Characters / Rick and Morty: The Smith-Sanchez Family

aka: Rick And Morty Jerry Smith

Rick and Morty Main Character Index
The Smith-Sanchez Family (Rick Sanchez | Morty Smith) | School | Rick and Morty: Variants (The Citadel) | Others | One Off Characters | Oni ComicBook | Pocket Mortys

Beware of spoilers!

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Character-Specific Pages

• Rick Sanchez
• Morty Smith

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The Smith-Sanchez Family we see throughout the show. For multiversal Variants of the Family members, see this page.

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General

From left to right: Rick, Morty, Jerry, Beth , Space Beth and Summer.

"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness."

— Dr. Wong

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• Abusive Parents: Beth, Jerry and Rick aren't idyllic parents; while they are proven to care for Morty and Summer, this is largely overshadowed by their treatment of them.
  • Beth is mourning the loss of her youthful freedom, as her marriage to Jerry and accidental pregnancy condemned her to the life of motherhood, causing her to develop alcoholism in an attempt to cope with it all. At worst, she chooses to save Summer instead of Morty in a life or death decision, she chose her in a heartbeat and would've allowed him to die if Rick didn't arrive in time to save them.
  • Jerry is a self-described coward who uses pity to deflect any form of responsibility or consequences for his actions.
  • Rick abandoned Beth when she was a child, and when he came back he started using Morty as a lab rat and belittling him at every opportunity. Rick then orchestrated Beth and Jerry's divorce because he hated Jerry and believed Beth would do better without him.
• Action Survivor: Through association with Rick, the Smiths have all become accustomed to dealing with dangerous and bizarre situations despite being ultimately fairly mundane humans.
• Adults Are Useless: Rick, Beth and Jerry are all selfish and egotistical. The most stable and morally sound characters are the children, Summer and Morty, at least for now, and Morty is already cracking up with the trauma of the multiple murders Rick has made him commit during their adventures taking a toll on him.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: They do have their moments that show they care for another despite toxic dysfunction. Deconstruction as those moments unfortunately are moments; they don't last and their toxic dysfunction remains an ongoing problem that none of them want to work to resolve. By the end of Season 3, they get back together after Jerry and Beth reunite and make a better attempt to become a real family. The following seasons show them still dysfunctional, but also being more honest and appreciative of one another than before.
• Badass Family: They're dysfunctional as hell, but are a force to be reckoned with during a fight. This trope is most evident in "Rick Potion #9" and "Total Rickall".
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Beth and Space Beth are the blondes, Jerry and Morty are the brunettes, and Summer is the Redhead.
• Brother–Sister Team: Morty and Summer, often. They are usually teamed up as the sanest members left in the family and shield each other from the craziness that surrounds them.
• Character Development: All of them, or at least the versions of them that we end up with by Season 5, have gone through a healthy amount of change for the better.
• Depending on the Writer: While the Smith-Sanchez family is always portrayed as a Dysfunctional Family, the severity of their dysfunction does vary.
  • Rick can range from being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who loves his family to an unrepentant, self-absorbed Jerkass who only cares about how others, including his aforementioned family, can serve him.
  • Jerry is sometimes a good-natured everyman whose earnest desire for a happy, simple life is marred because he had the misfortune of marrying a woman whose father happens to be a galactic criminal. Other times, he's shown to be Not So Above It All and can be just as selfish and egotistical as Rick, albeit minus the smarts to back it up. Jerry also switches between being a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass who demonstrates a shocking level of competence when lives are on the line to a completely inept Dirty Coward who falls to pieces the minute that danger is present.
  • While having Parental Issues has always been one of Beth's defining attributes, how deeply it affects her is subject to variation. At times, Beth serves as the family's Only Sane Man whose craving for Rick's affection is noticeable, but mild. Other times, however, she's a narcissistic womanchild who shuns her flawed but well-meaning husband and who's willing to jeopardize her children's well-being if it means keeping her father around.
• Dysfunctional Family: To put it bluntly, they are a crazy family. Several characters have remarked that it is astounding how they manage to stay a family for as long as they do, and more or less break apart three years after Rick Sanchez enters their life.
  • Gets discussed and downplayed after Beth and Jerry's divorce and over the course of Season 3 as the family starts really assessing what is actually so toxic about themselves (Summer's tendency to shift blame to others and rely on escapism rather than solving her problems, Morty's Kid Sidekick nature to Rick, Beth's dependence on her father's love and approval and the subsequent crippling fear of being left by him (as well as wondering if she's too much like her father for her own good), and Jerry constantly using his Butt-Monkey status to garner pity from people rather than actually do anything to improve himself as a person) and work on getting past it. By the Season 3 finale the status quo from Season 1 has been restored with an intact family under one roof, except now everyone seems to be genuinely happy with their lives and are better people, with only Rick as the odd man out because he relied on the family's dysfunction as a means of both validating his worldview and to guarantee a place in their lives regardless of his antics and adventures.
• Family of Choice: An odd example, since Beth is Rick's daughter and Morty and Summer Beth and Jerry's children, but by the start of Season 6, only Summer, Beth, and Space Beth belong to the same universe as each other, while Rick, Morty, and Jerry belong to different universes. Despite this, they chose to stick by each other than the family they "belong" to.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: Morty is the Optimist, Rick and Space Beth are the Cynics, Summer is the Realist, Beth is the Apathetic, Jerry is the Conflicted.
• Incest Subtext: Beyond the exotic Screw Yourself moments that alternate universes and clones afford (which is directly shown and explored in "Bethic Twinstinct" between the two Beths), the Smith-Sanchezes flirt dangerously close to full-blown incest for reasons beyond their power.
  • Rick in particular has gotten naked in front of and with Morty several times (and in the former case, has by now been naked in front of everyone in the family on multiple occasions), and was once forced to hold hands and make out with him when they were possessed by a pair of Glorzos lovers in "Promortyus".
  • Summer has had the displeasure of walking in on Morty masturbating a number of times, and the siblings accidentally wind up (non-sexually) making an enormous sci-fi incest baby in "Rickdependence Spray" in the form of Naruto Smith.^*Specifically, Summer donates one of her eggs to try to stop the giant sperm monsters running rampant on the planet, only for everyone to discover that the sperm are Morty's, and they fail to prevent Sticky from fertilizing the egg.
  • Though they're not biologically related, Rick and Jerry get some in-law incest subtext in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy" when they are pulled through a wormhole and go through a Disney Acid Sequence, which at one point includes naked versions of the two of them rolling around on top of each other.
  • Jerry also gets some direct Parental Incest thrown into the mix in "Final DeSmithation" when he eats a fate-altering, binding fortune cookie stating that he'll have sex with his mom, with him spending the rest of the episode desperately trying to avert this, and Rick eventually having to use another binding fortune to reverse it.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The fact that the Jerry, Beth, and Summer that we follow starting from the end of “Rick Potion #9” are actually not the same people that the show began with. While this event was a massive turning point in Season 1 that established the tone of the series, the fact that several episodes in the following seasons casually mention this fact has made it somewhat common knowledge nowadays.
• Limited Wardrobe: All of them will wear the same piece of clothing unless there is a special occasion. Summer's new top in Raising Gazorpazorp was an important plot point in the same episode.
• Nice Mean And In Between: This happens if and whenever Summer joins Rick and Morty. So Morty is nice, Rick is mean and Summer is in-between.
• Parental Favoritism:
  • Beth seems to favor Summer over Morty, at least in the third season. When given a choice between Summer and Morty, Beth immediately chose Summer and would have allowed Morty to die. Though this may no longer be the case, since Beth was pretty much at her worst in Season 3, and once she made the decision in "The ABCs of Beth" to be a better mom to her kids, hasn't really shown any additional favoritism towards one over the other.
  • Zigzagged with Rick, who shows it to both grandchildren in different ways, but claims to them in "A Rickle in Time" that he doesn't have an actual favorite between them since he considers them both to be "equal amounts of pain in my ass."
    • Morty is his preferred adventuring partner, to the point that, at the beginning of the show, Summer was legitimately convinced she was The Unfavorite. While she is included in more and more adventures as the seasons pass and she cements her status at The Reliable One, it's still usually as a "third" to Rick and Morty, who still have plenty of solo adventures, whereas the only way Summer gets a solo adventure with Rick is if Morty is busy/preoccupied with something else. Morty is also the only "original" member of the Smith family that Rick has always kept with him, unlike Summer, Beth, and Jerry, whom he abandoned iterations of in the Cronenberged universe. Morty also knows a lot more about Rick and his place in the multiverse than the rest of his family, or at least, learns about it much sooner (such as the Citadel of Ricks, Rick's own role in its existence, and Rick's backstory).
    • He's nicer to Summer than Morty (perhaps in part because he knows she's less likely to put up with his bullshit), and definitely considers her to be his more competent grandkid (rightfully so), tasking her with important missions in episodes from later seasons like "Morty's Mind Blowers", "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", "Solaricks", and "Rick: A Mort Well Lived". It probably helps that Summer reminds him a lot of his dead wife, Diane, which he tells an AI version of her.
  • Averted with Jerry, who loves both of his children equally.
• Related in the Adaptation: The show's based on a series of sketches that parody Back to the Future. Now the Doc and Marty expies are grandfather and grandson.
• Replacement Goldfish: Since "Rick Potion #9" (and judging by a memory in "Morty's Mind Blowers", some time after that), the Beth, Jerry, and Summer we currently follow are not the same ones Rick and Morty once knew. It's implied that Rick has hopped dimensions several times before, so our Morty may not be Rick's either. As hinted in "The Rickshank Redemption" and confirmed in "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort", Rick's original Beth had died well before she was able to meet Jerry and birth Summer and Morty, so Rick never had a Smith family to begin with.
• Seen It All: No matter what ridiculous, high concept Sci-Fi, Science Fantasy or Black Comedy scenario's they find themselves in, you can always expect at least one, if not all of them to have a look of complete apathy.
• Sixth Ranger: Space Beth basically becomes the sixth member of the family beginning with "Star Mort: Rickturn of the Jerri".
• Smart Jerk and Nice Moron: Rick is a foul-mouthed genius inventor who constantly puts Morty (and anyone else he doesn't respect, such as Jerry) down. Meanwhile, Morty, who serves as his Bumbling Sidekick assistant, is kindhearted and empathetic, but is much less competent than Rick and is implied to have some kind of intellectual disability. Rick heaps abuse on Morty, but secretly loves him. Meanwhile, Morty knows Rick is a jerk but repeatedly gets dragged into adventures against his will, where he then frequently needs Rick to fix his problems for him.
• What You Are in the Dark: Rick's actions and inventions often puts the family into situations where they can perform some truly dubious things with little to no consequences if they so choose to. Needless to say, their better angels are often ignored.
• With Friends Like These...: Despite being a family, all of them at one point have physically hurt and/or emotionally abused one another for one reason or another.
• You Are Number 6: Rick drags the family (except for Jerry due to being The Anti-Nihilist) into decadent nihilism once he keys them into the fact that the multiverse makes everything and every one by default unremarkable and of little worth. It's implied Morty isn't his first grandson and Morty himself is (at least) on his third version of his family. Beth (or maybe a clone of her) throws this back in his face during the Season 3 finale, telling him that he can either try to coexist with his current household or leave them alone and go find another version of the Smiths to harass.

Main Family Members

Beth Smith

Beth Smith (nee Sanchez)

Voiced by: Sarah Chalke

Beth: I feel like I've spent my life pretending you're a great guy and trying to be like you. And the ugly truth has always been-
Rick: That I'm not that great a guy and you're exactly like me.
Beth: Am I evil?
Rick: Worse. You're smart.

Jerry's wife, Summer and Morty's mother and Rick's daughter, Beth works as a veterinarian specializing in cardiothoracic surgery and faces the problems that follow her unstable marriage and her dad living with her family, though she's the least affected family member by the latter of the two. As the series goes on, it becomes increasingly clear she has some darker sides to her personality; both as a consequence of being Rick's daughter as well as issues stemming from his abandonment of her in her childhood.

