In the ‘Rick and Morty’ Season Premiere, Morty Finally, Really, Truly Outsmarts Rick

By his own design, Rick is the smartest being in the Central Finite Curve, but even he can find himself with a big problem on his hands thanks to an especially cocky Morty — or, at least, a traumatized, artificially mature one.

Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t yet watched tonight’s Season Eight premiere of Rick and Morty, “Summer of All Fears,” in which Morty found himself in an all-too-familiar situation: trapped by Rick in a simulated reality for years while he’s supposed to be learning some incredibly petty lesson. By this point in Rick and Morty, Morty Smith has lived several lifetimes in several different non-realities, usually due to Rick’s stubborn, vindictive nature, but, in “The Summer of All Fears,” Morty finally lived enough simulated years to learn how to teach Rick a lesson using a liminal dimension.

After Rick traps Morty and Summer in his new Matrix-inspired lesson-teaching machine for 17 years, a jaded, ex-con, war veteran Morty finally turns the tables on Rick in a plan that Rick himself doesn’t thwart by the end credits, marking the first moment in Rick and Morty history when we can say that Morty Prime out-Ricked the Rickest Rick.

In “Summer of All Fears,” Rick es out after imprisoning his two children in a newly introduced Matrix machine designed to punish Morty and Summer for any petty offense against their near-omnipotent grandfather, which, in this case, was exceptionally trivial even by Rick’s standards. While learning the lesson of “Never Take Grandpa’s Phone Charger,” Morty and Summer live very different lives in a charging-centric society, with Summer becoming a despotic President and tech mogul while Morty served prison time before becoming the immortal prime rib in the meat grinder during Summer’s military campaigns.

Upon their return to reality, Summer and Morty insist that Rick not use his “Morty's Mind Blowers” memory eraser to delete their time in the Matrix, a move that Rick almost doesn’t come to regret when he decides that jaded, ex-con, war-induced-PTSD Morty is a better hang than the annoying, normal-PTSD version of his sidekick. Morty impresses Rick with his new technical skills as they work on Rick’s amphibious Death Race-inspired super tank, only for Morty to really blow Rick’s mind by shocking him unconscious and trapping him in his own Matrix machine with the new lesson, “Don’t Put People in a Matrix.”

Morty then goes on a rampage in the revved up Death Racer with the goal of destroying a nuclear power plant that will knock out North America’s electric grid and remove the need of phone chargers entirely, only for Summer to talk him out of it at the very last second with an emotional speech. As opposed to every single other instance of Morty tricking Rick and using his own inventions against him, Rick isn’t the one to stop the carnage this time, although, after escaping the Matrix and firing off his signature catchphrase, he does swoop in to prevent nuclear meltdown and save a scientist from getting stomped to death by his grandkids.

And while Morty and Summer eventually opt to have their minds wiped of the Matrix-related trauma and its aftermath, Rick will have to live on knowing that Morty’s little Matrix trick easily bought him enough time to destroy the nuclear plant if Summer hadn’t stepped in, and that this normal, non-Evil Morty outsmarted Rick with an original invention, and Rick wasn’t even the one to stop him. 

Now that’s a real wubba lubba dub dub of a memory.