayals from his version of Rick. Mortys being disappointed by the actions of their “Ricks” aren’t a rarity, but the retaliation of a Morty certainly is. It demonstrates a surplus of intelligence and emotional maturity that this 14-year old character is not supposed to possess. 

While the show has been developing since 2013, almost a decade later it seems the true plot of the show is just beginning. Many fans speculate that the first five seasons simply serve as background and build up to the anticipated reveal of what this show is all about. Social media has been a catalyst for this conversation amongst fans, as it often is, and Rick and Morty’s verified social media accounts reply back just as often.

Going along with the fan-made theory of seasons one through five being a build up, season six episode one “Solaricks” serves as an introduction to a new family dynamic and way of conceptualizing this already complex show. Part of the show’s charm is almost every member of their immediate family is not from their original timeline. The show depends on the understanding, introduced by Rick, that there’s an infinite amount of universes, timelines, dimensions and therefore, no individual or bond is special.

While the emotional underlyings of the show contradicts this, Rick acts upon this in real life and has no conscience about switching Jerrys, Ricks and Mortys across timelines into other ones as he sees fit. 

In episode one of season six, we see the consequences of this framework and Morty, Rick and Jerry find themselves back in their original timelines separate from Summer, Beth and Space Beth. While they return to their original timeline they deal with the messes they’ve left behind. Rick was technologically haunted by his dead wife, Diane, Morty was facing abandoning his original family in a destroyed timeline, and Jerry goes back to a dysfunctional-Rick ruling dynamic as seen in season two. 

While many agree it wasn’t the most shocking episode thus far, it deconstructs a lot of what we’ve known about the show to be. Specifically the Smith family’s dynamic and even what their characters, at their core, are evolving to. The next episode airs Sept. 11 on Adult Swim, entitled “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” and broh it’s about to get wild.