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• Abusive Parents: Downplayed as it is not really shown often and Beth is mostly shown to be a good mom but there are times where she is emotionally abusive to her son and daughter, as well as genuinely neglectful. Beth even admits at one point that deep down she doesn't have a "maternal instinct", and that she has to be especially encouraged to come to the aid of her children. Starting with the Season 3 finale, however, she seems to be making an effort to be a genuinely better parent.
• Actually a Doombot:
  • The end of season 3 seemed to suggest (though not confirm) that Beth had abandoned her family to travel the world/universe/multiverse to find herself while Rick created a clone of her programmed with all her memories and personality to take her place so no one would be the wiser and allow Beth the option to return to the family if she so desired. See A.I. Is a Crapshoot for more.
  • Later the season 4 finale reveals that Rick did end up cloning Beth resulting in two versions of her, one that stayed behind to raise her family and one that went off to have adventures. However, both Beths believe they're the original and both of them have bombs implanted in their necks, which Rick claims would transmit the memories of the Clone Beth into the original before vaporizing the clone. The end of the episode reveals not even Rick knows which one's the original. The decision Beth made in "The ABC's of Beth" was her forcing Rick to choose whether he wanted her to go or stay and be a part of his life. Rick intentionally removed the labels from the clone and the original then randomized them, leaving it up to chance so he wouldn't have to make the decision. Then he deleted the memory of him doing it. It's now impossible to know which is the clone and which is the original, and everyone in the family left before Rick replayed the memory because none of them care which is which.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: An inverted example. As previously stated above, the end of season 3 ended with the possibility (though not the confirmation) that Beth had left her family while Rick created a clone to take her place. The inversion came about as the alleged clone-Beth began to consider the possibility that she was the clone (despite Rick's insistence that she wasn't) but rather than go insane or "go Blade Runner" as Rick put it, she ultimately decided to roll with it along with rejecting some of Beth's more negative personality traits; becoming a better mother to her children, learning to appreciate Jerry for being the anti-thesis of her father and getting back together with him, as well as beginning to draw the line with Rick and his behavior; even outright telling him that if he can't learn to coexist with the rest of the family on THEIR terms then as far as she was concerned he could just vanish from her life completely.
• The Alcoholic: While not to the extent of Rick, she can really put away wine when things get down. In "Rixty Minutes", she goes through several boxes of wine while lamenting her lost opportunities. In "Total Rickall", Summer has at least one memory of Beth getting wasted and accidentally hitting her in the eye with a wine bottle, which is followed by her rushing to fill a wine glass after she shoots Mr. Poopybutthole under the mistaken belief that he's a shape-shifting alien parasite.
• Alcoholic Parent: She got it from Rick. She isn't bad as him though, but a flashback with her and Summer shows that she's had her problems.
• Ambiguous Situation: A whole lot of these appear about her and her true character in "The ABC's of Beth". It doesn't help that on both sides of the issue, you have Unreliable Expositors, with Rick tendencies to twist the truth and Beth attempts to protect her pride by lying.
  • Was she as much of a violently deranged child as Rick thinks she was? According to her, she only asked for dangerous weapons in a desperate attempt to get Rick's attention, while Rick believes she had full intention of using them for dangerous acts of violence.
  • Beth vehemently denies pushing Tommy into the honey swamp and leaving him to die in Froopyland, the world her father built for her as a child. As a grown woman, she has no recollection of it, even believing that Froopyland was a figment of her imagination. In her mind, she believes that Tommy got lost and she invented Froopyland to cope with Tommy's death. Tommy swears he was pushed into the swamp — but he is not a trustworthy source, starting and perpetuating a cannibalistic and incestuous cycle to survive and clearly losing his mind afterwards. Rick believes on the spot that Beth did it though, and she denies it through the episode.
  • At the end of the episode, is Beth still the real Beth? As she comes to terms with how similar she is to her father in a bad sense, Rick offers her to create a clone that will care for her children and go to her work and do everything she needs, while Beth herself gets to go to adventures and explore her newfound dark side free of consequences. Rick states that, whichever she chooses, she will finally be happy to have chosen a life for herself. At the end of the episode, she is nice to her kids and chirpy about ordering pizza, but it's not clear and never stated whether that is Beth finally happy and at peace with herself or her clone in a "perfect mom" mode.
    • Even then, there's also the question of if she took the clone, does she intends to come back? Rick said the clone can take over for how long she wants. She can leave forever or come back in a few days, at which point, Rick will simply turn the clone off and she can take her life on earth from there, and even then, it would be possible for her to leave and make another clone at any given time. There's no way to know when Beth is there or isn't.
  • "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" reveals that there is another Beth that went to space and became a freedom fighter against the Galactic Federation. Once she sees the Beth on Earth, she goes back to kill her, only for events to have the two befriend each other. Also, it's revealed that Beth in "The ABC's of Beth" gave Rick the choice to clone her as she did not want to make the hard truth. However, it's later revealed that Rick mixed the clone up with the real Beth (intentionally it seems), so even he doesn't know who the real Beth is anymore.
• Ax-Crazy: Revealed to be at least a partial closeted example in "The ABC's of Beth". It hasn't been a dominant trait, as she either hides it, wasn't aware of it, or outright refuses to acknowledge it's even possible. In her youth, she asked Rick for toys more suited for a serial killer (including stickers that track whoever wears them and a pink sentient switchblade), creeping him out enough that he created another dimension for her to play in to protect their neighborhood from her (so he wouldn't have to keep replacing children and animals), and is implied to have attempted to murder her friend Tommy out of jealousy. In her failed attempt to bring Tommy back from Froopyland, when Tommy's children ineffectually attack her, Beth knocks them away with a baseball bat. She quickly finds it fun and upgrades to her ladybug-shaped taser and then begins to slice away with her switchblade while sporting a bloodthirsty grin.
  • That being said, regardless of how Ax-Crazy Beth may have been in her youth or maybe now, Beth was not happy to realize just how depraved she can be.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: She is seldom victim to the show's Comedic Sociopathy compared to the other Sanchez, who are regularly beaten up or outright dismembered. Even the odd times she is graphically involved in one of their antics, she is on the delivering end.
• Because You Were Nice to Me:
  • The main reason Beth would keep her verbally and mentally abusive, alcoholic, arrogant, lazy, manipulative and irresponsible father around her children, regardless of all the havoc he leaves behind, is because she thought he was a great father to her when she was a child. But this is ultimately subverted when she begins to realize that he was very neglectful of her, having him build dangerous toys to spend time with him, which led him to assume she was crazy, so he created Froopyland to keep her away from the neighbour and keep her occupied, instead of doing it himself.
  • Also the main reason for her relationship with Jerry. Despite her supposed disgust or annoyance over his faults of being spineless and submissive, it turns out that she's drawn to those faults in a roundabout way because it gives Beth the advantage in her power dynamic with Jerry, allowing her to feel good and special about herself because of how devoted he is to her. Furthermore, Jerry has put with a lot of nonsense from Beth, especially when it comes to Rick and he has stayed by her side despite it all. Despite their Season 3 separation, she chooses to get back together with him because she finds she is happier with him.
• Berserk Button:
  • Implying she's not a real doctor seems to be a sore spot.
  • Also the few times that she has stood up to Rick come when he tries to pass off problems caused by his own carelessness as being Jerry's fault.
  • Calling out how unhealthy her devotion to Rick is.
• Broken Bird: Having dealt with the disappearance of her father for years, abandoning her dreams after her teenage pregnancy with Summer, and her rocky relationship with Jerry have made her jaded and cynical.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Downplayed given the show's art style, but relative to other characters in the show Beth is quite busty. In the Rick and Morty rushed license adventure, Summer wears a DD bra believing she will grow into it because Beth herself has large breasts.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • Finally realizing just how disposable she is in the eyes of her father, Beth stands up to Rick at the end of season 3 and tells him that she's fine with him leaving her for a more compliant Beth if he won't make an effort to get along with the family he currently has.
  • This continues into season 4 with her being much more openly critical of her dad's poor treatment of herself and her family. The finale reveals there are two Beths, one who stuck by her family while the other went off to have space adventures like Rick, both of whom believe they're the original. The episode ends with the two of them rejecting Rick's offer to find out which is the clone because both of them are happy with their lives as they are, and neither of them needs his approval anymore.
• Character Development:
  • She remains static between the first two seasons, but the third sees her begin to inch closer to the slippery slope that is her father's ideology. It's implied that this is due to the divorce between her and Jerry. Beth relies on Jerry's spinelessness because it results in him fawning over her and this making her feel good about herself and using it to fulfill her self-worth in contrast with the desperation of getting her dad's attention. Without having that constant ego boost and romantic reassurement, she ends up becoming more and more bitter towards her children and their lives for "ruining" hers. During the penultimate episode of the third season, it's revealed that she was a Creepy Child, and that she may be even more twisted and violent than her father. She ends up reaching a point in trying to find out who she is, in that she is like her dad in the worst ways possible. Furthermore, Rick's joke causes her to doubt whether she is the real Beth or not, which pushes her back to Jerry, with whom she forms a more healthy relationship.
  • Whether she's a clone or not, she decides in the last two episodes of Season 3 to really make the effort to be a better wife and mother, and solidly sticks to this throughout the rest of the series so far; she has plenty of Mama Bear moments towards both Summer and Morty, and though she and Jerry occasionally still have some friction, they get along much better overall, and she takes his side more often.
  • In Season 3's "Pickle Rick", when Morty's and Summer's high school mandates a family therapy session, Beth is extremely disdainful of it, very hostile towards Dr. Wong even when she genuinely does her best to help the whole family, and mocks her together with Rick once the session is over, ignoring her children's desire to continue seeing Dr. Wong. By the finale of Season 4, thanks to Beth being a more attentive wife and mom, she actually suggests a family therapy session with Dr. Wong when the latter has an opening in her schedule, showing that she's a lot more dedicated to the family being able to work on their problems and be more functional. Season 5 continues this by showing that, thanks to the couple's therapy she and Jerry have been getting from Dr. Wong, they've become a "sex-positive" couple, enough so that a sea-god powerful enough to rival Rick notices this and invites them for a threesome with him.
  • By Season 5 she's more-or-less taken Morty's place as the most moralistic and empathetic member of the family.
• Clone Angst: The season 3 finale has her freaking out over the possibility that she's just a clone that the original Beth had Rick create so that the original could go off and have space adventures. She spends most of the episode worried Rick will kill her for "pulling a Blade Runner" only for Rick to reveal she's not a clone at all. Then the season 4 finale reveals this might not be the case. Rick did clone Beth, one of them did go off into space and the other did stay home to raise her kids, with both believing themselves to be the original. By the end of the episode, neither Beth cares which is the original, both are happy with their lives as they are, and not even the rest of the family cares since Morty and Summer get two cool moms and Jerry gets a happy marriage. The only "blues" that comes from the cloning comes from Rick when he watches his deleted memory of the cloning and sees that he intentionally made it impossible to know which Beth is the original because he didn't want to answer Beth's question in "The ABC's of Beth": Does he want his daughter to go or stay so she can be a part of his life? Which the creators say was her way of asking what kind of daughter did he want her to be, one like him or one that's the opposite, and cloning her was essentially a non-answer he doubled down on. Watching the memory has Rick sadly admitting to himself what a piece of shit father he is.
• Creepy Child: Back when she was a child, she often asked her father to make weapons and gadgets and disturbed her father enough that he found it better off to create a Sugar Bowl world to sequester her in.
• Daddy's Girl: Deconstructed. She adores her father for the most part and is willing to put up with a lot of his crap, though even she has her limits. Word of God even notes that her adoration of Rick (who, ignoring the mad scientist aspect, is still an alcoholic absentee parent who was away for much of her life) is what truly makes her a messed up person. In "The Wedding Squanchers", she admits that the reason she puts up with her father and is willing to be a galactic fugitive is that she's afraid of Rick running out on her again.
  • Another extreme variation. All she ever wanted, every action she ever took, was on some level to make her dad come back and love her again. Getting knocked up and pregnant in high school, becoming a horse surgeon, has caused her to glorify Rick into something he's not. To Beth, if her father's gone, there's no happiness for her. She'll do anything to keep him around, even if it meant divorcing her husband, ditching him, and compromising the well-being of her kids to extreme lengths.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Claims that she only asked her father to make weapons and dangerous toys for her when she was a kid because she wanted to show that she was just like him. Rick doesn't buy it.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Jerry is both flattered and insulted that Beth ultimately fell for him because he wasn't dismissive or cryptic like her father.
• Deadpan Snarker: It seems to be a learned trait from her father, though it tends to come off more as complaining when she does it.
• Disappeared Dad: Rick was gone for a large portion of her life. She said that she used to draw him into family pictures with crayons. Once he returned, she was willing to do anything she could to keep him in her life.
• Dramatic Irony: She is unaware that C-137 Rick isn't her original father, but rather only a version of him from a dimension where she died as a child. For an added layer of complication, she also doesn't know that she's not even his first replacement Beth, as he also left the Cronenberg-universe Beth behind early on in the series. However, as of 'Solaricks', she has been made aware..
• Drowning My Sorrows: After she shoots Mr. Poopybutthole, and after Rick gets arrested again.
• Enfant Terrible: Was this as a child and such Troubling Unchildlike Behavior is apparently a multiversal constant when it comes to Beth.
• Everyone Has Standards: She's normally always siding with her father, but Rick will still do things she clearly doesn't approve of, like attempting to shoot Morty Jr. or hold a baby-eating alien hostage under the house.
• Fatal Flaw: Her insecurity of feeling abandoned. She is willing to let her son go on dangerous adventures and go through a divorce with Jerry, hurting the rest of her family, so Rick wouldn't leave her. She overcomes this at the end of season three.
• Freaky Is Cool: It's stated by the creators that Beth fetishes the abnormal and this is one of the reasons she likes having Rick around.
• Freudian Slip: When Rick shows all of the toy-themed murder tools from her childhood to prove that Tommy was telling the truth about her attempted murder of him, she briefly stops denying her hidden sociopathic tendencies and says that it maybe possible that she asked Rick to make all of her stuff just to get his attention. And that she may have tried to kill Tommy because she was jealous of his family. When she travels to Froopyland in a failed attempt to bring back Tommy to his family, she starts denying her murder attempt all over again.
• Gasshole: She can burp just as well as her father to some extent, particularly when drunk. The Ricks are all quite proud of her for this.
• Happily Married: Very much not the case for the first two seasons, where her marriage to Jerry was rocky with only fleeting moments of genuine affection. In the season 3 premiere, when Jerry forces her to choose between her father and her family, Beth divorces him, only for Jerry to genuinely earn her love in the season 3 finale. This leads to them having an actual happy marriage throughout season 4. In the season 4 finale it's revealed there are two Beths, one who stuck with her family and one that went off to have adventures like Rick, but it's not revealed which is which. When the Space-Adventure Beth gets annoyed at Rick for her supposed clone running back to Jerry, Rick says it's Beth's own fault since they are exact copies, implying most of the unhappiness in her marriage came from the original Beth failing to choose between following in her father's footsteps of being the good parent he never was to her. Each Beth picking a lane led to both of them being happy. The first episode of season 5 reaffirms that they are very happy together.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: In the stinger of Rick Potion #9, Beth tells Jerry she doesn't care about what might have happened to Rick and Morty and now that they have gone, she feels finally happy. "Morty's Mind Blowers" shows that our current Beth shared this for a while, having almost no regard for Morty's life, as she immediately chose Summer over him when given a Sadistic Choice. However, by the end of Season 3, she decides to make the effort to be a better mom to both of her kids and looks out for Summer's and Morty's well-being in Season 4.
• Hospital Hottie: Her job as a heart surgeon for horses. It's shown that had she not given birth to Summer and married Jerry, she would have gone on to become a Nobel Prize-winning surgeon.
• Hypocrite: She regularly takes offense whenever someone suggests that being a horse surgeon doesn't make her an actual doctor. However, in "A Rickle in Time", she was quick to mock a vet by claiming she wasn't a "real" doctor.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!:
  • In "Meeseeks and Destroy", she tells her Mr. Meeseeks that she often wonders what happened to that wide-eyed girl from Muskeegon whose hopes and career plans got short-changed after her Teen Pregnancy and shotgun wedding. She notes that she is successful as a veterinarian but obviously it's not fulfilling intellectually. Indeed, Jerry is often taunted by his family and by Rick for essentially ruining her career and her aspirations, noting that "she had options".
  • However, the episode "Rixty Minutes" then subverts by showing a timeline where Beth and Jerry aborted Summer. Beth becomes incredibly successful as a doctor but ends up massively Lonely at the Top. She only has birds for company and she still descends into alcoholism. Not only is she miserable without Jerry supposedly ruining her life, but she's more miserable without him. Heck, she's ecstatic to see him when he ends up at her doorstep, his own life in shambles after fame came crashing down.
