Film Theory: We're Watching Evil Morty's Origin Story! (Rick and Morty Season 5)

stop being in love and start having fun oh love's pretty fun summer just give it a chance i hate to break it to you but what people call love it's just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed it hits hard then it slowly fades leaving you stranded in a failing marriage break the cycle rise above focus on science oh geez season five rick is way different than you season one rick hello internet welcome to film theory the show that's back with a rick ridiculous theory that if true will expose probably the best twist reveal any show has ever conceived ever i'm not even joking if this one is even remotely close we're talking reveal on par with game of thrones red wedding or them needing to go back to the island on lost now don't get me wrong i've loved the start of season five of rick and morty honestly it feels stronger than the start of season four but even with the episodes themselves being solid something to me has felt off about it all the characters just i don't know it's hard to explain but they're acting in ways that don't quite fit with how they're established to operate and i'm not the only one to notice this mixed in with all the preys have been people calling out the fact that the characters just seem out of sorts there's also some outright mistakes which we'll talk about here in a minute that for any other creative team might slide but for rick and morty just feels sloppy in a way that the show isn't something is clearly a miss in season five and while it certainly could be new writers or the break between seasons or the fact that this is the fastest turnaround time ever for a season of the show i'm not convinced that that's it i think that there's a theory that explains all of it the weird characters the mistakes and the odd creative choices that we've seen in these first few episodes i think that what we're witnessing in season five is evil morty's origin story things feel off because we're following a different morty and rick from a different point of their lives and that by the end of the season there's gonna be a big rug pull moment when morty puts on his signature eye patch showing that he is in fact not the morty we assumed he was a special shout out to ghast writer on the game theorist subreddit for bringing this idea to my attention it's an idea that seems outlandish at first but the more that we thought about it and re-watch the episodes the more it starts to make sense well episodes 1 and 2 were relatively unremarkable it was season 5 episode 3 that really got my theorist senses tingling a rick convenient mort in the episode morty dates a copyright neutral version of captain planet while rick and summer go party on three different worlds in their final moments before destruction and while it's a fine episode to be sure there's just tons of little things about it that again feel off first and foremost is rick we watch as rick in the episode falls in love with an alien okay grandpa the meteor's almost here we can go now ah now we still got time then stop being in love and start having fun oh love's pretty fun summer just give it a chance this is totally out of character considering that back in season one he was the one telling his grandkids what people call love is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed focus on science falling in lust yeah that's a total rick move but wanting to make an emotional connection with someone and then being furious when the relationship ends yeah that that's not our rick and rick isn't the only one breaking character here we've also got morty falling in love with planeteena honestly who could blame him for falling in love with the character voiced by allison brie but throughout his entire emotional arc the way he deals with infatuation lust love and falling out of love feels immature compared to where we saw morty last season in case you forgot back in the season 4 episode vat of acid the show's creators loki slid an amazing 4-minute silent film right into the middle of the episode it covers the epic highs and lows of a relationship where morty learns to fall in love and deal with loss and devastation and triumph and heartbreak and reconciliation and everything in between by the end of the episode his maturity level has skyrocketed you know it was fun rick living without consequences is great but then i started wondering what am i living for we are who we are because of consequences compare that to the level of emotional development and maturity he displays at the start of this episode i don't want to think i want to see a girl i like slamming the door repeatedly in his parents face no fewer than was that four times geez morty why don't you tell mom and dad how you really feel morty's behaving just like a petulant fourteen-year-old my son is 14 miss i'm sorry morty you're way too young wait morty can't be 14 can he that brings us to an even greater inconsistency in this episode something that goes beyond characters behaving out of character because despite what his mother might claim about his age it doesn't make sense for morty to be 14 in the scene based on what we've seen so far i mean he was a 14 year old high school student way back in season one and assuming everything that we've seen so far has been in chronological order he should have aged during that time at the start of season five we had this exchange when do i ask you for anything when do you i haven't been to a full week of school in years unless you think that this is just morty exaggerating we know that more than a year has passed between season one and five based on the fact that we had christmas episodes both in the season one episode anatomy park and in the season four episode rattlestar rick galactica at the very least a full year of time has had to have passed between those two episodes making him more than a year older than when we first started so if the series is set in chronological order it would make no sense for morty to be a 14 year old high school student at the start of season 1 and still be 14 years old in season 5. some people might look at these sorts of inconsistencies as the result of a rookie mistake by the show's new writing staff case you weren't aware over half a dozen writers or staff writers on the show got their first writing credit starting in season four or later but i'm not buying it i mean it's not as though the writers kicked the show's old staff off to make room for themselves dan harmon is still the man at the helm steering the ship come to think of it the entire premise of that episode with mr nimbus seems off too it begins when their ship touches the ocean violating an old treaty that supposedly existed between rick and his old nemesis mr nimbus but in the season three episode rick lantis mix up rick and morty had an entire off-screen adventure in atlantis all right morty you ready for our adventure to the lost city of atlantis ready as i'll ever be rick it would have been pretty hard to do that without ever coming into contact with the ocean especially considering that mr nimbus himself is from atlantis if you seek war with atlantis you shall have it something weird is going on with the continuity of season five for as chaotic and random as the show can seem at times the reality is that rick and morty has been far too intentional and deliberate with its creative choices for all of these inconsistencies to just be random oopsies last year at the adult swim festival's rick and morty panel dan harmon and several other members of the show's staff and cast briefly hinted at their plans for season five dan do you have any update that you can give us about season five i know this is the season four look back panel there's pretty groovy things coming regarding bath space beth