Rick and Morty has emerged as one of the best sci-fi shows on television, despite being a foul-mouthed animated series in the same vein as South Park or Family Guy. The show expertly crafts fun and thought-provoking tales of the ethics of science, the love of family, and the personal self-realization of super-genius-but-kind-of-evil Grandpa Rick Sanchez and his high-school-loser grandson Morty Smith.
Although the show mostly specializes in an “Adventure of the Week” model, there is a continuity throughout the entirety of it. Relationships get damaged, bad things that happened in previous episodes are remembered in future ones, and the Smith/Sanchez family slowly gets further down the inter-dimensional rabbit hole. Like any story that deals with the multiverse theory (that there are infinite universes with infinite possibilities), things can get somewhat confusing. That leads to a lot of fan speculation.
Rick and Morty fanatics have scoured the show for clues and come up with these nine amazing theories, which each come with their own varying degrees of believably. Some are definitely more possible than others, but in a universe with infinite realities, can we really count any of these out completely?
9. Will The Real Morty Please Stand Up?
Are we even sure we’re following the right Morty? And by that, we mean the Morty that matches up with the Rick from universe C-137. At first glance, you’d probably answer “yes, of course, that’s the right Morty.” But consider the following:
We know that Rick had disappeared from his daughter Beth’s life for the last 20-years. We also know that Morty is a 14-year-old high school student. Despite that, we are shown that Rick has memories of Morty of a toddler.
How can that be, if Rick has been in the wind for the last two decades? The theory is that our real Rick is hanging out with a new family, and not his original group of relatives. If that’s true, what happened to real Rick’s original Morty, the one he remembers as a baby?
Well, it’s right there in the opening credits:
That’s right. Rick’s original Morty was devoured by giant frog monsters. The death of his original Morty led Rick into a spiral of drinking and depression, and perhaps explains why he’s so careless with the Morty we see on a regular basis. He already lost the one he cares about the most, so who cares if Morty 2.0 dies on their next adventure?
This theory goes even deeper. What if the Morty from the opening credits somehow managed to survive the harrowing brush with frog monster death? He would grow up to resent Rick. All Ricks, in fact. Some fans theorize that Morty turned into Evil Morty, the one responsible for killing thousands of Ricks.