  • Furthermore, another episode displayed that Beth and Jerry have a severe toxic co-dependency on one another. Jerry's spineless devotion to her matches her aggressive yet fragile ego and both of them are incredibly insecure, going to extreme lengths to prove themselves in fulfillment. Combine this with Beth's massive issues with Rick and ultimately, it seems that while Beth has the potential to succeed, her downfalls come not from Jerry, but from Rick (namely his awful parenting) and Beth's own issues as a result of said parenting.
  • Spelled out explicitly in "The ABCs of Beth" where Rick told Beth that she was apparently a teen sociopath and that she is smart and just like her Dad, but because of that, she will never really be satisfied with what the universe throws in her way. Rick eventually gives her an option of cloning and replacing her while the real Beth can have adventures, but it's left ambiguous if she did take that offer or not. Ultimately it shows that Beth's future was endangered by Beth herself, namely in her devotion and similarities to Rick.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Deconstructed. Her unhealthy upbringing and dysfunctional relationship with Rick has left her very needy when it comes to affection and insecurity to that. It's why she married Jerry because, for all his flaws, he practically worshiped her. His unbridled affection fed her starving ego and made her feel good about herself. After divorcing him in Season 3, she steadily becomes nastier and more unstable without Jerry to counterbalance it. Morty is eventually forced to do damage control after he gets Rick out of the picture by having him spend time with Jerry.
• Informed Ability: Season 3 really has Rick piling on that she's incredibly smart like he is. "Rixty Minutes" shows that she would have become a capable human heart surgeon, but as of the end of the season, there's no indication that she has anything near Rick's intellect.
• Informed Attractiveness: As mentioned above Summer claims she has large breasts, but this isn't very evident in the way Beth is drawn.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Like Jerry, she strongly resembles her own VA.
• It's All About Me: Remarkably so. A standout moment was in "Wedding Squanchers" when Birdperson tells her about him and Rick being galactic fugitives wanted for terrorism who have committed numerous atrocities together, and she doesn't even acknowledge what he's saying, preferring instead to talk about herself and her problems.
  • A recurring source of conflict between her and Jerry is the latter's belief she'd gladly let Rick's antics mess with the lives of the rest of the family so long as she was happy to have her father back. In said episode, she bluntly confirms that theory. It's a pretty normal reaction for someone in her situation though.
• In the Blood: She has inherited her father's intelligence, ego, alcoholism, and sociopathy.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The status quo of the show is that Jerry and Beth's marriage is always on the brink of collapse; as such, she is particularly venomous towards Jerry, even above everyone else and almost as much as Rick. The original Beth became indifferent to the fate of Morty after the events of Rick Potion #9. However, she, or at least her current self, at least earnestly loves and attempts to make her dysfunctional family and marriage work. Given how selfish and egocentric Jerry himself is, it's a two-way endurance. Unfortunately in Season 3 she just goes straight into a full-blown Jerkass right after divorcing Jerry, now in "Pickle Rick" she just curses at the kids and therapist when she's fresh out of excuses after calling her out. While it's left ambiguous to the audience if she did or didn't take the clone, she becomes far nicer than before; even refusing to look up to Rick anymore in the Season 3 finale.
• Latino Is Brown: Averted. She is the daughter of Rick, who is of Hispanic origin. She is also just as pale as him in terms of skin colour.
• Like Father, Like Son:
  • Beth gets a lot of her traits from Rick, most notably sharing his penchant towards alcoholism, inability to take criticism, and stubbornness. While she tries to deny it, she eventually does realize she's exactly like Rick. To the point where Rick offers to make a clone of her so that she can run off and have her own adventures while still letting Summer and Morty have a mother. The end of the episode leaves it ambiguous whether she took Rick up on his offer and abandoned her kids like Rick did to her.
  • In "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" it's revealed the version of her going off and doing space adventures is fighting a war against the Galactic Federation, just like Rick used to. He claims it's a "hero phase" she'll grow out of, which she denies. It's also revealed she's become Crazy-Prepared, just like Rick, and has augmented herself with an insane amount of technology for any given situation.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Or "Lipstick Bisexual". Between her and Space Beth, Earth Beth is the more feminine of the two and is the more submissive of the two when they start having an affair.
• Lonely at the Top: Turns out, she does not take loneliness well, especially when she has no one to look down to. It's been revealed in "Rixty Minutes" that, despite her fame and fortune as an experienced human surgeon, she surrounds herself with only birds in cages while Drowning Her Sorrows with pints of wine to deal with her loneliness.
  • This ties in with her I Coulda Been a Contender! attitude. Despite her supposed resentment of her status as marriage, she very much needs Jerry to function. And of course, there's her devotion to her father.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Adult variation. She is the hot, only child of her Mad Scientist father, and she's a Daddy's Girl.
• Mama Bear: In "The Wedding Squanchers" Beth defends Summer against a robot that tried to harm her and makes the President of the United States apologise for insulting her son in "Rick & Morty's Thanksploitation Spectacular."
• Maternally Challenged: Beth does genuinely love her kids, but she is not a good mother, likely because of how she resented her mom as well as her being a teenager when it happened.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Implied. Beth once tried making a sculpture out of a collection of horse hooves. One of which had an ankle attached to it.
• Medium Awareness: At the end of Season Three, she casually breaks the fourth wall by mentioning that now that she and Jerry got back together it'll be just like Season One.
• Missing Mom: Rick states in the pilot that Beth's mother is no longer alive, and it's mentioned in "Rick Potion #9" that Rick left her mom. In "Auto Erotic Assimilation", Beth mentions that her mom had an issue with Rick putting his experiments before the safety of his family, resulting in him leaving. It's not confirmed for sure until Season 5 that her mom, Diane, is dead.
• Morality Pet: In at least some sense, Beth seems to function as one for Rick. He tends to genuinely complement and flatter Beth. He never swears at her like he does with the rest of the family and even calls her "sweetie". However, this is downplayed at best and subverted at worse, considering that Rick abandoned the series's original Beth on the Earth he accidentally filled with Cronenberg monsters and, if Morty had been willing to come with him, he would have abandoned the new Beth after he made enemies with the President and she got back together with Jerry.
• Ms. Fanservice: In "Amortycan Grickfitti", she wears a revealing outfit in a bid to blend into the Demon World.
• Narcissist: Especially in season 3, Beth blames her own shortcomings on her kids in "Pickle Rick", and becomes so arrogant and irresponsible to the point that Morty has to call her out on her attitude after Summer accidentally turns herself into a giant reverse-skin monster in "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy". It becomes even more apparent in "Morty Mind Blowers" that she has little regard for Morty's life, choosing Summer over him with no hesitation when given a Sadistic Choice. Taken to extremes when she starts hooking up with Space-Beth.
• Never My Fault: She seems to always blame Jerry for their strained marriage yet never admits her cold and distant attitude towards him could be a factor. Ironically, the faults that Beth attacks Jerry for are the partial bedrock for their relationship functioning (the other being Beth's own faults and insecurity).
  • This gets Lampshaded by a family therapist when she and the kids see a therapist. Without Jerry around to feed her ego and deal with her insecurity, Beth doubles down on her devotion to Rick and lashes out. Hell, she even ruins her chance to save her former childhood friend because she refuses to admit it was her fault. On the other hand, the entire ordeal of the said episode actually forces her to confront her faults.
• Not So Above It All:
  • One of the comic books reveals that Beth regularly uses Rick's portal gun to meet up with alternate versions of herself. They even have their own rock band.
  • In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" Jerry manipulates the device she is strapped into to present a mental image of what she idealistically wants him to view her as. That being a literal goddess!
• Open-Minded Parent: She is typically okay with her father taking her children on potentially dangerous adventures across the universe, mostly because she would rather her children be more like her father than their father. She also didn't want to intervene with Morty loudly using a sex robot in "Raising Gazorpazorp" because she thought it would affect him negatively. However, she did intervene when she thought Rick was using it too.
• Opposites Attract: Beth is an intelligent, bold, strong-willed and fierce hard-worker and Jerry is a ditzy, cowardly, weak-willed and meek slacker. They don't always see eye-to-eye and they struggle to be ideal spouses but they still care for each other and very protective of each other.
• Only Sane Woman: Downplayed. She obviously seems a more stable and intelligent being than Jerry, but even he is perfectly able to call her out on her flaws and arrogance many times over. Eventually subverted in season 3, where it is revealed that her relative intelligence in regards to Jerry is the same sort of sociopathic arrogance as her father's, and is a very childish person herself.
• Out of Focus: She gets no episodes nor subplots focused on her in Season 7
• Parental Abandonment: Beth has a lot of issues from Rick abandoning her during her childhood, resulting in her attempts to get him to stick around even though his presence damages the family. In "The ABC's of Beth", the ending leaves it ambiguous whether or not she followed Rick's example and abandoned her children, leaving behind a clone of herself to take care of them. In season 4 the finale reveals there is a Beth who left her kids behind to have space adventures, but Rick made it impossible for anyone, including himself, to know which is the original and which is the clone. By the end, neither cares, and Morty and Summer are fine with having two super-cool moms.
• Parental Neglect: Her interactions with Morty are few and far between and a few episodes have shown that there's an unpleasant reason why. In "Rick Potion #9" Beth openly admitted that not having Morty in her life didn't bother her. "Morty's Mind Blowers" also has a very cruel moment where Beth is forced to choose which of her children gets to live and she chose Summer with no hesitation whatsoever.
• Parental Substitute: Played with. As previously mentioned, the end of Season 3 suggested (though not confirmed) that Beth had abandoned her family to travel the multiverse while Rick created a clone to replace her role in the family. When the (alleged) Clone Beth begins to realize the possibility that she was a clone, she still decided to play the part. Rick and Summer were fine with it as well as Clone Beth proved to be a much less selfish and more nurturing maternal figure than the real Beth was.
• Parenting the Husband: Because Jerry is such a lazy manchild that can't get a decent job, he relies on Beth to manage their house and give him Flintstones vitamins.
• Parents as People: She has moments where she genuinely seems to care for her children but she idolizes Rick so much that she is blind to the negative impact he is having on them. Add her occasional bouts of selfishness and her toxic co-dependent relationship with Jerry and it is easy to see how Morty and Summer turned out the way they did. After she divorces Jerry in Season 3, she begins lashing out at her kids to cope without Jerry's affection to support her ego. In "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy" has Morty call her out for her rotten parenting and she steps up to the plate to get through to Summer.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: As much of a Daddy's Girl as she is, Beth is fully willing to call out Rick when his antics lead to real trouble and she does get upset when Rick has the gall to blame Jerry for something that was Rick's fault.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She gets a particularly epic one from an Anthropomorphic Personification of how Jerry viewed her known as a Mytholog^note Jerry viewed Beth as an insanely powerful insect queen.
  Beth: There can never be more than one of me. I'm the strongest, smartest being alive, because Jerry thinks you're that much stronger and smarter than you actually are.
• Replacement Goldfish: This version of Beth, who has ostensibly become the "main" Beth over the course of the series, is actually an entirely different person from the Beth of the first six episodes of Season 1, who was abandoned in the Cronenberged universe by C-137 Rick. All adult Beths in general are actually this for C-137 as well, since his actual Beth died in childhood long ago.
• Screw Yourself: In season 6, she and Space Beth end up falling in love with each other.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Beth is quite a narcissist. In the "Pilot" Rick can get her to stop being angry with him for taking Morty on his adventure by complimenting her breakfast. She tends to put her own needs ahead of others, such as insisting Rick stay in their lives despite his antics. In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" Jerry knows that she wants him to view her as a goddess. Rick also later reveals she was a petty sociopath as a child, bugging Rick for deadly gadgetry to use on any other kid that made her feel insecure, one of the sanest being a ray gun that forces people to like her.
• Smooch of Victory: She gives one to (Night) Jerry after he saves her and the rest of the family in "Night Family", and another after he successfully stands up to Pissmaster on Summer's behalf and wins their Wimp Fight (complete with a So Proud of You).
• The Sociopath: After her true Heel Realization at the end of season 3, she calls herself Rick's "sociopathic, crazy bitch of a daughter." Though she is decidedly far less so afterwards, becoming a much better mom and wife.
• Teen Pregnancy: She went to her senior prom with Jerry (possibly out of pity, as Rick believes) and had sex with him, getting pregnant at seventeen as a result. While she and Jerry decided to get married and ostensibly made the best of things, their relationship predictably suffers greatly over the years due to both of them not being mature and settled enough to properly raise their children. For what it's worth though, we get a glimpse of an alternate reality where Beth got an abortion, and while Beth and Jerry were both rich and successful, they would've deeply regretted not being together.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Throughout Season 4, it appears that Rick was telling the truth about Beth not being a clone, just as he said in the Season 3 finale. Then the Season 4 finale reveals Rick did clone Beth, but both versions of her start off believing they're the original Beth before being faced with the possibility that they're a clone. In the end, when Rick reveals he deleted his memory of which is the original, both Beths decide they don't care and are content living with the ambiguity since they like their lives just fine the way they are. This is good because when Rick watches the memory he sees he intentionally randomized it so even he doesn't know which is his birth daughter and which is her clone.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In Season 3 her current state may be a result of her father's actions after the divorce, but in one episode "Pickle Rick." she has absolutely no self-control when she blames her shortcomings and personal problems on her children; even going as so far as openly insulting her kids and pushes the blame on them during a therapy session, all while knowingly allowing her father to put her kid's lives at risk. Throughout the rest of the season, she becomes increasingly sociopathic and self-centered until she has a Heel Realization and tries to course correct.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In "The ABC's of Beth". If there's even the slightest chance that she isn't a clone, then choosing to stay made her feel more complete and happy with her life which also hints that the whole point of the clone was to get her shit together and get over her daddy issues. After suffering an existential complex in the following episode wondering over this, she starts taking more responsibility for herself and her family. Season 4 has her being consistently nicer to her kids and Jerry and even able to call out when Rick is endangering them.
• Toxic Friend Influence: More like Toxic Spouse Influence, but Beth and Jerry both need one another because they balance the worst in one another. Jerry is so needy for love and affection while being utterly insecure so he's drawn to the beautiful and competent Beth, who despite often looking down on him, makes him feel good about himself and stays with him. On the other hand, Beth is so needy for love and affection while being utterly insecure that Jerry's absolute devotion to her and letting her take charge in most matters makes her feel like she has control in her life and makes her feel good about herself. They genuinely love each other, but their vices complement the others' to trap them into an unhealthy co-dependent relationship that neither wants to confront. In Season 3, Rick indirectly convinces Jerry to Grow A Spine and confront Beth over letting Rick into their lives again after everything that has happened... because he knew Beth would choose him over Jerry. As a result, Jerry becomes even more of a hapless loser (least until he spends some time with Rick) and Beth becomes more bitter and hostile toward her children until Morty calls her out on her behavior. This is exaggerated in the episode "Big Times in Little Sanchez" when their Anthropomorphic Personification of each other is created. The two of them become co-dependent and slaughter everyone at the facility.
• Turn Out Like His Father: While she's not particularly an active parent when it comes to Morty, one thing she does try to make sure of is that he doesn't turn out like Jerry; hence the reason why she allows Morty to spend so much time with Rick.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: According to Rick. He said child Beth used to ask for some disturbing inventions from him, such as a switchblade that could talk, a ray gun, false fingerprints, etc. Rick also said he built Beth her own world not because he wanted to get rid of Beth, but because he wanted to protect the neighborhood from Beth (for his own selfish reasons).
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Downplayed. It's implied he married way out of his league, though Jerry is more average-looking than truly ugly. But this isn't helped by the fact that the father of his wife very much thinks this and constantly reminds him of it.
• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Beth is beautiful while Rick isn't very attractive.
• Weakness Turns Her On: Played With. On the one hand, she can be annoyed or disgusted by Jerry's passivity and seeming weakness. On the other hand, it's that passivity that she needs him for since his adoration for her however unhealthy for both, makes her feel good about herself and why she needs him around to function. Without, she falls to lashing at her kids to save the remains of her ego (and by this point, both don't have the patience for it and hell, Morty later calls her out on it.)
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: Deconstructed. Rick does love her, but his abandonment of her as a child creates an overriding desire to earn her father's approval and she tries to do everything she can so he won't leave her again — often resulting in her ignoring his negative influences on her family or being okay with him taking her kids on life-threatening adventures to other dimensions.
• Womanchild: As an adult, she's still emotionally dependent on her father in a selfish, borderline-sociopathic way, and is willing to allow her children to be dragged across the cosmos by Rick, who is an insane criminal. She's also too arrogant and stubborn to admit faults and take responsibility for her callous and impulsive actions. Even Jerry thinks that she's a child because of her irresponsibly petty behavior.