was not a one-on-one off character and indeed we see space beth return in season five episode two after that dan harmon hands the baton to executive producer scott martyr there's epic cannon in season five coming okay i mean fans are gonna like get knocked over by the can and we're about to hit them with season five again this is an indication that the show's canon in continuity is gonna be a big part of season five meaning that what looks like chronological inconsistencies might be no mere accident in fact the show seems to be outright drawing attention to the weirdness of the chronology i mean why else would summer put on some giant 2010 throwback glasses in season five episode three don't get me wrong i'm not saying it's 2010 in the show that wouldn't make sense but what i am saying is that the show's creative team are directing our attention to chronology in that same episode we see planetino wearing a shirt that says vote no to prop 6. since this also took place right after she put out a huge forest fire something that california is known for i'm going to assume the no on prop 6 shirt was a reference to the california ballot proposition trying to repeal a fuel tax that would make sense for the eco-conscious planetina but the what isn't important here it's the win prop 6 was a big deal back in 2018. yet another example to the show dating itself for some strange reason though come to think of it that's another place where we potentially have a mismatch between established rick and morty cannon and what we see in season five all signs point to the scene happening in california but apparently it's only 200 miles from where the smith family home is there's a huge forest fire like 200 miles from me and in case you've forgotten according to series creator justin roiland the smith family lives in washington state near seattle which is far more than 200 miles away from the border of california based on that the most sensible explanation for these chronological and geographical mismatches is what we're seeing in season 5 doesn't directly follow the events of previous seasons because this isn't r rick and morty and by that i mean the rick and morty from dimension c137 the rickest rick and the mortiest morty as you might call them from the rickest rick there is it would go without saying that the rickest rick would have the mortiest morty that said despite them being from c137 they've actually been living in dimension c132 ever since the episode rick potion number nine just wanted to call that one out anyway to recap the rick and morty that we're seeing in season five so far doesn't seem like our rick and morty that we've spent the last four seasons getting to know in terms of both characterization and continuity which leads me to believe that this might be telling a story about a completely different family and i don't think that's a big logical leap in fact i think that the show is actively leading us in this direction season five episode two morty plicity was basically an entire episode with the premise what if we had an episode where we focused on a version of the smith family that wasn't our version of the smith family in that episode we get a repeated series of fake outs where a smith family is presented to us as the real smith family before getting bumped off cause they were just a bunch of decoys the point of the episode was that we as the audience are blind to who we're really watching in any given episode and that we're totally willing to get emotionally invested in the characters even though we're not watching our canonical main version of the characters that was insane i love you guys i've totally changed that episode set up the idea that we could be watching any version of rick and morty at any point that we turn on an episode so why not the big reveal that the morty we've been watching since the start of the season is in fact evil morty if they can do that sort of fake out with multiple new families within a single episode why not do it with a single new family across multiple episodes one thing i've talked about a lot recently with these theories is the show trying to strike a balance between serialization and episodic structures so how do you balance the two what we learned is to split the diff from now on rick and morty doing a little of this and a little of that yeah sometimes we'll do classic stuff you know other times we'll do whatever i think that this could be part of a brilliant way to as morty says split the diff you get those classic season 1 vibes by resetting the characters back to an earlier part of their emotional journey but it also all pays off in the end fulfilling all those promises about epic canon that will how did he put it again fans are gonna like get knocked over by the canon we're about to hit them with season five the immature version of morty that we see in rick convenient mort might seem like a continuity problem or our show's protagonist breaking character but it might also just be a setup to reveal that this is all part of an emotional arc for a different morty an evil morty and i don't think it's a stretch to assume that this new morty that we're observing in season five is gonna turn out to be evil morty let's consider what this version of morty has gone through in the season already in episode one he finally manages to get a date with jessica and then loses her and not just in a they're not dating kind of way anymore but for all intents and purposes the jessica that he knew has effectively died i'm a time god then in rick convenient mort we see him running headfirst into a whirlwind romance with planeteena maybe it's him trying to bounce back after what happened to jessica maybe it's just him with teenage hormones but he experiences love lust heartbreak and loss in very quick succession going from saving wildlife in the forest with your earth-loving girlfriend to killing a bunch of middle-aged has-beens to freer to watching her murder a bunch of coal miners that is gonna be doing a lot of weird stuff to a young teenage boy's emotional development this is freaking you out huh it is a lot to take in this could be the start of an arc that involves this version of morty being pushed to an emotional breaking point by the end of the season luckily mom is there at the end of the episode to comfort him mommy's here but this is also the most that we've ever seen morty relying on a family member for emotional support what's gonna happen if he loses beth or beth lets him down his one remaining emotional lifeline who won't you know is also back to drinking i'll get the wine thank you something that we haven't seen in a very long time throughout season five we've seen a weaker more vulnerable and less capable version of rick accompanied by a morty who's learning more and more that it's up to him to take control of things at the same time that this same morty seems to be getting pushed closer and closer to an emotional breaking point could this be foreshadowing a conversion to the dark side after all remember that by the time we met evil morty in season 1 he had already replaced his own rick with a robotic puppet well we'll have to wait and see but the more i re-watch these season 5 episodes and the seasons that led up to him the more i'm convinced that this version of rick and morty isn't what it first appears i know that i'm ready to go nuts when morty finally reveals that evil eye patch but until then it's all just a theory all film theory and subscribe to this channel so you can be the first to tell all your friends and co-workers these awesome theories about all your favorite shows or subscribe to the channel so you can come back to this video and make fun of me when i completely am wrong at the end of the season either way subscribing seems like the right choice i'll see you all next week

