The Rick And Morty Season 7 Finale Brings Back A Major Character From Rick's Past
This article contains major spoilers for the "Rick and Morty" season 7 finale, "Fear No Mort"
Most "Rick and Morty" season finales go in an unexpected direction, but they still give fans a lot of canon to discuss. A lot of fans thought the season 3 finale, for instance, would bring Evil Morty back into the fold after his amazing re-introduction three episodes earlier. Instead, the episode focused on a seemingly one-off story about Rick beefing with the President. That might sound disappointing, but it resulted in Jerry's reunion with Beth, as well as Rick choosing to be a slightly less terrible influence on his family. Evil Morty would have to wait, but the season 3 finale's impact on the show is still easy to measure.
"Rick and Morty" season 7 takes a similar approach. Going into this season, fans may have expected an episode like "Unmortricken" to be the season's finale. A big, climactic battle between Rick and Rick Prime would've been the traditional approach to this sort of thing, ending the season on the most straightforwardly climactic note possible. Instead, the finale starts off as yet another one-off adventure, this time with Rick and Morty being introduced to a mysterious "Fear Hole" designed to make them face their deepest fears.
At first the fear hole seems to be a pretty anti-climactic plotline, with the duo easily beating up a couple of monsters and climbing out without issue. But when they get home they find that, through some weird time-loop, Rick's wife Diane has been teleported back into the Smith family's lives, the same age she was when she was supposed to die. Rick and Morty immediately figure the situation out — obviously, they're still in the hole — but Rick gets sucked into the situation anyway. After decades of loneliness, he has his wife back. Simulation or not, he's gonna have fun with it.
Real or not real?
It's the first half of this adventure where the episode's at it's most interesting. Rick is treating the situation a bit too much like a simulation, to the annoyance of Diane, which is enough to raise the idea that maybe the big twist of this episode is that this isn't a simulation at all. Maybe the real twist is that Rick really did get his wife back, but he's so emotionally closed off at this point that he'll let her slip away yet again.
It's a plot point disconcertingly similar to a season 3 fake-out in Dan Harmon's previous sitcom "Community." That episode ("Curriculum Unavailable") revealed that the main characters had all been patients in an insane asylum, and the whole first three seasons had been a shared psychosis between them. Of course, "Community" immediately backtracked and revealed that the therapist was lying to them, but still: This was so close to the end of season 3, which easily could've been the final season given the show's low ratings, and that made the fake-out twist a little more believable than you'd think. (It helped that half the storylines in "Community" were blatantly absurd.)
"Fear No Mort" plays around with the same premise. Objectively, we know it makes more sense for Diane's reappearance to be a simulation caused by the fear hole. But this is the finale, where most bets are off, so it's hard not to wonder if maybe we are about to see a whole new status quo shift. By the midway point, however, it becomes clear that this really is a simulation, with Rick being tested on his fear of losing love again and Morty being tested on his fear of being alone and ignored.
Who is Rick, really?
Despite Rick's knowledge of what's really going on, he still chooses to spend as much time with his old wife as possible. After some initial arguing, the two turn out to be a perfect match, and "Fear No Mort" presents us with the softest, kindest version of Rick we've ever seen. It's the moment that really highlights the central tragedy behind Rick's battle against Rick Prime: that no amount of revenge can bring back the gentle Rick who existed before Diane was taken away from him.
This sequence with Diane and Rick falling back in love lets us understand why the writers chose this episode for the season's finale; the central arc of season 7 was not about Rick getting his revenge, but about us discovering who Rick used to be. Maybe there's a chance Rick can return to the man he was when Diane was still around, this season argues. This finale presents us a world where he does, then it cruelly takes that world away.
For a few more scenes the audience is given some hope that this might motivate Rick to strive towards returning to who he once was, but after a few more fake-outs we get the episode's final twist: Rick never went into the fear hole at all. This was all Morty's hallucination, not Rick's. Rick never gets to meet Diane again, nor does he get to experience how any of that felt. Hell, there's a good chance that the real Rick wouldn't even handle the situation like he did in the simulation; maybe this version of Rick could never exist at all.
Another parallel to season 1
"Rick and Morty" season 7 has been filled with devastating full circle moments for the show, and this finale's no exception. Whereas "Unmortricken" ended with a twist on the ending to season 1's "Rick Potion #9," this episode ends with a twist on season 1's "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" The 2013 episode was all about Rick and Morty being trapped inside multiple layers of simulations, but the twist was that the Morty we've been following never existed. Rick was alone in the simulation the entire time (well, along with Jerry), talking to a version of Morty who was only there to trick Rick into giving the aliens the formula for portal travel.
In that episode, the Morty twist was a mild betrayal. It was clever, but it's not like Rick was particularly devastated by it. He'd already figured it out before the aliens revealed it, and Rick got the last laugh in the end. "Fear No Mort" switches the twist around, however, and it makes for a much darker revelation. Morty relies on Rick far more than Rick relies on Morty, at least from a pure survival perspective, so the reveal that Morty's trapped in the situation hits a lot harder than it did for Rick.
On the bright side, the episode's final moments provide some hope for the duo. Although Morty's Diane hallucination indicates that Morty would be genuinely upset by Rick finding happiness again and no longer needing him, Morty beating that level of the simulation implies he's moved past that fear, at least to an extent. Rick returning to the attitude of his younger self is still a far-away, nearly-impossible goal, but it's a little more believable now than it used to be.
Embracing the simulation
Perhaps the finale's most poignant idea, explored in at least two separate versions of the fear hole's simulation, is that what's real or not doesn't matter. First it's just fake Rick who embraces the simulation, then it's Morty who does the same, only snapping out of it when he realizes he's old enough to look almost identical to his dad.
It's an idea that's grown increasingly common in sci-fi stories about simulations over the years. Whereas "The Matrix" came out with a clear cut message about the importance of rejecting comforting falsehoods, subsequent simulation stories have ended with the conclusion of "eh, who cares?" Movies like "Inception" told us it doesn't matter if the main character was still dreaming or not, just like the recent sci-fi novel "Sea of Tranquility" ends with the main character discovering there's a major chance his world's a lie, and choosing to embrace it anyway.
"Rick and Morty" isn't even the first animated sitcom to play around with the idea. The recent season finale of "Futurama" also revealed that the characters' lives existed within one of many levels of a simulation, and the Planet Express crew chose to make peace with it instead of breaking out into the real world. At some point in the past 24 years, we've stopped trying to escape the Matrix, and Rick and Morty are no exception. Although Morty does (maybe) escape the fear hole in his final scene, the finale ends with him convincing the real Rick not to go down it himself. Morty spent the whole finale being confronted with harsh truths about his life and his inner psyche; Rick is denied any such clarity, and the episode seems to conclude that this is for the best.