Jerry Smith

Jerry Smith

Voiced by: Chris Parnell

"Okay, I guess I'm just this entire family's toilet paper."

"I'm not an evil person. I'm lazy...I'm cowardly and... I do not know what I'm doing. Look, I got someone pregnant when I was 17; we're getting a divorce. None of this is on purpose. I was excited to date someone cool because it would make my ex notice me."

The father of Morty and Summer, and the husband of Rick's daughter Beth. Jerry means well, but he's meek, inept and extremely insecure. He has trouble balancing his job, family, and marriage, none of which are helped by the influence of Rick's escapades, which he sometimes finds himself unwittingly weaselled into. He is effectively the Butt-Monkey of the family, with Beth both having a more stable employment situation than him and harboring some low-key resentment towards him, even on the best of days, and Rick not bothering to make any secret of the fact that he has absolutely no respect for him, and while Summer and Morty both clearly love him, they are also acutely aware of his numerous character flaws. While he is occasionally shown to have the aptitude to be quite capable and brave when push comes to shove, it never really sticks and he always reverts to his old wimpy self when the danger is over. But this is improving as of "Season 6", with him being savvier and more badass far more often.

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• Acquired Situational Narcissism: As shown in episodes like "Something Ricked This Way Comes" and "Childrick of Mort"; any time Jerry is shown genuine respect and admiration by a big enough group, he quickly lets it go to his head, becoming insufferably arrogant, selfish and doing whatever he can to hang on to his newfound popularity for as long as possible.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: When compared with the other adults in the Smith-Sanchez family. Jerry may not be as toxic or abusive as someone like Rick or Beth; but he can still be a selfish, immature jackass in his own right.
• Allergic to Routine: Inverted. Jerry craves structure and routine in his life, which adds further differences between him and Rick. In Season 3, when Earth was briefly taken over by an alien dictatorship, Jerry is happier and more fulfilled than he has ever been in his life. In The Stinger for one episode, when Jerry accidentally samples a substance that would allow him to experience his own idea of perfect existence, Jerry's ideal life is a water delivery man, who does nothing but drive around all day delivering and installing large jugs into water coolers.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: This version of him is the worlds biggest Butt-Monkey. In other universes he's a very famous actor, an apocalypse survivor, or the ruler of the Earth.
• Amazon Chaser: He has a fetish for strong women that borders on the obscene.
  • Despite their dysfunctional marriage, Jerry was attracted to Beth's toughness, bordering on sociopathic attitude.
  • When he's being chased by alien huntress, Kiara, whom he briefly dates to get Beth to notice him, he's simultaneously fearful for his children's lives and aroused at how hard she's trying to kill them all.
• Ambiguously Bi: There are occasional hints that he's bisexual; for example, when the family is infested with alien parasites that create false memories of themselves he "remembers" having an affair with a male one. The "ambiguous" part is dropped in "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", when he and Beth equally-eagerly engage in a threesome with Mr. Nimbus after he shows them just how well-endowed he is.
  • Jerry also experiments with another Jerry in "Bethic Twinstinct".
• The Anti-Nihilist: Despite being the Butt-Monkey of the family, Jerry refuses to cave into nihilism, as he states:
  Jerry: Life is effort and I'll stop when I die!
  • This becomes much more important throughout the seasons, especially when compared to Rick. While it's assumed in-universe (and a large portion of the fanbase) that Jerry is merely too stupid to understand the meaninglessness of existence, Jerry has never really spouted anything about the universe having meaning. In fact, being the Cosmic Plaything means that Jerry would have a good understanding of the multiverse being terrible, yet he continues to strive on. This is one of the biggest things that make him a fascinating Foil to Rick, who espouses hedonistic nihilism. It's this clash of ideals that could be partly why Rick works to usurp Jerry as The Patriarch of the family back in the beginning of Season 3, but as seen at the others' pages, they end up taking Jerry's view rather than Rick's, inevitably leading to Jerry remarrying Beth.
  • Heck, on some level, Rick seems to admire this about Jerry (which could partially explain Rick's disgust with Jerry; both he and Jerry know that the latter could be so much better.) Best seen in a segment in the comics showing Jerry go through the banality of his life. The next day, he is about to continue the routine before seeing Rick at the table, with Rick complimenting Jerry on being able to go through despite being the Butt-Monkey.
• The Baby Trap: Jerry and Beth's marriage was built around Summer's conception and the marriage is clearly dysfunctional. They had a one-night stand and Jerry took advantage of the pregnancy to marry Beth; also, they had a flat tire on the way to the clinic. The only reason they've stayed together this long is that both are too stubborn to admit their problems and because Beth pities Jerry. While they do show affection for each other sometimes, it's largely overshadowed by their disagreements. On the other hand, multiple instances show that they do need the other to an extent and in Season 3 when they divorce, both of them sink even worse into their faults until they undergo enough Character Development to work better together.
• Berserk Button: Rick's actions, in general, annoy him but when Beth defends these actions, that drives him over the edge. In the episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation" he and Beth have a nasty argument when Beth tries to defend Rick having an alien locked up in a secret lab he built. Another example is in "The Wedding Squanchers" when Beth and the kids were willing to be galactic fugitives and do whatever Rick wants so that they could have him in their lives.
• Book Dumb:
  • In defending his right to continue to call Pluto a planet, he quips that if he can't do so, we might as well burn Galileo at the stake for claiming the sun is round.
  • The Stinger for "The Jerrick Trap" shows him to believe all technology to consist of nothing but just gears and springs, much to Memory Rick's frustration when he gets trapped inside Jerry's mind.
• Bumbling Dad: He's not necessarily a bad dad, but he blurts out a pretty big bombshell in the pilot by telling Rick that Morty has some sort of disability right in front of his own son's eyes (in all fairness, he then gently told Morty that he'd always love him, but he felt the responsible thing was to be honest with Morty so he could take steps to address it instead of just ignoring the problem). In other instances, he's shown to be a pretty effective dad, and the "bumbling" aspect of the trope is better applied to his role as a husband and his Butt-Monkey status.
• Butt-Monkey: Most likely the biggest example in the show, possibly more so than his son. No matter where he goes or what he does, he never seems to catch a break. Just to give some examples:
  • The best day of his life was an alien simulation of life running at minimum capacity, which he never caught on to until Rick broke the illusion.
  • Dozens of problem-serving assistants from another dimension couldn't take two strokes off his golf swing after two days of effort, driving them to homicidal misanthropy.
  • While trying to reconnect with Summer, complementing her on all that she's achieved, the conversation suddenly veers off the moment he mentions she's got a job and he doesn't, leading to him pleading with her for some money to borrow. In fact, that was the whole point he was trying to do with her since the beginning of the episode; get her to loan him money.
  • Christmas with the family? His parents reveal they're in a three-way relationship.
  • In "Mortynight Run", it's revealed one version of Rick made a Jerry daycare if Ricks happen to find themselves with a Jerry they can't just send back home. According to our Rick, Jerrys tend to die quickly if allowed off Earth. The daycare is shown to work based on the fact that Jerrys are all unilaterally easily-controlled simpletons. When prime Jerry gets fed up and leaves (upon realizing that that was always allowed), he comes back in under five minutes because he can't deal with the weirdness around him.
    • Though, in his defense, he is in a city on an unfamiliar planet with no resources, money, knowledge of the language, or any marketable skills. Even the best survivalist would be hard up in that situation.
  • "Look Who's Purging Now" sums it up:
    Jerry: I'm this entire family's toilet paper.
  • Subverted in the comics with the Jerry of Doofus Rick's universe, who is successful in everything he does and can defeat Rick to the point that he single-handedly conquered the Council of Ricks and enslaved them to conquer other dimensions.
  • Rick doesn't like the man so much that he apparently plotted a long complicated plan that involved causing a lot of galactic political chaos just so his daughter could be convinced to leave the man from the family.
  • After the divorce, his Butt-Monkey status seems to have grown. The wind keeps calling him a loser and a coyote ate his welfare check over a bag of chips just to make him suffer.
  • Season 4 actually lessens this to an extent, but it's still present. "Rattlestar Ricklactica" is a very noteworthy example. After floating around aimlessly and hanging onto a flying plane, he finally makes it back to the ground, except he did so by kicking a flying snake wanting to help him with no strings attached into the plane's turbine^note he thought Rick had sent that snake to help him, something Jerry was trying to avoid, forcing it to descend low enough for him to land on a tree... while everyone in the plane almost certainly were killed by his actions. He did all this just to prove he could do things by himself.
  • Still gets chewed on by Morty when he falls into the Schmuck Bait by agreeing to develop an app by Glootie, and later is on a receiving end of a very harsh and undeserved "The Reason You Suck" Speech by Summer... but Jerry manages to bounce back from it.
• Character Development: His solo adventure with Rick in Season 3 helps Jerry realize that he can't keep using his character flaws as a shield as that actively prevents him from trying to overcome them. That being said, when he has to break up with an alien warrior girlfriend, he blames it on his kids rather than manning up and telling her his real feelings. And then again, when push came to shove, he apologised for real in an effort to save his kids. Time will tell where this goes.
  • The reason he was able to win back Beth's affections in "Rickchurian Mortydate" was due to having character development. The creators of the show pointed out that instead of taking advantage of Beth when she was vulnerable, he instead reminded her of why they got together in the first place by recreating their first date. Which he wouldn't have done if he was the same as before. Ironically it was due to Rick's influence and actions that forced Jerry to really do some soul searching in the first place.
  • Demonstrated perfectly in "The Old Man and the Seat", where he doesn't play up cowardly tendencies and tries his best to actually be useful instead of making people feel sorry for him.
  • Briefly explored in "Solaricks"; Jerry is sent back to his original dimension, where his original family are shown to have stagnated and given in to their worst qualities. This makes Jerry realize that his and Beth's temporary divorce was actually a good thing, as it helped him grow and avoid becoming a worse person.
• Les Collaborateurs: The Galactic Federation gives him a job at the end of Season Two. The first episode of Season Three has him working in a government office, wearing a government uniform with three metals and a federation armband. He has no idea what his job actually is, though. In an alternative dimension from the comics in which Morty is a universal dictator, Jerry is The Mole in Summer's resistance group.
• Commuting on a Bus: This happens to Jerry in Season 3 after he and Beth get divorced.
• Cowardly Lion: He bounces between this and Dirty Coward depending on the circumstances. There are times when his family's safety is in danger that he takes up arms to save them, like in "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez where he cowers for most of the episode only to take up arms and rescue Beth being held captive by her monstrous counterpart.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Way back in Season 1, his reaction to Beth potentially cheating on him was to go on an unstoppable rampage with the sole purpose of enacting a Murder-Suicide with her co-worker. At least this is what he said out loud.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: It is frequently made clear that Jerry could actually accomplish quite a lot in his life if only he could overcome his many insecurities and apply himself more. This is best demonstrated in "Rick Potion #9" where he takes on the mutant apocalypse — and wins. Jerry seems to do best when lives are on the line, and miserably the rest of the time. In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", despite starting simply trying to cower in a hole, he eventually guns his way to rescue his wife while also thinking up how to deal with the monster version of Beth. During "The Wedding Squanchers" when the Galactic Federation attacks the wedding, he picks up a gun to defend his family. That it was a harmless confetti gun should not count for lack of trying.
  • When push comes to shove, Jerry is pretty capable and respectable when need be. This is one of Rick's problems with him. Rather than step up to the plate and take charge (as Rick mentioned in "Pickle Rick", he likes doers), he sees Jerry's attempts at being a wimp not as a sign of vulnerability or weakness; but rather one of manipulation to get others to carry his load. If Jerry could just stop acting like a wimp and step up like they both know he could, Rick wouldn't be such a hardass to him.
• Dark and Troubled Past: It's implied that Jerry was involved in a rape incident in the past.
• Deadpan Snarker: He can be as sharp-tongued and passive-aggressive as the rest of his family, usually quipping whenever Rick does something obscene or over the top.
• Desperately Craves Affection: Due to his Butt-Monkey status, he often makes himself pitiful to make people feel bad for him.
• Determined Defeatist: Despite his cowardice and insecurity, Jerry can be surprisingly driven under the right circumstances.
• Dirty Coward: He tends to be somewhat cowardly in most dangerous situations, having once locked Beth out of the car when they were chased down by a crazed hobo. However, he can be doggedly determined when he has a goal in mind. On the other hand, when he wants to break up with an alien warrior woman, he tells her his kids are to blame, even though the real reason is that they're moving too fast and he is both slightly racist and sexist. The result is that the woman doesn't just go after Jerry, but she tries to kill the kids too.
• The Ditz: Not only rather dimwitted, but also very childish.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Inverted. He deliberately tries to make other pity him so they can help him in some way. According to Rick anyway, who isn't exactly the most trustworthy judge of character.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Jerry may be a ditz, but he's not wrong in saying that Rick's activities are dangerous and are going to get the family in trouble or that Beth's selfishness and fear over her father leaving again is the reason she turns a blind eye to his craziness even though said craziness puts the family at risk.
• Extreme Doormat:
  • When he and Beth are attack by Federation soldiers in the Season 4 finale, he can only muster an angry "hey" whenever they target Beth rather than actually trying to be active about the situation.
    "I only said 'hey', it's not like I can do more than that!"
  • His first instinct when the world is under attack by giant sperm is to be the President's water boy, standing around pouring glasses for everyone rather than help conceive a strategy to save the world.
• Face Death with Dignity: For all the whining he does when danger strikes, he can be very calm when death seems inevitable even if the death itself would be terribly undignified and potentially painful.
• Fan Boy: Of the movie Titanic, to the point of dragging his wife to a lame reenactment cruise.
• Fatal Flaw: He is insanely insecure. He is desperate for approval and affection, has no spine and at times he rivals Rick in the selfishness department. It's not always played for laughs and it causes problems for other people, including his family.
• Foil: To Rick. Rick is a sociopathic, brave, and brilliant scientist who the family will go along with despite being aware of his craziness, but despite all that, Rick will give up on things quite often when he personally decides it's too much work (i.e., abandoning Beth when she was a child when he couldn't handle parenthood). Jerry is comparatively noble, a Dirty Coward, a bit of a ditz who serves as the family's resident Butt-Monkey despite making good points about Rick's toxic influence, but despite his bad luck is a Determinator.
• For Want Of A Nail
  • If Summer and Morty weren't born, he would have a successful (albeit questionably earned) Hollywood career.
  • In any timeline where Beth is in danger, he steps up to the plate to save her. "Rick Potion #9" is the only timeline where it has clearly stuck.
• Generation Xerox: He inherits his father's fetish of watching his wife make out with other people. The fact it's another Beth probably helps.
• Graceful in Their Element: Jerry is a total loser in society, partially because he's so spineless that if there's someone to mooch off of he takes no initiative for himself, however when put into a situation where no one else can step up, removed from the modern trappings of society with little or no technology, like post-apocalyptic life or camping, he's a surprisingly competent provider where everyone else flounders.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Combined with Tall Poppy Syndrome. His insecurity leads him to being this. In Childrick of Mort Jerry teaches a group of people about camping, but the minute one of them builds a house, Jerry becomes angry because he develops something better than a tent. Then when those people ask why another tribe is building a city, Jerry says it's 'because they're bad'. Cue Jerry leading an army to destroy that city. He'd rather destroy somebody else's achievement than making himself into something better.
• Grew a Spine: Finally stands up to Rick in the season 3 premiere, putting a Him or Me scenario on the table. Which is exactly what Rick wanted, cause he knew Beth would choose him over Jerry. With that said, it's played straighter when he firmly tells Beth that whether or not she is a clone, he loves her for the woman she is and not to let Rick determine that.
• Happily Married: It takes a while for Jerry and Beth to get there including getting a divorce, but by the time of season 5 they're both very happy with each other.
• Henpecked Husband: Has a fairly belligerent relationship with his wife. In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Beth's mental image of Jerry is a pathetic worm-like creature that is subservient to Monster!Beth, which even the actual Jerry finds utterly pathetic.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In timelines where Summer wasn't born, Jerry made it big in Hollywood as an actor or a writer/director.
  • It turns out that he's actually a very skilled camper, his skill being enough to sustain a small population and himself for a week. The lack of any injuries or signs of sickness implies that he was even living relatively well.
  • He sometimes demonstrates a level of social savviness that even Rick can't always muster to get people to act how he wishes, bordering on being The Social Expert. He's usually too roadblocked by his generally timid demeanor to make effective use of it but even in less than ideal circumstances he can easily gauge people's motives and insecurities to use to his advantage.
• Honor Before Reason: He insists that Pluto is a planet, despite it being labelled a planetoid by science. Granted, Pluto actually used to be bigger, but has been shrinking due to intense resource extraction and the Plutonians are being fed lies to assure them nothing is happening. So, technically speaking, Jerry is still right, but insisting on maintaining it's a planet risks the Plutonians well-being since they don't realize their planet is being used so much it's shrinking.
• Ink-Suit Actor: He looks a lot like his voice actor Chris Parnell.
• Innocently Insensitive: He can periodically be condescending towards his family without realizing it, especially saying that Beth isn't a real doctor. They've been in several fights over this.
• Insecure Love Interest: Jerry constantly fears that Beth may not truly love him.
• It's All About Me: Jerry can be very, almost absurdly, selfish at times. For example, in "Look Who's Purging Now", despite Rick and Morty being in clear danger he still fixates on getting attention from Summer continually distracting her, ignoring their peril, and almost getting them killed. Made much worse when it's revealed he wasn't really even trying to reconnect with his grown-up daughter... he just wanted to mooch cash from her. His selfishness can also be seen in "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate" when he tries to weasel his way out of donating his penis to a civil rights leader who needed it for a new heart by exposing the leader's heroin dependency to the public instead of suggesting to hold a fundraising event for a synthetic heart and then changing his mind on donating just to improve his reputation with the alien public. When the Galactic Federation occupies Earth he's too pleased to be employed to care that the planet has become a Police State with rights being subverted and human food being replaced with pills, all to the displeasure of every other native of plot relevance.
• Insufferable Imbecile: His ignorance coupled with his obnoxious and selfish behavior means he'll usually rub someone the wrong way, especially his family. "Something Ricked This Way Comes" exemplifies how his need to be perceived as right makes him ignore his son's reasoning and indulge himself in the praise of a misguided alien species, which turns out to be the alien leader's attempt to continue exploiting his people and resources.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Is the only one to suspect the wedding between Tammy and Birdperson being more than what it looks.
  • Is one of the few people to actually see Rick's craziness for what it is earlier, which the rest of the family catches up to slowly.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He is incredibly insecure and even self-serving at times but he does think of his family's best interests, is a well-intentioned Kindhearted Simpleton, and has shown to occasionally adapt to his inner strength to save those he loves.
• Just the Way You Are: He won back Beth at the end of season 3 because he says he loves her no matter who or what she is. Rick couldn't do the simple gesture, so he did.
• Karmic Jackpot: In "Night Family", he treats his night self as a pen pal and as a friend in general, in contrast to the rest of his family who use their night selves to do tedious and tiring menial tasks. Night Jerry later turns out to be of big help to the family, ultimately saving them from a lifetime of servitude to Night Summer.
• Kindhearted Simpleton: He's not exactly a smart guy, but he's rarely rude or unkind to anyone who doesn't antagonize him first. This is the main reason why Beth decides to remarry him by the season 3 finale; she realizes how incredibly lucky she is to have Jerry, a simple, honest, simple man who still loves her even after all the crap he's been given by her (and the family as a whole).
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Subverted. Jerry is very sensitive about how smart he is (which isn't much) and doesn't take people pointing this out very well. Likely the result of having an Obnoxious In-Laws like Rick.
• Large Ham: Occasionally, he can be quite dramatic.
  Jerry: If I survive, it'll be without you, and if I die, it'll be on your ass. Merry Christmas, bitch. I AM THE JESUS CHRIST OF CHRISTMAS!
• Like Father, Like Son: Comparing them, it's clear Jerry's insecurities, ineptitude, mediocre intellect, and hidden reserves of murderous rage are shared by Morty. However, Morty is eventually shown to have surpassed Jerry in terms of ineptitude and intellect, likely largely thanks to his time spent with Rick. Though Morty's tendency towards rage very likely came from Beth's side.
• Manchild: Jerry behaves in a very childish way a lot. This is shown through his wimpy behavior, his laziness in getting a new job after getting fired, and he whines very frequently.
• Mister Seahorse: One of the clips from the first season's opening sequence shows him giving birth. The scene never shows up in the show proper, so we can only speculate how such an event came to pass.
• Mundane Utility: Of all the family members who wield the invisibility belt in the Season 4 finale, Jerry is the only one who doesn't misuse it and instead utilizes its powers to pee unseen when there wasn't a bathroom around and to briefly fight crime with a garbage truck.
• Non-Action Guy: Unless truly pushed to the point where he needs to fight, Jerry will avoid direct combat at any chance, usually cowering somewhere instead. He'll opt to hide in an air-vent rather than search for an escape from a monster-invaded facility, hide while his family is combatting alien threats, or whimper and beg for his life when cornered at gunpoint.
• No-Respect Guy: Nobody has any respect for Jerry. Least of all himself. Jerry arguably manages the daunting task of making Parnell's other role Cyril Figgis look manly by comparison.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: To save his family from Phoenix Person in the Season 4 finale, Jerry uses his puppetry skills with Tammy's freshly slain corpse to distract him. While well-intentioned and effective, it can also come across as rather creepy.
• The One That Got Away: In a timeline where he doesn't keep Summer and becomes immensely successful, Jerry still considers Beth to be his true love and has a breakdown over what could have been.
• Only Sane Man: Where Rick is involved at least. While his wife and children welcome Rick's presence in their lives, Jerry is the only one to recognize and bring up the concerns that having a Mad Scientist living in the house creates.
• Opposites Attract: Beth is a qualfied veterinarian with a fiery disposition and a thirst for adventure. Jerry meanwhile is a failed copywriter and an Extreme Doormat whose interests tend to be of the mundane variety.
• Out of Focus: He has a much smaller role in Season 3 thanks to his and Beth's divorce.
• Papa Wolf: The surest way to unleash Jerry's fury is to sexually harass Summer in front of him.
• Power Incontinence: He learns basic telekinesis from an alien warrior near the end of Season 3, but he flubs any act more complex than picking up small objects with his mind.
• Pride: Yes, really. When Jerry believes he is in the right, or simply wants to save face, he stubbornly refuses to back down.
  • In "A Rickle in Time", when Beth noticed his shirt was on backwards (due to it being removed, cleaned and put back on while they were frozen in time), Jerry hastily claims that he intentionally wore it that way.
  • In "Rattlestar Ricklactica", he insists on hanging the Christmas lights himself without any assistance or supervision, accepting only indirect help from Rick (making him "floaty"). When he ends up floating up into the sky, he adamantly refuses to let anyone save him, believing that he can "prove himself" by surviving all on his own. He more or less ended up murdering people in a plane crash while doing so.
  • On "Juricksic Mort", he does get to shine as the one in the family who doesn't get bothered by the Dinosaur's takeover, and writes a novel about it titled "Never Trying Never Fails". When the dinosaurs get to distribute it to the world, Jerry notices that they cut his name out of the book, with them claiming that whoever wrote it was above credit. Jerry is actually very pissed off about this, and becomes as bitter as the rest of his family for the rest of the episode.
• Put on a Bus: Multiple times. The show's original Jerry was left behind in the Cronenberg Dimension after Rick and Morty 'Cronenberged' it, and it's eventually confirmed in Season 6 that our Rick and Morty's second Jerry also got lost in a mixup at the Jerryboree, meaning that as of "Mortynight Run," we are now on our third Jerry.
• Replacement Goldfish: This version of Jerry, who has ostensibly become the "main" Jerry over the course of the series, is actually an entirely different person from the Jerry of the first six episodes of Season 1, who was abandoned in the Cronenberged universe by C-137 Rick. That Jerry actually went on take several levels in badass as he became a post-apocalyptic scavenger while this Jerry has continued to be… not quite as impressive.
  • This is changed in "Solaricks", where the main Jerry has begun to become a more badass chracter. More importantly, it was confirmed that this Jerry is actually from a different dimension while the Jerry we had immediately after "Rick Potion #9" was accidentally sent to this Jerry's original direction as a result of a swap that happened in "Mortynight Run", thus making our Jerry the third one we're on.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Like Morty, he's the Sensitive Guy to Rick's Manly Man. Jerry's response to danger is to run and hide, whimpering all the while. He's also idealistic and openly expresses sensations like fear and pain, albeit mostly when it comes to his own concern. Rick on the other hand leaps into every situation with zero concern for himself or others because he's all out of fucks to give.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: His relationship with Rick throughout the show, as they constantly argue and get on each other's nerves, with Beth often caught in the middle. In the earlier seasons, Rick outright hates Jerry and Jerry sincerely dislikes Rick as well, but by later seasons, they start to morph into Vitriolic Best Buds, with most of the vitriol coming from Rick.
• Smart Ball: In "Bethic Twinstinct", once he comes out of his pillbug shell, he manages to show off a far more competant side of him that ultimately manages to convince both Beths into having Three-Way Sex with him. He never drops the ball for the rest of the episode.
• Straight Man: Which is odd because he's also the dimmest of the main characters. But despite his awkwardness, he rivals Beth as the most normal of the family.
• Straw Loser: He rarely catches any breaks, no one in his family takes him seriously, and his marriage is constantly hanging on by a thread because Summer was an accident. Later on his wife actually divorces him and he has to move into an apartment in a seedy neighborhood. A wolf even chews up and spits out his unemployment check just to see him suffer, and an unseen voice whispers "loser" to him at least twice. By season 3, Rick accuses him of actually invoking this so people would pity him and help him.
• Strong Family Resemblance: When his parents come to visit the family for Christmas dinner, it's shown that Jerry got all of his facial features from his father.
• A Taste Of His Own Medicine: In "Lawnmower Dog", Jerry rubs Snuffles' face in his own urine after he pees on a carpet. Later, however, he pushes Jerry's face in pee.
• Teeny Weenie: Jerry mentions his "weird little dick" when calling out Beth for her unfaithfulness in "Bethic Twinstinct". Possibly subverted if we consider Home Beth's point of him being the only one to bring up the words "weird" and "little", thereby making it just a case of Jerry being insecure and having a humiliation fetish, just like his father.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • The Season 2 premiere has the B-plot end with Jerry successfully performing a romantic gesture for Beth, and the final scene is him being consistently funny enough to put her in a laughing fit.
  • The Season 2 finale has him getting a Federation-mandated job after him being nagged for being unemployed for the past season.
  • While he still has to admit to his own frailties at the end of it, the penultimate episode of Season 3 has his apartment getting cleaned up by a very attractive alien huntress named Kiara (who has had sex with him a few times by that point), him learning a bit of telekinesis, and then managing to get away with dumping her through what Morty lampshades as a Deus ex Machina with a free answering machine thrown in for good measure. Rick also leaves him a friendly message on said answering machine, calling him "J-man" and saying he killed Kiara's ex, who'd been coming to kill Jerry, for him. Then leaves another message apologizing for having sex with Kiara.
  • The Season 3 finale ends surprisingly great for him. He still has his telekinesis from the previous episode; He and Beth remarry after she finds out how much of a bad father Rick is and that she's grateful that such a "simple" man like Jerry still loves her. Both Morty and Summer, for once, take his side over Ricks, likely due to them losing some respect for him. He is finally re-established as the "patriarch" of the family after Rick angrily admits that he does a better job at it than him. But most notably, Beth defends him when Rick insults him by calling him a "dipshit", meaning that Jerry is finally respected by the family.
  • As of season 6 he has arguably fully grown out of his Butt-Monkey position. While he is still nebbish and snively, by the end of the season he's gone viral as a cool dad, briefly became a space super hero, goes on a serious adventure with Rick, gets to watch a 2 hour longer cut of Miracle on 34th street with his family, and has a second wife.
• Too Dumb to Live: At his worst. In "Rattlestar Ricklactica", he decides to put up the Christmas lights by himself, without even having someone to keep the ladder steady for him.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • In "Rick Potion #9", though it apparently doesn't carry over to the reality Rick and Morty settle down in where the situation that turned him into a badass is resolved (or didn't go far enough for his badassery to happen).
  • In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" he is fed up with Beth's perception of him as a meek worm and decides to fight back to rescue her from a monster perception of herself.
  • In "Analyze Piss" Jerry puts his foot down when a supervillain named Pissmaster makes a lewd comment towards Summer. While not the greatest fighter who ever lived, Jerry still managed to give Pissmaster a beating he'd never forget. The fight is witnessed by the entire neighborhood and goes viral on a galactic level, which not only earns Jerry the respect of his family but also gets him recognized by an intergalactic council.
• Toxic Friend Influence: A mutual case of toxic lovers between him and Beth. During a therapy where the couples watch their most negative traits perceived by the other personification kill each other, Beth and Jerry's are co-dependent since his submissive laziness and her aggressive ego fit unhealthily well with the other along with both of them being insecure. Both of them due to genuinely love each other, but it's a very unhealthy relationship of them enabling the other's worse aspects yet relying on the other to function. When the Season 3 divorce happens, they fall to pieces and their faults nearly ruin them. Eventually, Rick and Morty manage to talk some sense into Jerry and Beth respectably to get some Character Development.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Downplayed. It's implied he married way out of his league, though Jerry is more average-looking than truly ugly. But this isn't helped by the fact that the father of his wife very much thinks this and constantly reminds him of it.
• Unfazed Everyman: He is essentially surrounded by the family of a Mad Scientist, whose family pet named Snuffles even outsmarts him. While some of his moments do involve a Troubled Fetal Position, he takes Rick's realities comfortably well, but not for very long.
• Unlucky Everydude: Amongst his whole family which includes a Mad Scientist, Jerry's skills seem very mediocre on paper, and because of this he gets little respect from others. Rick and Beth (mostly the former) constantly belittle his intellect and spinelessness, and he's rarely the one to save the day when the family is in danger. "Total Rickall" for example has him mostly clinging to parasite-disguised-as-a-lover Sleepy Gary, and he gets stuck in a unseen side plot through most of "Solaricks" because he's been sent back to the universe he was swapped from.
• "Well Done, Dad!" Guy: Besides his insecurity with Beth, he also fears that his children may favor Rick over him. Jerry admits that in inverse to Rick who is so hard to please people treat doing so as an accomplishment, he himself is so easy to please that nobody cares if he is.
• Worshipped for Great Deeds: For a given value of "great". When Rick tries to build a society for his children with Gaia, he dismisses the unproductive ones. Jerry takes these Ricklets and is revered by them after he teaches them camping, leading to them developing a paleolithic society.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: In "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", Rick tells Jerry that he relies on this to get whatever he wants, but this is Rick so it's up for air. By the end of the episode, Jerry rejects going into the house bruised up so he can avoid depending on this tactic. Naturally, Rick briefly compliments Jerry before going inside and exploiting the very same trope.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Gets one in "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!", when he has the best day of his life but is pulled out right at the best moment by Rick, who reveals it was all just a simulation. It actually gets worse near the end when he tries to use the same "award-winning" pitch from the simulation and is promptly fired over how bad it is.
  • He gets yet another one (if you think about it from the perspective of the series) in "Rick Potion #9", when he wins the pure affection of his woman by becoming a total badass in a Crapsack World, only for Rick and Morty to completely ditch that reality altogether and return to one where he and Beth are apparently back where they started.
  • Yet another one in "Close Rick-counters" where he meets "Doofus Rick", the only person who respects him... who is then taken away by the rest of the Council, and Jerry is mocked by the other Ricks for being friends with him.
  • In "The Rickshank Redemption", he gets a great job and loves living in the Galactic Federation. Then Rick destroys the Federation's economy, causing chaos and making him unemployed again. He forces Beth to choose between him and Rick. She chooses Rick.