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,687,582

Rating: 4.9083433 out of 5

Keywords: evil morty, evil morty theory, evil morty origin, rick and morty, rick, morty, rick and morty season 5, rick and morty season 5 episode 2, rick and morty song, rick and morty season 5 trailer, rick morty, rick and morty theory, rick morty theory, film theory, film theorists, matpat, rick and morty film theory, rick morty film theory, film theory rick and morty, rick and morty best moments, rick and morty evil morty, rick and morty season 5 episode 5

Id: kw8-FrCaTD4

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/User_4756]

He didn't see S5E7, didn't he?

Because I think it was confirmed that we are in C-132, which makes all his theory broken, unless the writers somehow use time travel?

I mean, I'm going to be honest, the part where he shows all the "plotholes" is funny, but I don't think the answer is evil morty.

[u/ThrowJed]

Bloody hell these "plot holes" are the weakest arguments I've ever seen. He's still 14 because it's a bloody cartoon and they don't want to age him. Simpsons have over 20 Christmas and Halloween episodes and reference time passing and they haven't aged either, guess we better make a whole theory based on it.

They don't have to make Morty a damn 20 year old if they don't want to write stories based on that. That's the beauty of having a cartoon rather than real actors, they don't have to grow up.

Either way if nothing else episode 4 and 7 are confirmed c137, and there's no reason to think other episodes aren't or that they're an exception. This theory is just catering to the current debates going on for views.

[u/GhostUgandanWarrior]

In Season 5 ep 3 we see the graveyard in the backyard so at least ep 3 is C 137

[u/OnlyNeuron]

Poor guy trying hard to justify this sloppy writing

[u/Abbabaloney]

Boy, this plays like a giant stretch.

Even if they are pulling some big bullshit behind the scenes reveal, to invest 5 episodes into making poor content in order to do it is a really hm-fisted execution.

[u/thechikinguy]

I like how "they celebrate Christmas twice means two years have passed in-show" is proof when most cartoon shows have multiple Christmas/holiday episodes yet the characters never age. Maggie Simpson has seen like eight Christmases and she's still a dang baby.

[u/MaeM9]

I'm gonna be pissed if this isn't canon.

[u/Rockhardsimian]

He could have gone to Atlantis in another dimension?

[u/PlayingOrkGamez]

I imagine they were done with Evil Morty, just to spite the fans. He's president of the Citadel of Ricks, that's peak irrelevancy.

But with new writers, they might just give the fans what they want. And that might suck.