Rick & Morty Season 6 Finally Answers A 7-Year-Old Question
This post contains spoilers for the season 6 premiere of "Rick and Morty."
"Rick and Morty" stands at a curious place when it comes to animated sitcoms. As a comedy, the show has always known how to deliver hilarious standalone episodes, a craft that's been slowly lost to time in the age of streaming. From "Pickle Rick" to "Total Rickall" to "The Vat of Acid Episode," there are episodes you can easily watch over and over again on their own and they continue to hold up. These stories focus on a simple sci-fi premise and exploit them for every laugh they're worth.
But every once in a while, the series drops a bit of lore, a key backstory reveal that makes its world feel larger and lived-in. Whether it's the history of the Council of Ricks or the story of Rick's adventures with his alien friends fighting against the Federation, "Rick and Morty" has slowly but surely built up an intriguing mythology that fans can obsess over. And yet, any time the show has the chance to become a proper serialized story, it laughs in the face of canon. As co-creator Dan Harmon told IGN, he doesn't think he's good at writing canon that leads to an actual ending.
Indeed, much of the show's major canon was seemingly put to an end last season when Evil Morty literally destroyed the Citadel and yeeted himself to a universe without Rick. But that doesn't mean we still can't have callbacks to past events. In fact, season 6 begins with one of the best callbacks the show has done in some time, and it involves Jerry Smith.
A Jerry in time and space
The premiere picks up shortly after the season 5 finale, with the Citadel destroyed and Rick and Morty drifting in space. After a great "Avengers: Endgame" parody, the duo is rescued by space clone Beth and brought back to Earth, where Rick resets the multidimensional fluid required to repair his broken portal gun. The problem is that this resets every interdimensional traveler in this dimension. This applies to Rick — who we know is from a dimension where he lost his wife and his daughter — and Morty — who hails from a dimension where every human turned into a Cronenberg monster after Morty's love potion got out of control. But Jerry also arrives glowing green just like Rick and Morty. Why? Because of the Jerryboree of course!
The Jerryboree made its debut in the season 2 episode "Mortynight Run," the episode that introduced audiences to the Blips and Chitz arcade and the game "Roy: A Life Well Lived" and followed Morty's adventure befriending an alien assassin that bought guns from Rick. But before they could finish the shady deal, Rick and Morty have to deal with a stowaway Jerry. Their solution? Leave him at a daycare. And at some point, a Rick decided it would be useful to leave his Jerry at a safe place, so a daycare at a Furp Rock Plaza on an unregistered cross-temporal asteroid was opened. There are dozens of Jerrys at any time, and they have miniature models, a ball pit, a TV with customizable settings for the Jerrys to play with, and an employee in a big Beth costume serving as a mascot.
At the end of "Mortynight Run," Rick and Morty return to Jerryboree to pick up Jerry, but Morty accidentally crashed into another Morty and both their ticket stubs fall to the ground. This forces Rick to simply pick a Jerry at random. It was a silly, funny end to the story, not really meant to be a mystery, let alone a story with any serious repercussions. Until now.
A grown Jerry
The season 6 premiere, "Solaricks," answers the question many fans had forgotten: did Rick pick the right Jerry? It turns out ... he didn't! So when Rick and Morty return to their original dimensions, Jerry also teleports away to a dimension straight out of season 2 — Jerry is still out of a job and constantly the butt of the joke for the rest of the family.
But even if "Rick and Morty" isn't strictly a serialized show, we have seen the characters grow and change over the years, even if it's just a little bit. This is not the same Jerry from season 2 — he's gotten back together with Beth, he has a job (presumably), he has gone on big adventures with Rick, and he is an interdimensional traveler. He has every right to mock his former family and tell them to suck his interdimensional a**, and when he tells Beth that he's glad they spent time divorced, you believe him. He's come out stronger on the other side.
Sure, finding out more about Rick's backstory, or seeing the saga of Evil Morty take place is thrilling, but it is just as satisfying to see "Rick and Morty" recalling a tiny mystery it had seemingly forgotten.
"Rick and Morty" airs new episodes Sundays on Adult Swim.