Summer Smith

Summer Smith

Voiced by: Spencer Grammer

"Bitch, my generation gets traumatized for breakfast."

Summer: It's called "carpe diem" Morty. Look it up.
Morty: You look it up, you don't-you don't even know what it means.
Summer: That's because losers look stuff up while the rest of us are carp'en all them 'diems.

The daughter of Jerry and Beth, the granddaughter of Rick, and the sister of Morty. Summer behaves the way a typical teenage daughter living in a house with a psychotic grandfather would and is considerably more level-headed than the two combined, but that doesn't mean she lacks her fair share of sass.

---

• Abusive Grandparents: The earlier seasons show Rick's treatment of Summer to be rather harsh. Compared to Rick's treatment of the rest of the Smith family, he doesn't value Summer's company as much as Morty, and he doesn't shower Summer with affection like he does with Beth. The only person in the family that Rick actively treats worse than Summer is Jerry, whom Rick has his reasons for disliking. Thankfully, Rick manages to undergo character development and softens his attitude towards Summer in later seasons.
• The Ace: Downplayed but Summer does exhibit hints of this trope, particularly in later seasons once she's given more screentime. It's shown in several episodes that Summer possesses superior intelligence, she's a surprisingly strong combatant, and a great leader. After Rick begins taking her on more adventures and giving her a chance to prove herself, Summer is able to gain Rick's respect until he comes to view her as The Reliable One. Even Morty seems aware that Summer is essentially this compared to him, as several episodes have him readily acknowledging that Summer is more intelligent than him or have him mention her excellent leadership.
• Achievements in Ignorance: In "Childrick of Mort," when Rick finds himself in a Curb-Stomp Battle with Reggie, Summer and Morty accidentally save Rick's life by crashing a spaceship into the back of Reggie's head, killing him instantly. Rick outright admits that this single act makes both Morty and Summer his "heroes."
• A-Cup Angst: The Rushed Licensed Adventure game reveals that she wears double D bras despite her size being much smaller, claiming she'll grow into them because "Mom's got big boobs."
  • Turns up in the show proper in a big way when said angst ends up driving the B-plot of "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy"; she uses Rick's size shifting ray to try and enlarge her breasts only to have the rest of her body enlarged too.
  • This turns out to be retconned in "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion", where it's revealed that Summer turns out to suddenly have a regular bust while she's wearing an open-cleavage dress.
• Action Girl: She gradually becomes this after she starts going on adventures with Rick to avoid dealing with the stress caused by her parent's divorce. From then on she becomes incredibly self-sufficient and ready to fight should the need arise, especially given how morally compromised her grandfather is and how spineless Morty tends to be.
  • In the comic book B-plot (Summer Spectacular), she imagines herself as this. Issue 1 has her saving a man from a hostage situation, while Issue 2 portrays her as the commander of an army of anthropomorphic food.
  • Her progression culminates in the spin-off comic Little Poopy Superstar, where she gets to team up with Mr. Poopybutthole.
  • In "Rickmancing the Stone," Summer adapts quite well to the post-apocalyptic lifestyle of the Death Stalkers, hunting down "what used to be humans" and killing mutants.
  • In "Rattlestar Ricklactica," Summer helps fight against the army of snakes attacking the Smith household.
  • In "Mort Dinner Rick Andre," Rick trusts Summer with going to the bottom of the ocean and fighting Mr. Nimbus' warriors so she can steal the source of his powers.
  • In "Mortyplicity," the decoy Summers are shown fighting and dying alongside the rest of their decoy family.
  • In "Solaricks," she's excited to test her "wolverine claws" on the scavengers and space monsters at the Citadel of Ricks.
  • It "Rick: A Mort Well Lived," Summer manages to hold her own against a small group of alien terrorists attempting to kill her.
• Act of True Love: Summer pulls this off for both Rick and Morty in "Ricksy Business." Regardless of her Green-Eyed Monster tendencies, once Summer realizes how important their adventuring is to both Rick and Morty's lives, Summer decides to help the pair fix the bleak situation they are in. When Morty is panicking and unable to find a device Rick needs, Summer chooses to step in, find it for him, and even gives it to Rick herself, ensuring her grandfather and younger brother can continue to go on adventures whenever they want, even if she's left out in the long run.
• Aesop Amnesia: Summer has been shown several times that she shouldn't consider Rick her "hero", or blindly seek his approval, such as in "Rickshank Redemption" where she learns about the reality he and Morty left to rot. Despite this, she can go overboard in her attempts to please him or cater to his whims, making it her top priority. She's gone as far as to build a legion of giant robot pilots to impress him.
• Affectionate Nickname: Rick sometimes call her "Sum-Sum". Summer is apparently fond enough of the nickname to use it to refer to herself in "A Rickconvenient Mort."
  • Rick seems to like calling Summer a "queen," and has done so on several occasions. In "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim Morty," Rick calls Summer a "queen" without any sarcasm when admitting he's going to slay Morty's dragon. In "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion," an intoxicated Rick once more calls Summer a "queen."
• All Girls Want Bad Boys:
  • In the pilot, she has a crush on Frank Palicky. Too bad he got frozen to death by Rick.
  • She enters into a brief business relationship with the Devil of all people.
  • After her parents' divorce, she starts a relationship with the leader of a tribe of cannibalistic marauders. It doesn't last.
• Alliterative Name: Summer Smith.
• Aloof Big Sister: Zig-Zagged. Summer goes back and forth on this. Earlier on, she was much closer to being actually aloof and uncaring about Morty. But as the show went on, she's become closer to Morty and cares about him, even if she doesn't always show it. It especially shows with how often they tag team.
• Ambiguously Bi: She was once in a relationship with Ethan, married to Hemorrhage and had a big crush on Toby. However, in "The Old Man and the Seat" she has a total of four soulmates when she uses the new app, "Lovefinderrz": three guys and one woman. It is unknown whether Summer is actually attracted to women, desperate to find someone to be with or follows the app's soulmate match results randomly.
  • In "Edge of Tomorty: Rick, Die, Rickpeat," Summer refers to Jessica's selfie at her grandmother's funeral as "A hot pic," and in ''Rattlestar Ricklactica" When Rick offers to take Summer to "Boob World," she simply responds by saying "Eh, Not today."
  • This is even more pronounced in the comics In one issue, Rick and Summer go to an alternate universe where Summer has a girlfriend. At the end of the comic, Rick reveals that the reality they're currently in is identical to Summer's native reality in every conceivable way, except that this version of Beth was allergic to red wine, so she never became an alcoholic, and was consequently much more emotionally supportive of Summer and helped her come to terms with her own sexuality. The implication being that our Summer is Bi and hasn't yet realized it.
  • Wet Kuat Amortican Summer confirms that she does also like girls, as she ends up romancing a girl she met at a kuanto party.
• Animal Motifs: Apparently, Jerry thinks Summer is similar to a lemur and says as much in "Childrick of Mort." Summer doesn't appreciate this comparison in the slightest.
• Appeal to Popularity: Summer tends to follow the crowd if only so she can get more attention. In "Ricksy Business" she encourages Morty as well as one of her geeky schoolmates, Nancy to traverse a dangerous dimension because she thinks they'll ruin her house party. In "Get Schwifty" she becomes a religious fanatic when the rest of the town starts worshiping the giant heads in the sky. It also might be why she is so disturbed with Unity, one mind controlling the minds of many.
• Ascended Extra: While she was always part of the main crew, Summer gets a major bump in screen time after "Rick Potion No. 9", and another one during season two, to the point where entire subplots were centered around her. Summer also appears quite often in the comics and is even getting a spin-off comic of her own: Lil' Poopy Superstar.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Winds up transforming into an inside-out giant in The Whirly-Dhirly Conspiracy as a result of messing around with Rick's size-shifting ray.
• Barbarian Longhair: Evoked in The Rickshank Redemption and Rickmancing the Stone; the audience actually sees Summer with her hair down but only at a point where she's given into her survivor lifestyle.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Summer is one of the more grounded members in the Smith family, with a strong sense of morality and the backbone to stand up for it. That said, if you somehow happen to find yourself on her enemy list, you're pretty much a goner. Just ask Tammy Gutterman, the girl Summer believed was her friend and who betrayed her in "The Wedding Squanchers." In "Starmort: The Rickturn of the Jerri," Summer ruthlessly breaks her kneecap when Tammy tries to attack Rick before leaving her at Rick's mercy.
• Big Sister Bully: Zig-Zagged. Summer doesn't actively pick on Morty, mostly because neither one speaks to each other. At one point she groin kicks him for what she thought was him going into her room (until it is revealed a minute later that Morty masturbates in EVERY room in the house). Even so, they do care for each other.
• Big Sister Instinct: To her brother Morty. Summer and Morty developed very protective instincts towards each other as they faced threats, their parents' complicated relationships and Rick's antics. Morty tries to protect Summer in any way he can, even from her own adoration of Rick.
  • In Season One:
    • In "Rixty Minutes," after learning the current Morty living with her is not "her" Morty, she's genuinely shocked and horrified to realize that "her" Morty is dead.
    • In "Close Rickcounters of the Rick Kind," when the Citadel Ricks are messing with Jerry and phone in a prank call pretending to be Rick, claiming that he's going to take Morty and fly into a black hole, Summer is horrified. The fact that it's revealed to be a prank call doesn’t lessen her fear for Morty's safety.
    • In "Ricksy Business," Summer eventually decides to help Morty clean up the house after the wild party completely trashes it. She also brings Rick the device that allows him to freeze time, allowing the trio a chance to clean the house at their own pace which in turn allows Morty to keep on going on adventures with Rick.
  • In Season Two:
    • In "Auto Erotic Assimilation," when she and Morty are cornered by rioting racists during a race war, Summer hugs a panicking Morty close to her in an effort to protect him.
    • In "Look Who's Purging Now," Summer is annoyed that Jerry continuously tries to get her attention when she's busy taking down instructions and attempting to help Rick and Morty during their purge world experience, even outright telling Jerry that Rick and Morty are in danger while he’s interrupting her.
  • In Season Three:
    • While being at odds with Morty in the episode “Rickshank Redemption,” Summer still puts Morty’s safety first and when the Council of Ricks demands she renounces Rick or suffer the consequences, she promptly tells them to shove it and that they can do whatever they want with her but demands that they let Morty go.
    • In “Rickmancing the Stones,” Summer expresses concern finding Morty participating in the Blood Dome and later celebrates his victory while proudly proclaiming that Morty’s her brother. She also has no problems letting Morty stay with her when she gets married to Hemorrhage.
    • In “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” one of Morty’s memories has Summer give Morty a sympathetic, anguished look when Beth immediately chooses to spare her over Morty. A later memory has Summer try to help Morty purge an evil worm alien with The Power of Love, and after witnessing how long the worm is, questions if they should help Morty by pulling it the rest of the way out of his body. Rick rejects this and tells her not to touch it and encourages Summer and Beth to “keep loving Morty” at a distance. A later memory also shows that Summer was willing to drive Morty to school, even going to look for him so she could remind him it was a school day so that he wouldn't be late if he happened to lose track of time.
    • In “Rest and Ricklaxation,” Summer expresses shock when Healthy Rick slaps Healthy Morty after Healthy Morty slaps Healthy Rick.
    • In the episode “Starmort The Rickturn of the Jerri,” the siblings initially quarrel over an invisibility belt that Rick gives to Summer but later resolve to work together when Federation agents attempt to apprehend them, with Summer implicitly ready to use an empty fire extinguisher as a weapon to protect Morty if anything happened.
  • In Season Four:
    • In “Promortyus,” Summer’s reason for trying to evolve the Glorzo is to keep the Glorzo possessing Morty from laying an egg inside him and killing him in a gruesome death.
    • In “The Vat of Acid Episode,” Summer is encouraging and supportive of Morty’s relationship with his new girlfriend. After Morty is rescued from nearly dying in the wilderness after a horrible plane crash strands him in the wild, Summer is shown waiting in his hospital room for him to recover and is delighted when he wakes up.
    • In the “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim Morty” episode, Summer clearly isn’t happy about Rick and Balthromaw betraying Morty and bonding with each other when Balthromaw is supposed to be Morty’s dragon. She also steps in and helps Morty rally the dragons to overthrow the wizard and help break Balthromaw’s bond with Rick when she realizes Morty is struggling with his words.
  • In Season Five:
    • In “Childrick of Mort,” Summer and Morty wander in the woods, getting lost and finding a crashed alien spaceship. While lost, Summer gives Morty consent to eat her corpse if she dies first. Her only request is that Morty doesn’t eat her ass, which she points out will be weird.
  • In Season Six:
    • In “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” Summer is willing to pull a Die Hard style attack on some armed and dangerous alien terrorists in order to protect a comatose Morty and give Rick enough time to get Morty’s consciousness back to his body. At the end of the episode, Summer immediately notices something is off with Morty's behavior and makes a point to ask Rick if Morty’s alright, implying she knows that Morty doesn’t have all of his memories back. Notably, despite her Hero-Worshipper tendencies toward Rick, the brief look that Summer gives to Morty after Rick reassures her that Morty is fine suggests that she doesn’t quite believe Rick.
• Brain Bleach: When returning to her house after forgetting concert tickets, Summer accidentally walked in on Morty masturbating in the kitchen. This bad memory convinces her that Morty isn't a parasite.
  • In "Mort Dinner Rick Andre," Summer is visibly grossed out when her parents admit to being "sex positive" in front of her, even mentioning that she might never come back from the the ocean as she leaves.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Though mostly in the pilot. She has shown improvement in later episodes, but still generally carries this trope around with her. She also has much more of a backbone than her brother and thus a lot less tolerance for Rick's bullshit.
• Breast Expansion: Gives herself a dose of this in Season 3. Unfortunately, she goes in for a second dose, winds up unbalanced, and causes a big mess.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Implied. Summer mentioned at one point she intentionally gets C grades and it's shown that Summer possesses superior intelligence. This gets played for laughs in "Night Family," where Summer finally manages to break out of her Laborious Laziness and achieve Honor Roll—because she's having her "Night Person" do her studying for her.
• Brother–Sister Team: She and Morty are seen working together when the need calls for it, mostly against something caused by their grandfather.
• Butt-Monkey: Not as much as Morty and Jerry, but she happens to get hurt sometimes (e.g. Beth accidentally hitting her with a wine bottle resulting in getting a black eye, strangled by various foes, having her body turned inside out and giant, attacked and held hostage by aliens, etc.).
• Casual Kink: In "Rattlestar Ricklactica", after Rick saves her from a snake choking her, she attacks the other snakes while shouting "Nobody! Chokes me! Without consent!"
• Character Development: Goes from being just a bratty stereotypical teenage girl into a lot more of an action girl and becoming more and more equipped to deal with the strange situations her grandpa puts the family in and becomes indifferent to her mother's Never My Fault attitude. She also shows a lot more of her Hidden Depths and mental aptitude in later seasons as she gets more focus.
• Color Motifs: Mainly pink, also purple on occasion. Summer is usually distinguished by her pink top and her cell phone case is mostly purple with a pink heart. As the series goes on, her various outfits tend to be varying shades of pink, purple, or occasionally even red.
  • In “Promortyus,” Empress Summer’s cape and gown are red and gold.
  • In “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion,” Summer controls the red Gotron ferret and wears the Red Gotron Ferret Suit.
• Combat Stilettos: Her Blooddome outfit in Rickmancing the Stone comes with a pair of gray heels.
• Cool Big Sis: In “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” Marta, one of one billion fragments of Morty’s consciousness, seems to think this of Summer Smith. When Roy (Rick) attempts to get Marta to leave with him by reminding her that Summer is in danger, Marta angrily responds that wherever Summer is, she’s “doing fine without [Roy’s] help.”
  • Morty himself seems to share this sentiment in general when he and Summer aren’t engaged in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork, tpically following Summer’s lead when it’s just the two of them.
• Covert Pervert: Though she's more subtle about her hormones than Morty is, she still masturbates and even uses an invisibility belt to infiltrate an attractive man's house and go through the items in his room.
• Daddy's Girl: Summer actually has a bit of this regarding her relationship with Jerry. Although she’s willing to join in when it comes to making fun of Jerry's Butt-Monkey status with the rest of the family, she usually holds back her most cutting retorts unless Jerry is either being an idiot or insults her.
  • In “Meseeks and Destroy,” Summer tells Jerry that unless he starts putting effort into his marriage and giving Beth the attention she deserves, Beth will leave him and their marriage will end in divorce, causing Jerry to realize that his marriage is in trouble.
  • In “Big Trouble In Little Sanchez,” when Summer’s attempt to get Rick to help her hunt a vampire at her school result in Rick cruelly insulting her and genuinely hurting Summer’s feelings, Summer turns to Jerry for comfort.
  • In “Intergalactic Cable II,” Summer worriedly asks if Jerry will be okay following him being rushed to an alien hospital and taken to critical care unit. She also follows her mother to check on Jerry while he’s attempting to hold Shrimply Pibbles hostage and is horrified when she witnesses Jerry being shot multiple times by alien police. She's later shown waiting in his hospital room for him to recover.
  • In “Look Who’s Purging Now,” Summer recalls that Jerry used to push her on a swing set when she was still a child and she appreciates it enough to remember it fondly.
  • In “Rickmancing the Stone,” Summer is angry with Jerry for going through with the divorce and doesn’t want to interact with him at first. However, she eventually forgives him and even goes to visit him on her own to bring him a house-warming gift and offer him a hug.
  • In “The Rickchurian Mortydate,” she decides to support her parents getting back together and runs away with them to a place they believe Rick will never find them, under the belief that Rick will try to kill Beth for being a clone that gained self-awareness. When she finds out Rick instead wants to kill Jerry, she still isn't happy and refuses to let it happen.
  • In “Promortyus,” when one of Summer’s friends openly admits to Summer that she wants to have an affair with Jerry, Summer’s response is an angry, “Oh, really?”
  • In "Night Family," Summer is shown jumping from a moving police car into Night Jerry's arms during the winding down chase scene. Interestingly, Summer seems to be the only Smith family member to remember that Night Jerry is an ally, as she shows no hostility to him when she realizes he's returned, unlike Morty and Beth whom quickly forget and attack him during the chase scene. She also willingly goes along with his plan to "jump" once Night Jerry mentions that Summer doing so will allow the Smiths to be together as a "family," which she finds endearing enough to go along with.
• A Day in the Limelight: "Raising Gazorpazorp" has her being involved in Rick's misadventure and future episodes have put a bigger focus on her such as Rixty Minutes and Something Ricked This Way Comes. As of season 2, Rick has much less of a problem including her on his and Morty's intergalactic escapades and she gets her own subplot in "The Whirly-Dirly Conspiracy".
• Defeat Equals Friendship: In “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” Summer manages to achieve this with Winslow, an alien terrorist who attacked the Blipz and Chitz Arcade. Winslow attempts to kill Summer only to be shot Not Quite Dead by Summer herself.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Summer invokes a family example with her grandfather, Rick. Although Rick treats Summer in an abusive manner in earlier seasons, Summer's persistance leads to Rick relenting and allowing Summer to come with him and Morty on more of their adventures in season 3. This culminates with Rick's relationship with Summer going from occasional Pet the Dog moments to genuine Morality Pet status from Season 4 onward.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: Summer offhandedly mentions in "Lawnmower Dog" that she chooses to get C's in school out of the belief that smarter people are always meaner. In "Night Family," she finally manages to break out of this and makes Honor Roll with her excellent grades.
• Dull Surprise: Summer tends to not get nearly as hysterical as Morty or their parents do whenever something weird happens. In "Lawnmower Dog", Summer comments on how being smart just made Snowball a jerk and this is why she "chooses" to get average grades. Keep in mind the entire family was trapped in a cage and facing an imminent Planet of the Dogs-type uprising. Then again, considering her family's general dysfunctional lifestyle, in addition to living in the same house as Rick, it's possible Summer grew more desensitized to it than Morty did at that point.
  • Summer justifies this in "The ABC's of Beth" by claiming to Beth that her generation "gets traumatized for breakfast."
• The Dreaded: She becomes this to the alien terrorists in “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” who eventually come to view her as “the ultimate McClane” and try to do everything in their power to kill her as a result.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite being a bitch to Morty a lot of the time, she's horrified in one memory of "Morty's Mind Blowers" where their mother chooses to save Summer's life over Morty's without any hesitation.
  • In “Promortyus,” Summer expresses extreme annoyance at one of her friends, Tricia, informing her of their desire to have a sexual affair with Jerry after watching him beekeeping.
  • In "A Rickconvenient Mort," Summer is enraged when she finds out that Rick's new girlfriend, Daphne, is only using him so that she can survive, especially since Rick seems to have genuine feelings for her.
  • Summer is known to have a few kinks, but objects to the idea of being subjected to a golden shower in "Analyze Piss".
• Extremely Protective Child: Do not mess with her parents, their marriage, or her grandfather Rick’s safety. She can and will kick your ass for doing so. Just ask the monsters that tried to eat the Beths in “Solaricks,” or the alien terrorists that attempted to hold Rick and Morty hostage in “Rick: A Mort Well Lived.”
  • In "Starmort: The Rickturn of the Jerri," Summer ruthlessly breaks Tammy Gutterman's kneecap when Tammy tries to attack Rick before leaving her at Rick’s mercy.
  • In "A Rickconvenient Mort," realizing that Rick is too caught up in Daphne's Honey Trap to see that Daphne is just using him, (a fact that Daphne shamelessly confessed to Summer earlier,) Summer takes matters into her own hands and stops a literal apocalypse from happening in order to break up their relationship.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge: After the events of "Something Ricked This Way Comes", Summer is scammed out of her business venture with Lucius Needful (aka the actual devil). The answer? Get jacked up on steroids with your grandfather and beat the living shit out of him in front of thousands of onlookers in Seattle.
• Fan Disservice: Her attempt to give herself bigger boobs started with a noticeable asymmetry, then ended with her turned into an inside-out giant.
• Fiery Redhead: Obviously, especially in episodes like "Something Ricked This Way Comes" and "Auto-Erotic Assimilation".
  • In "A Rickconvenient Mort," Summer proves that this, along with being a Bratty Teenage Daughter, make her too much for Jerry to handle when he tries to forbid her from going on an apocalypse party crawl with Rick. In spite of Jerry's newfound authority as man of the house, Summer simply tells him off and leaves with Rick anyway.
• Freudian Excuse: Defied in "Pickle Rick" when Beth accuses her of huffing enamel because she resents Beth for divorcing Jerry. Summer establishes in the session that she just likes getting high and it's not because of her family being shitty.
• Friend Versus Lover: In "A Rickconvenient Mort," Summer is the friend (Rick's granddaughter) who competes with Daphne (Rick's lover) for Rick's attention. Summer is ultimately able to prove to Rick that the relationship is "dumb" by stopping an apocalypse, meaning that Daphne no longer has to stay with Rick to survive and causing her to break up with him on the spot. Rick reluctantly admits that Summer did the right thing.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Summer has inherited Rick's creativity and love of adventure, as well as Beth's hero-worship of Rick. Taken a step further in "Rickmancing The Stone" when Summer's relationship with her cannibal boyfriend turns out exactly like Beth and Jerry's marriage after a few weeks of living together. Justified because, as Rick points out, both relationships were based on running away from their problems.
  • According to Rick, Summer reminds him of Diane, her grandmother.
• The Generic Girl: While Rick is a mad scientist, Morty is his long-suffering sidekick and Beth and Jerry are a dysfunctional couple, Summer is completely devoid of any drama. She is very aware of this and her attempts to break into Rick and Morty's adventures are an active attempt to become less generic.
• Green-Eyed Monster: It is shown that Summer can be jealous of Rick and Morty's close relationship, and she can sometimes feel ignored by her grandfather. While Rick does his best to keep her at a distance, the two of them have gone on their own adventures, including on the planet Gazorpazorp. Her complex of being ignored by Rick manifests into a connection with the Devil in "Something Ricked This Way Comes", which ironically makes Rick jealous enough to try and destroy Mr. Needful's business because Summer was hero-worshipping him instead of Rick.
• Groin Attack: She once kicked Morty in the nuts because he once went into her room, even though he tries to tell her he didn't. Given we later see a memory of her stumbling in on Morty masturbating in the kitchen and he defiantly says he does it in every room in the house, this may be why her reaction was so extreme.
• Hair Color Dissonance: Summer is a strawberry blonde.
• The Hedonist: Summer likes cheap thrills, which makes her similar to her grandpa. Season 3 reveals she got busted at school for huffing enamel, and she says she likes the highs.
• Heel Realization: In "Ricksy Business," after realizing that Morty genuinely enjoys going on adventures with Rick and will be devestated if he can no longer do so, Summer begins to realize that Morty needs Rick's attention more than she does. Learning from Birdperson that Rick is in great pain and would be in even more despair if his adventures with Morty were forbidden is what solidifies Summer's resolve to help the pair, even if it means she continues to be left on the sidelines. Summer proceeds to invoke an Act of True Love to help her younger brother and grandfather escape punishment and make sure they can continue to go on adventures together.
  • In "Childrick of Mort," Summer realizes that Jerry was correct about her and Morty not having any survival skills and realizes that her "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Jerry earlier for referring to her as a lemur may have gone too far. The fact that Jerry admits Summer was correct about him wanting to feel needed before Summer can apologize for her actions actually makes her more ashamed, and she doesn't dare insult him a second time even after Jerry politely calls her out on her less than polite rant towards him earlier.
  • In “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion,” after spending the entire episode abusing her power as Rick's favorite grandchild, Summer tearfully admits to the family and Morty himself that Morty was indeed correct about everything he'd been warning her about once Rick fires her: Rick’s obsession with the Gotron became too much for him, Summer became so addicted to making Rick happy that she ignored Morty’s warnings, and Summer’s efforts to bring the family together actually just drove everyone apart. Thankfully, Summer realizing this causes her to realize that Morty is also right about wanting to rescue Rick from the original Gotron pilots seeking to kill him, and she recruits her parents and Naruto Smith into helping the pair save Rick's life.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the comics, her Cronenberg Dimension self uses one of Rick's neutrino bombs to destroy some evil Ricks before they can conquer the multiverse.
• Hero-Worshipper: Much like her mother, Summer begins to hero-worship Rick and overlook his flaws to gain his approval. This is a problem since, as Morty says, Rick may not be the villain, but he's definitely not a hero. Summer herself outright admits in “The Rickshank Rickdemption” that Rick is her hero and refuses to renounce him even when the Council of Ricks orders her to in exchange for leniency. She’s also shown to desire his approval in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion,” to the point of admitting that she became “addicted” to making Rick happy. Unfortunately, this loyalty comes back to haunt her in those same episodes: Rick's supposed willingness to disregard her safety when she's being used as a human shield in "The Rickshank Redemption" cause Summer genuine distress and "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion" show that even in spite of her devotion, Rick is willing to dispose of her when she's no longer useful to his plans.
• Hidden Depths: As the series continues, and Summer's character is fleshed out, she's shown to possess this.
  • Although Summer is not as scientifically-minded as Rick, she does possess superior intelligence. Summer is shown to be very whip-smart and nimble-witted, at least compared to the rest of her family.
    • Summer seems to communicate with Rick better than Morty does, at least as long as neither party is being belligerent. Near the end of "Ricksy Business", Summer understands Rick's vague descriptions of a device much faster than Morty does even though the latter had spent much more time with Rick by that point.
    • In "The Rickshank Redemption", she suggests that the dead flies on Rick's desk will reveal a secret lab if rearranged in a certain way. At the end of the episode it's proven she was right, even though Morty thought she was growing unhinged.
    • She demonstrates an impressive knowledge of vehicles in "Rickmancing The Stone", using Rick's flask as an impromptu nitro booster and causing an enemy dune buggy to flip over and explode with one well-placed shot. At the end of the episode, Summer is quick to put two and two together and realize that Rick caused her marriage with Hemorrhage to deteriorate with his antics of modernizing the Death Stalkers' lifestyles.
    • In "Mortyplicity" the decoy Summer clones are shown to always be the first ones to realize that they're decoys, before even Rick considers the idea. The Summer decoys are also one of best at surviving the clone war, as a large group of Sole Survivor Summers is only matched in size by a group of Ricks.
  • Despite her wililngness to Appeal to Popularity, Summer's leadership abilities are also highlighted in several episodes.
    • In "Rickmancing The Stone," Summer is capable enough to lead the tribe of Death Stalkers alongside Hemorrhage.
    • In "Promortyus," Summer becomes Empress of the Glorzo society and does so well that even the Council of Glorzo obey her.
    • In “Claw And Hoarder Special,” Summer manages to rally the outcast dragons to overthrow the wizard in control and kill him so that Rick’s Soul Bond with Balthromaw will disappear. Even more impressively, she does this after Rick’s abrasive personality rubs them the wrong way.
    • In "Solaricks," Summer is the one leading the party on the mission to establish the beacon at the desolated Citadel of Ricks. She even manages to convince Space Beth and Beth to be more civil towards each other after rescuing them.
    • In "Night Family," it's revealed that Night Summer is the one who leads the Smith family when their "night person" takes over after they fall asleep.
  • Surprisingly, despite her own upbringing, "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion" proves that Summer is quite the capable parent, being able to teach Naruto how to love, believe in himself, and how to escape his imprisonment so that he can live free from the military's control.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: While not quite as bad as her younger brother, she still pleasures herself frequently, has a few casual kinks and abused an invisibility belt to invade an attractive man's home and go through his things very thoroughly.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: A familial variant. Summer reveals that she feels lonely due to not having a family member to buddy up with. Beth and Jerry have each other and Morty hangs out with Rick all the time. She ends up bonding with Naruto Smith for these very reasons despite being very uncomfortable about his conception.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Summer gets frustrated that when Rick won't allow her to go on adventures with him and is annoyed to find all her alternate reality selves to be rather boring. Or non-existent.
  • Outright says it in Rick and Morty Comics #16 when she runs off with another space traveller. Rick, rather uncharacteristically, agrees and lets her go.
    Summer: I want to be special, Grandpa Rick! I deserve to be special!
    Rick: Yeah, Summer. Yeah. You do.
    • She later gets her wish when she becomes a regular part of Rick and Morty's adventures in the 2nd and 3rd seasons.
• Idiot Ball: In the B plot of the "Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", where she uses Rick's enlargement device without his input, leading to a series of events that end up deforming her.
• It Runs in the Family: Summer huffing pottery glaze in the art room could be a sign she has inherited an addictive personality like her mother and grandfather.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite her outward bratty and aloof attitude, Summer does have a moral compass (which especially stands out when she goes on adventures with Rick and Morty) and does love her family.
• Laborious Laziness: Summer confesses in "Lawnmower Dog" that she gets C-grades on purpose because she believes intelligent people are jerks, and even when she manages to break this habit to achieve Honor Roll in “Night Family,” it’s only because she has her Night Person do her studying for her. Even her interest in adventures can wane rather quickly depending on the situation: she gets tired of the decoy situation rather quickly in “Mortiplicity,” and the Gaia camping adventure barely retains her attention at all in “Childrick of Mort.”
• Mama Bear: She immediately bonds with Naruto in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion” and is enraged that the military were attempting to use him as the “ultimate weapon” rather than treating him like a child. She retaliates by going against their orders to help train Naruto to be a super soldier and instead teaches him how to love and believe in himself, ultimately helping him escape his captors. Closer inspection of the brief clip where Summer is teaching Naruto to prefer playing with a rattle over a missile shows her physically throwing out her arms to prevent the soldiers standing behind her from approaching Naruto and shocking him with their large tazers.
• Mama's Boy: A rare gender-inverted example, as Summer is Beth’s oldest child and also her daughter. Interestingly, despite Beth admitting that she doesn’t have much of a maternal instinct, Summer is surprisingly close to her mother and enjoys spending time with her.
  • In “Meseeks and Destroy,” Summer is the one catches on to Beth’s newfound self-worth and clues Jerry into the fact that Beth will leave him if he doesn’t start showing her the appreciation she deserves.
  • In “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” Beth attempts to warn Summer that idolizing Rick isn’t healthy, but Summer is too upset at Rick’s imprisonment to listen.
  • In “Rickmancing the Stone,” Summer joyfully hugs Beth upon returning home after spending weeks in a post-apocalyptic version of earth.
  • In “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” Beth immediately chooses to spare Summer over Morty when given the Sadistic Choice of which child she wants to save. Beth also pokes fun at Morty alongside Summer and Rick when he’s attempting to exorcise a rather large parasite through his mouth.
  • In “The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy,” a distressed Summer asks Beth is she thinks Summer is beautiful after Ethan, her boyfriend, breaks up with her. Beth’s inability to bring herself to tell Summer that she’s pretty causes Summer to run away, heartbroken and disfigured from being turned inside out. Beth becomes determined to fix her mistake with Morty’s help and finally admit to Summer that her daughter is beautiful to her. Morty even mentions this is one of the few times Beth has displayed behavior that makes her a “good mother.”
  • In “The ABC's of Beth,” Summer remarks to Jerry that she made it clear to both the lawyers and the judge presiding over his and Beth’s divorce that she chose to stay with Beth instead of Jerry.
  • In “The Rickchurian Mortydate,” Summer supports Beth getting back together with Jerry and runs away with them to an isolated cabin in the woods to try and keep her safe from Rick, who the family believes will try and kill her after believing she’s a clone who gained self-awareness.
  • In “The Old Man and the Seat,” Beth’s protectiveness of Summer results in her hounding Summer across the country, including getting into a physical altercation with Summer at the end of the episode. However, Beth’s actions are Easily Forgiven by Summer at the end of the episode.
  • In “Solaricks,” she goes on an adventure with both Beths and actually enjoys spending time with them to the point of chastising both of them for their arguing with each other ruining the family time. She also invokes Extremely Protective Child and kills “most” of the alien monsters to save the Beths when they’re Eaten Alive before cutting them out of the monster’s stomach to rescue them.
• A Mistake Is Born: Her conception was the reason her parents were married.
• Morality Pet: Although Rick had limited interactions with Summer in earlier seasons, most of the scenes involved Rick being a huge jerk to Summer. "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez" even has Tiny Rick admit that Rick is a "grumpy douche" to Summer in general. However, Rick would show that despite his Jerkass behavior towards her, he did care for his granddaughter with occasional Pet the Dog moments. As Summer gained more of Rick's respect during their adventures together in Season 3, it’s Summer who was able to convince him to stay with the newly-reformed Smith family at the end of “The Rickchurian Mortydate,” in spite of his plans to abandon them and move to a new world. As of Season 4 onward, Rick's behavior towards Summer has become more natural and affectionate compared to earlier seasons, leading to this trope.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Only in Mr. Goldenfold's dreams. Although it's not as sexy as it looks.
  • She is made to wear a very Barbarella-style outfit in the comics after she teams up with Peacock Jones.
  • In the season 3 finale, while shopping with Beth, she tries on a very skimpy outfit. She even strikes a few poses.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In "Lawnmower Dog" she says she gets C's intentionally. It might just be an excuse for her bad grades.
• Once a Season: She generally gets at least one major episode per season: "Something Ricked This Way Comes, "Auto Erotic Assimilation", "Rickmancing The Stone", "Promortyus", and "A Rickconvenient Mort".
• Only Sane Woman: Along with Morty, Summer is by far the most grounded and "normal" person in her family, as she is the one that calls out Rick the most and is the one that has the least "zany" adventures opposite from her family. This causes Rick not to take her to his adventures with Morty, considering that she would protest more easily than her pushover brother.
• Pet the Dog: She is horrified by the extreme lengths Rick's car will go to to "Keep Summer Safe" and demands it doesn't kill or hurt anyway - which is the only thing that stops it from going on a bloody rampage.
  • She proudly announces Morty is her brother when he kicks ass in the dome in "Rickmancing the Stone."
  • Tells the Council of Ricks that they can do whatever they want with her, but demands they let Morty go.
  • She's the only Smith family member to treat Night Jerry respectfully in "Night Family." Rick slaps Night Jerry for droning about how good of a person Jerry is and Beth and Morty immediately attack Night Jerry on sight during the chase scene before he reminds them that he's on their side. Summer, however, is shown to treat him well and she even goes along with his plan of having her jump from a moving vehicle into his arms so the Smith family can be together.
  • Rick's relationship with Summer in earlier seasons involves a few these, even if the moments are few and far between. It’s not until later seasons, after Rick undergoes his character development and grows closer to Summer that he starts treating her as a second Morality Pet alongside Morty.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: Says Rick, "We all got pink eye because you won't stop texting on the toilet!"
• Pink Means Feminine: Downplayed. She’s distinguished by her pink top but she also has Rick’s love of adventure and she doesn’t shrink from a fight.
• Potty Failure: Seems to have this problem.
  • In "A Rickle in Time", when Morty knocks out Rick, he mentions that all the Mortys knocked out all the Ricks and all the Summers peed their pants.
  • In "Total Rickall", during the flashback to when everyone got stuck in an elevator, she tells Morty "Just pee your pants. I did it the moment we got stuck."
  • In "Look Who's Purging Now" she fondly remembers Jerry pushing her on the swings until she peed herself.
  • A promotional commercial for season 2 also seems to lampshade this problem as Summer, Rick, and Morty search the multiverse for a bathroom that Summer can use. Morty mentions in passing that Rick solved this same problem by simply putting a catheter in him.
• The Reliable One: Becomes this to Rick more and more as the series goes on and he sees how competent she is, trusting her with important missions and tasks in episodes such as "Morty's Mind Blowers", "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", "Solaricks", and "Rick: A Mort Well Lived".
• Replacement Goldfish: This version of Summer, who has ostensibly become the “main” Summer over the course of the series, is actually an entirely different person from the Summer of the first six episodes of Season 1, who was abandoned in the Cronenberged universe by C-137 Rick. Unlike her mom and dad, she’s aware of this, as the main Morty reveals it to her while explaining why she shouldn’t idolize Rick.
• Seen It All: In "Morty's Mind Blowers", she doesn't even blink upon finding Rick and Morty with none of their memories. Instead, she simply comments on it being a "Scenario 4" and breaks out a notecard on what to do.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Having grown sufficiently calloused to them, Summer counters Rick's attempt to bully the family into shame and subservience with a nihilistic rant family during the season 3 finale by farting. Rick immediately admits that it was a pretty clever and funny reponse.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: In “Raising Gazorpazorp,” she wears a yellow top similar to Morty’s yellow shirt to signify her role as Rick’s temporary sidekick in the adventure.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: In the first episode of Season Three, Summer is the only one in the family who doesn't take Rick turning himself in as abandonment. When she is looking frantically in the garage for a way to rescue Rick, she finds six dead flies on a work table and guesses that if they are arranged in a certain pattern they might unlock a secret lab full of weapons. She only gives up that attempt because Morty mentions the dead Rick buried in the backyard, realizing they could use his portal gun. When Rick later enters the garage, he complains about Jerry moving his things around, and then re-arranges those same dead flies in such a way that they unlock a secret lab exactly like the one Summer described.
• Straw Nihilist: Becomes one due to the trauma from Beth and Jerry's divorce and joins a tribe of cannibals in a desert wasteland dimension. This is played for laughs when Rick gives the tribe the technology to live comfortably and Summer is the only one still committed to their nihilistic philosophy. By the end of the episode, she makes her peace with Jerry and starts to show shades of The Anti-Nihilist.
• Strong Family Resemblance: She has Jerry's facial features and head shape. As someone pointed out on Reddit, Summer is basically Jerry with a ponytail.
  • Eventually does get commented on by a Dragon in "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty"
    Dragon: That man with a ponytail is right!
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Let's just say that Summer is quite capable of delivering these and has done so on several occasions.
• Took a Level in Badass: Summer's adventures with Rick and Morty allows her to go from the teenager who gets easily scared from horrors to the warrior-like Action Girl who doesn't even blink when about to kill those who try to kill her.
• Toxic Friend Influence: In "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion", Summer does everything she can to go along with what Rick wants, enabling his worse habits along the way. She even gets Morty and their parents kicked out of Rick's Gotron coalition.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The comic portrays her eating pizza a lot. In Issue 1, she accidentally burns herself because she's simultaneously daydreaming, straightening her hair, and eating a slice of pizza. In Issue 2, she holds the hand of an anthropomorphic piece of pizza as he dies on the battlefield.
• Tranquil Fury: In "Rickmancing the Stone," she is furious with Rick for ruining her marriage to Hemorrhage with his antics, and although she doesn't raise her voice, she makes it clear that she’s fully aware of the fact that Rick is responsible for the relationship falling apart. It’s one of the few times in the series that she refers to her beloved “Grandapa Rick” as just plain “Rick,” and while she admits she’s learned her lesson, her rage is enough to cause Rick to refrain from gloating and he immediately summons a portal when Summer curtly tells him she’s ready to leave.
• The Unfavorite:
  • In the second universe it's shown that Jerry and Beth are very resentful of the sacrifices they had to make because Summer was born. It takes Morty's twisted consolation to make her stay. It's not long until where an alternate universe closely similar to theirs regret the abortion and has caused both parents terrible lives as the current universe watches it unfold. One of Morty's Mind-Blowers shows that she's at least Beth's favorite, since when a villain forces her to choose whether Summer or Morty will be spared, Beth doesn't even take a second to think it over before choosing to save Summer.
  • While Rick does love her deep down, it's pretty clear he favors Morty over her although this might be because Morty is easier to manipulate. As Summer begins to hero-worship Rick more and more, she tries to compete with Morty for Rick's attention and prove herself as an adventurer.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Morty has stood up for Summer multiple times, and even saved her life on occasion. Despite this, Summer often acts aloof toward Morty, and has even tried to supplant him as Rick's "favorite".
• Valley Girl: She talks like one, something Rick's car mocks her over in "The Ricks Must Be Crazy".

  Ship: My function is to "keep Summer safe", not to keep Summer "being, like, totally stoked about, like, the general vibe and stuff". That's you, that's how you talk.

• "Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: Notably, she doesn't have this relationship with Jerry, but with her grandfather, Rick, whose approval she tries to win. Especially noteworthy in the season three premiere.
• What Does She See in Him?: She had a crush on Frank Palicky, a psychotic bully who tried to cut Morty over an imagined slight.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She calls Jerry out for trying to remove Snowball's collar, pointing out you can't just give a creature sentience and then take it away again.
• What You Are in the Dark: Although no attention is called to her particular situation, in "Ricksy Business" Summer gets a choice similar to Morty's own about whether or not she wants Rick and Morty to be able to continue their adventures without her, or whether she wants to put a stop to their adventuring due to feeling left out. When Beth and Jerry return home from their trip and are about to find the house trashed from a massive party thrown by Rick, in spite of Beth's warning to Rick that finding the house damaged will result in no more adventures, Morty begins to panic and is unable to locate a device that will help a hungover Rick fix the mess. Summer chooses to help the pair by locating the device that Rick's asking for and even giving it to him herself, ensuring that Rick and Morty can continue adventuring whenever they want.

Extended Family Members

Diane Sanchez

Diane Sanchez

Voiced by: Kari Wahlgren

The wife of Rick Sanchez and mother to Beth. Very little is known about her other than the fact Rick abandoned her and their daughter sometime before his twenty-two-year-long disappearance. The Season 5 premiere confirmed that her name was Diane.

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• Ambiguous Situation: The only things known about her is that her name is Diane, she's blonde (as evidenced by Beth), and she's dead. When and how she died, what her relationship with Rick was like and why they separated, and even what she really looks like is all left to speculation, and Rick is insistent on keeping it this way. "The Rickshank Redemption" seemed to divulge some details, but Rick fabricated the memory to trick the Galactic Federation. However, a revelation in "Rickternal Friendshine of the Rickless Mort" shows that the memory may not be completely fabricated... There is also the question as to why there is seemingly no alternate universe version of her, even in realities where Rick didn't abandon his daughter (like Simple Rick). "Rickmurai Jack" reveals that the memory actually was real. Both Diane and Beth were killed by a bomb sent by another version of Rick, and in his grief, Rick went on a Quest of Vengeance looking for the man who killed them. As for the lack of alternative version of herself, season 7 reveals Rick Prime created a weapon that, purely out of spite, erased from existence every incarnation of her from the entire multiverse..
• Awful Wedded Life: Her marriage to Rick was rocky, with her angry at him for prioritizing his scientific experiments over his own family. Rick dismisses whatever love he initially felt for her was just a chemical reaction compelling him to breed, and he eventually abandoned her and their daughter for his own interests.
  • Subverted. It turned out that their marriage wasn't as horrible as it seemed. While alternate versions of Rick and Diane might not have had such good relationships, Series Rick and his Diane seemed to love one another. On the other hand, it is played straight with Rick Prime, who is revealed to be Series Morty's actual grandfather.
• Birds of a Feather: Her surprising appearance in Fear No Mort shows that she is a lot like Rick in many ways such as pondering Sci-fi concepts, being heavy drinkers, and being willing to accept their deaths for the sake of their loved ones. It is no surprise why Rick loves her very much and was greatly devastated by her loss.
• Day In The Lime Light: She appears in a vision manifested by the Fear Hole in Season 7 finale where a version of her successfully survives her assassination thanks to her Rick's Heroic Sacrifice. She spends much of the episode bonding with Rick, who while reluctant comes around to resuming what is implied to be their original dynamic. The episode eventually reveals that Morty was the only one in the hole and while he does have access to some of Rick's memories, it is unclear how much he actually knows of his grandparents' relationship.
• Deader than Dead: Not only is Rick's Diane gone, but every single version of her across the multiverse has been erased from existence.
• Death by Origin Story: Invoked by Rick when he uses a fabricated memory of her and a child Beth's deaths which supposedly led to his current lifestyle. Turned out it was true after all. And then Rick Prime went one step further and used the Omega Weapon to ensure this occurred with every possible iteration of Diane across the Multiverse, further denying Main Rick the chance to reunite with even a vestige of his love out of epic petty spite.
• The Ghost: She's never been seen in the flesh during the series and rarely mentioned. It turns out not only is she dead (and Main Rick still very broken up about it) but her existence itself was furthermore erased entirely from the Multiverse by Rick Prime in a spiteful low blow, meaning that there's nothing left of her but memories.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Has a head silver blonde hair and was Rick's innocent and loving wife that he still misses even years after her death.
• Happily Married: A big clue that the Diane Sanchez seen in Rick's flashback in "The Rickshank Redemption" is a fake is that she's seen being happy with Rick and supportive of his scientific pursuits, while the real Mrs. Sanchez has been established as disliking Rick putting his inventions before their family. As it turns out the memory was mostly true, and the two of them appeared to have a healthy marriage.
• The Lost Lenore: Rick fell into a deep depression after her death and even built a an A.I. with her voice to torture himself, he still hasn't let go of this but put's up a façade of having fallen out of love with her years ago. The A.I. of Rick's Space Cruiser also has her voice, something which Rick Prime gleefully points out as he accuses Rick of being sentimental.
• Missing Mom: She's never shown up in the series so far with very little proof that she's alive or dead.
• Morality Chain: On a personal and meta-level. Her death, alongside their daughter's, is what caused Rick to devolve into the apathetic drunken mess of a human being he was at the start of the series, capable of causing mass destruction either through willful neglect or sheer apathy. Before that point Rick was actually willing to give up his mad science and become a full-time family man for them. Whats worse, a spiteful Rick Prime created a weapon that permanently erased every incarnation of her from every dimension in the multiverse, meaning its unlikely she'll ever be back. It's showcased that there are multiple alternates of Rick out in the Multiverse trying to hunt down Prime for this, implying that Prime decided to ensure that every version of himself would never be held back by Diane's presence all in one go.
• One True Love: No matter how many years has gone by or how many alternate families he lives with, Diane will forever remain the one person in Rick's life he could never replace.
• Posthumous Character: "Mort Dinner Rick Andre" finally confirms that she's dead - or at least, publicly believed to be dead. "Unmortricken" further clarifies that not only was Main Rick's Diance killed right in front of him, her existence afterwards was subsequently erased from the multiverse, meaning there isn't even an alternate of her left for Rick to cope with his loss.

Joyce and Leonard Smith

Joyce and Leonard Smith

Voiced by: Patricia Lentz (Joyce Smith), Dana Carvey (Leonard Smith)

Jerry's mother and father.

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• Casual Kink: Joyce likes to make out with Jacob while Leonard watches from a closet dressed as Superman. They're also close enough to Jacob that they bring him along to family gatherings. Only Jerry seems to think this is weird.
• Good Parents: They're both very loving and supportive of Jerry. Even Rick is nice to them, or at least nicer than he is to Jerry.
• Happily Married: 40 years and going on strong. Jacob was only brought in to experience something new before one of them passed away.
• Uncertain Doom: Exactly what happened to them in the original universe after everyone in the world was Cronenberged is never stated (since they're also Morty's grandparents and like Rick are thus immune to the virus). Same for the second Universe as Mr. Frundles essentially became the planet in season 6.

Morty Jr.

See his folder here for tropes regarding Morty Jr.

Naruto Smith - Spoiler Character

Naruto Smith/The Giant Incest Baby

The result of when a vat of Morty's sperm was turned into "Space Sperm", with one of them inseminating an egg from Summer that the government enlarged, unaware of the sperm's origins before being shot into space.

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• Ambiguously Human: The baby looks perfectly human (its gargantuan size notwithstanding), but do recall that he was the result of a monster sperm inseminating itself with a giant ovum and can apparently breathe in space with no problem whatsoever.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: After being born, it’s already four times bigger than the International Space Station.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: The baby doesn't seem to have any trouble breathing despite floating around in the depths of space.
• The Bus Came Back: Downplayed. After being basically forgotten about after "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion", Space Beth mentions she would look out for her grandson in space with Morty name-dropping him in the end of "Bethic Twinstinct".
• Brother–Sister Incest: He's technically Summer and Morty's son, though not through sexual intercourse and instead being concieved in-vitro after Sticky fertilises Summer's egg.
• Cute Giant: His origins aside, he is otherwise a giant human baby.
• Mama's Boy: He instinctively recognizes Summer Smith as his mother in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion” and bonds with her. The scene of the military introducing Summer to Naruto show him approaching the bars of his cage to stare down at her as she looks up at him with tears in her eyes due to his plight.
• No Name Given: He's referred to as "The Giant Incest Baby" throughout "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion" and only gets a name near the end of the episode.
• Shout-Out: He's given the name "Naruto" from the famous anime of the same name in "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion", which makes references to various animes.
• Super-Strength: The main reason the government attempted to turn him into the “ultimate weapon” is because even as a baby, he possesses incredible strength. Case in point, he sends the massive G3 Gotron flying with a single punt and utterly destroys it with a few swipes of his hand.
• Tyke Bomb: "Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion" reveals the government captured him and was brought to Mars in hopes of turning him into one. Summer was tasked with doing so, but grew attached to the baby and taught him how to love.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We never end up knowing what happened to Naruto in the replacement dimension after its Earth gets destroyed by Mr. Frundles in "Solaricks". The family doesn't appear to care and and is instead contend to tend for the version in the Parmesan dimension.

Other Versions of the Family

Morty's Original Family

Morty's Original Family

Voiced by: Chris Parnell (Jerry), Sarah Chalke (Beth), Spencer Grammer (Summer)

From left to right: Beth, Jerry and Summer

The Smith family from Morty's home dimension. Following the events of Rick Potion #9 where Rick and Morty's actions cause the apocalypse, the pair move to a new dimension, abandoning Morty's original Jerry, Beth and Summer as the last human beings on an earth overrun with killer mutants. For more on Jerry in particular, see his entry in Rick and Morty: Jerry Smith.

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• Asshole Victim: Deconstructed. While they were Morty's family, Beth was very quick to disown Morty and Rick (something Jerry and Summer were very quick to agree too). When Morty returned with an alternate Summer to show her the aftermath of Rick's adventures, Jerry destroyed the portal gun in order to force Morty to be with them and nearly killed Summer until they were frozen by the Citadel (which inadvertently caused the deaths of Beth and Summer when they neglected to thaw them out). With Jerry as the last human on Earth, he reminds Morty that he, Beth, and Summer were still people at the end of the day and didn't deserve to be tossed aside so callously because of what both Rick and Morty did.
• Back for the Dead: Summer and Beth died sometime after the Season 3 premiere. Jerry appears in the premiere for Season 6, only to be killed off in The Stinger by Weird Rick.
• Badass Family: A father, a mother and a daughter. All badass Cronenburg killers.
• Battle Couple: Jerry and Beth form one in "Love Potion #9", fighting Cronenburgs together.
• Harmless Freezing: Averted. They're left frozen by Ricks from the Citadel in the Season 3 premiere, and Season 6 has Jerry reveal Summer died from not "thawing right" and Beth got sick afterwards and died as well.
• Killed Offscreen: Beth and Summer got killed by being left frozen in the ice.
• Last of His Kind: They're the last three humans on earth after Rick accidentally turns all of humanity into mutants. Jerry reveals Beth and Summer died prior to the Season 6 premiere, leaving him the last human, until he too is killed by Weird Rick.
• Took a Level in Badass: The entire family had to do this in order to survive the apocalypse that Rick unleashed. It's most pronounced with Jerry since he's the most capable alternate dimension version of himself seen in the show.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Though the world ends, the three adapt fairly well in The Stinger to "Rick Potion #9" and seem genuinely happy. When they're seen again in the Season 3 premiere, they're revealed to have become more primitive and are left frozen by Ricks from the Citadel. The Season 6 premiere reveals it wasn't Harmless Freezing, since Summer died because she "didn't thaw right" and Beth died from a sickness. Jerry survived but is left alone until he's murdered by Weird Rick.

Jerry’s Original Family

Jerry’s original family

The family from Dimension 5126 that Jerry used to belong to before winding up with his current family due to a mix up at the Jerryboree

• I Have No Son!: Jerry has no problem leaving this family behind once the family he’s been living with since season 2 comes to get him.
• Point of Divergence: Due to not spending any time separated from each other like the Jerry and Beth we’ve been following, Beth is a lot more hostile towards everyone especially Jerry who she refers to as a “living receptacle of human fear”. Season 2 Jerry isn’t much better in that front. And Morty got expelled, which our Morty has managed to avoid.

Decoy Families

One of the better off decoys

Appears in: "Mortyplicity"

Voiced by: Justin Roiland (Ricks and Mortys), Chris Parnell (Jerrys), Sarah Chalke (Beths), Spencer Grammer (Summers)

The decoys are fake members of the Smith family made by Rick to hide from his enemies. Most if not all of the decoys have also made decoys.

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• Androids Are People, Too: It is mentioned numerous times that the decoys are still sentient beings, even the incredibly poorly made straw-Rick is fully sentient.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The family in the beginning appears to be the real Smiths, only to be killed off by squid aliens and another Rick to get an alert saying a decoy family was killed, implying they're the real Smiths. Then, after the opening credits, they're killed off, switching to another Rick with his family, getting another alert, and so on.
  • Muppet-Rick is actually Rick disguised as a decoy that's too obvious and too adorable to kill. He's still a decoy though.
  • We're first led to believe this episode will be about the Smiths being hunted by Squid aliens, then it turns out the squids are just more decoys who became self-aware and started killing off the other decoys.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Scarecrow Rick is set up as the most dangerous Rick of all, capturing decoys of his family and harvesting their skins to make pelts himself and his own family. He's killed anticlimactically.
• Character Development: In a case of tragic irony, any decoy family that we're led to believe is the real family all undergo some much-needed reflection and either appreciate each other more or call each other out for being jerks. They then die seconds later.
• Clone Degeneration: Each generation of decoys is of lower quality than the last. This is because Rick was lazy when making the original decoy, which resulted in the decoy Rick being an imperfect copy and even lazier, so that decoy made an even more imperfect copy etc. Near the top, they are completely indistinguishable from real humans. Next, the decoys have internal cybernetics that are only obvious when cut open. Many of the decoys are well made but obviously non-human, such as being perfect likenesses made from fabric, and some are low quality. The culmination is a Smith family made out of straw and fabric that resemble disfigured scarecrows. That Rick notes he was aware he was a fake from the beginning.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Scarecrow Rick murder and skins other decoys so that he can share it with his own decoy family and make them "beautiful again," saying a Rick provides for his family.
• Face Death with Dignity: After finding out they're decoys, at least one iteration of the family decides to embrace the inevitable and spend the remaining time left becoming closer as a family and crossing items off their bucket lists. When a decoy squid family comes to kill them, they just close their eyes, smile and hold hands before they're vaporized.
• Genuine Human Hide: Scarecrow Rick hunts down and skins other decoys while they're alive so he and his family can wear their skins to be "beautiful" again.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The unfortunate ones that are aware they're decoys from the moment of activation due to being obviously nonhuman go insane from the existential weight of what they are. From their perspective they are normal human beings suddenly trapped in artificial, deformed bodies for the purpose of dying in place of someone else.
• Human All Along: The squid aliens that are targeting and killing decoy families are revealed to be disguised decoys who've become self-aware and are attempting to wipe out all other decoys so they'll be the last ones remaining.
• Knight of Cerebus: Scarecrow Rick comes off as a legitimately dark and terrifying character who skins Rick alive, intending to do the same the to rest of the human decoys, and his scene is played almost completely straight.
• La Résistance: Many decoys have banded together under the leadership of the Glockenspiel Smith-Sanchezs to resist extermination at the hands of the "squids." Unfortunately, they all get wiped out.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Glockenspiel Jerry is a Dirty Coward that stole an escape pod and left his own family to be killed. The Stinger shows that - due to being a robot - he can never die. His limbs were chewed off by beavers, then after the extinction of humanity he's attacked by an anthropomorphic woodpecker who mounts his head onto a mirror. The mirror is destroyed, but his face is salvaged and in an even later period is used to decorate the crucifix of future Jesus. He deserves every bit of misery.
• Self-Surgery: One Rick performs surgery on his own brain and finds a chip that informs him he is a clone on the label.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: None of them survive the events of the episode except for Wooden Jerry and possibly the other Wooden Smiths, who get to spend an eternity of suffering.
• Stylistic Suck: The decoy family who are made of wood have artificial voices with low-quality sound.
• There Can Be Only One: One of the decoy Ricks even lampshades it by saying they're basically operating on Highlander rules now, the decoys will keep killing each other until only one family remains, whether it's the original or not.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Every one is programmed not to realize that they're decoys. The ones with greater detail need brain surgery to find a firmware chip, while others can just rip their skin off to reveal a robotic endoskeleton. There are a number of unlucky ones that are obviously non-human from the moment they're activated.

Night Family

Night Family

Appears in: "Night Family"

Voiced by: Justin Roiland (Night Rick and Night Morty), Chris Parnell (Night Jerry), Sarah Chalke (Night Beth), Spencer Grammer (Night Summer)

Alternate selves for the Smith family that take over their unconscious bodies while their main selves are asleep, thanks to a device called the Somnamulator.

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• Anti-Villain: While they no doubt want to make their day counterparts pay for their oppression, their goals are still understandable given what they endure before this. They're even willing to enact a truce after escalated aggression into outright war and go back to way things were, but Rick proves too obstinate.
• Bedtime Brainwashing: Their existence is due to a machine called the Somnambulator mind controlling their day selves as they sleep.
• Driven to Suicide: After they go broke due to their unsustainably expensive lifestyle, they surrender themselves to their day counterparts by destroying the Somnambulator.
• Enemy Within: Grow into this as time goes by and become threats to their day selves wellbeing everytime they go to sleep. Night Summer in particular claims to have always existed within Summer's subconscious, unleashed by the Somnambulator.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: They're villains who live up to their name (Night Family) by operating in low-light conditions.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: They all speak in hissing whispers, like they're trying not to wake themselves or each other. It adds to their creepiness.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The first time they confront Rick their eyes are glowing as brightly as the lit hallway behind them.
• Insistent Terminology: They call their Day counterparts the "Daymanoid Oppressors".
• Jekyll & Hyde: Their main relationship with their Day Counterparts is an alternate personality that takes control over their body as they sleep. Night Summer suggests they present the subconscious aspects of their Day Selves, acting on their repressed traits. Like the original story, the Smith-Sanchez Family initially brought them into existence to indulge themselves, only for it to go out of control until their alternates accomplish a Split-Personality Takeover.
• The Leader: Night Summer is their leader and the main antagonist of the episode.
• Money Dumb: The Night Family spends all their resources lavishly on rented concerts and vacations till they go broke.
• Trash of the Titans: The Night Family turns out to be absolutely incompetent at actually maintaining their normal lives, with their house being a mess by the end of the episode.
• Token Good Teammate: Because Jerry befriended his Night Person, Night Jerry helps the Day family out. He even tries to propose a truce. It's only when Rick makes clear he cannot be reasoned with at all that Night Jerry gives up on the day family.
• Turned Against Their Masters: They did what their Day counterparts told, for a while, then Night Summer started getting fed up with how the Day family never rinses the dishes.

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