Original air date: 7/30/2017
While trying to deal with their parents' divorce, Morty and Summer decide to spend some time in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth.
Tropes:
- Accidental Hand-Hold: When Hemorrhage and Summer both reach for a wrench on the ground, they accidentally touch each other's hands, and a romantic moment ensues.
- Acting Unnatural: The robot versions of Morty, Summer, and Rick are at best shallow facsimiles of the real versions. They gladly go along with whatever Beth wants and Robot Morty eventually gains sentience before Rick overrides him.
- Alcohol Is Gasoline: At the start of the episode, Summer takes Rick's flask, takes a swig, and then spits it into the air intake manifold to give the vehicle a nitrous boost.
- Aloof Big Sister: Jerry and Beth's divorce has left Summer with nothing but overall indifference to the rest of the family that she does many questionable acts the whole episode just to escape from that reality. Morty himself gets a bit of this, but he gets better without Rick utterly humiliating him with the consequences (which he does to Summer).
- Amplified Animal Aptitude: The wolf that threatens Jerry not only wants to eat his mail instead of his food, but it can also tell which of the two envelopes contains his unemployment check. It also seems to understand him perfectly well, howling in confirmation when Jerry tries to understand the absurdity of the situation.
- An Aesop:
- Running from your problems will always make them (and by extension you) worse.
- Don't half-ass anything that you love, commit to it. If you can't, leave and don't look back.
- Animals Hate Him: The wolf in The Stinger who eats and vomits up Jerry's unemployment check simply because the universe hasn't seen him suffer enough.
- Anti-Climactic Unmasking: When Summer takes Hemorrhage's mask off, she clearly wasn't expecting a normal, handsome-looking man with a dumb mustache.
- The Apunkalypse: Mohawks and skimpy leather bondage gear in full display.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: The episode ends with Summer going to visit Jerry, offering him some life advice and a loving embrace.
- Behind the Black: Rick makes some disparaging remarks about Jerry, even though Jerry is standing right in front of him. He acts like he doesn't see Jerry until the camera pulls back enough to see him. Jerry lampshades this.
- Big "NO!":
- Hemorrhage when Rick steals the isotope sample providing his community power just before portalling out.
- Robot Morty says this as Rick overrides him.
- Blood Knight: When Rick injects a severed arm's muscle memory into Morty's left arm, "Armothy" eagerly slaughters contenders at the blood dome. Morty is initially horrified that his super buff arm cannot be controlled as it brutally kills its opponents, but then starts getting into it himself as an outlet for his repressed frustration over the divorce.
- Bond One-Liner:Deathstalker: MY BODY IS CHROME!!! MY BLOOD IS GASOLINE!!!
[Rick drops a car on him]
Rick: Nope; regular blood. - Book Ends: The episode begins and ends with Jerry hearing the wind blow by and whisper "Loser..."
- Butt-Monkey: Jerry, moreso than ever. The episode starts with Rick calling him a waste of human life to his face followed by his entire family giving him the cold shoulder and the wind itself calling him a loser. Then in The Stinger, a wolf deliberately eats and regurgitates his unemployment checks just for no better reason than to make him suffer more. And the wind calls him a loser again.
- Call-Back: The U-To truck makes its second appearance since the pilot episode in which Jerry tries to make Rick move out. Ironically, this time it is Jerry who is moving out.
- Continuity Nod: Jerry is wearing the Titanic hat from "Ricksy Business".
- Description Cut: Rick assures Beth that her kids are flourishing. Cut to Morty partaking in some sort of in Gladiator Games.
- Did They or Didn't They?: It's left ambiguous if Summer and her cannibal boyfriend had sex during their make-out session, though the importance of this is diminished given that they're married later in the episode - they almost certainly have had sex at some point.
- Diesel Punk: As for Mad Max reference, All the transportation in dimension is this. And even Co-creator in Sneak Peek video
calling this episode atmosphere as Diesel-powered vehicular field death and nihilism. - Do Androids Dream?: The Morty Robot manages to achieve sentience after three weeks, only for Rick to override him remotely and destroy him offscreen.
- Dying Vocal Change: Robot Morty's attempts to escape being deleted end in failure, with his voice trailing off into a slow-motion drone.
- Everyone Has Standards: Rick is initially cagey with Morty about his reasons for staying in the post-apocalypse dimension, but he's forced to drop the act when he can't bring himself to eat human flesh.
- Fanservice:
- Summer has a pretty hot make-out session with the leader of the Deathstalkers and it's implied to lead to sex.
- As always, Summer in post-apocalyptic gear is very attractive.
- Forced Friendly Fire: When Morty storms the castle, he stabs one knight with the sword of another.
- Future Slang: Hemorrhage speaks like this, for instance - referring to explosions as "Boomy-booms." When Summer makes fun of him for it, he vaguely implies that he only speaks that way because he thinks that's the way people are supposed to speak after an apocalypse.
- Generation Xerox: Summer's relationship with her cannibal boyfriend/husband after a few weeks of living together turns out exactly like Beth's and Jerry's marriage. Justified because, as Rick points out, both relationships were based on running away from their problems.
- Gone Horribly Right: Rick creates robot versions of Morty and Summer that are well-adjusted to reassure Beth that she made the right decision with the divorce. Unfortunately for Rick, they're too well-adjusted, and their support of Beth's own feelings lead her to try to contact Jerry about the divorce. This forces Rick to retrieve the real Morty and Summer after scrapping their robot selves.
- Here We Go Again!: To get Summer away from a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Rick just does what he did with Beth and Jerry's marriage.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Rick decides on biceps meat when given an option between it and quadriceps meat, giving a few sample tastes. Morty points out that Rick would rather eat human than acknowledge Summer's increasingly reckless behavior.
- Insistent Terminology: It's not a Thunderdome, it's a blood dome.note
- Just Following Orders: The warrior Armothy identifies as his murderer runs away screaming that he was only following orders when raiding the village.
- Kick the Dog:
- On their way out of the now-civilized Mad Max universe, Rick takes both the large isotope chunk and the smaller chunk that was powering their homes, just because he can.
- In a near literal example, except the dog (in this case wolf) does this to a human (Jerry). The wolf deliberately eats Jerry's unemployment check then vomits up the ruined remains just to make him suffer.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Morty calls Summer out on this at the beginning of the episode for not knowing what Carpe Diem means.
- Lampshaded the Obscure Reference: Rick burns a raider's semantics by saying "Save it for the Semantics Dome, E.B. White." This is a reference to E.B. White's The Elements of Style. One of the other raiders actually gets it.
- Like Parent, Like Spouse: Hemorrhage, Summer's raider boyfriend, turns out to have a personality based on neediness, insecurity, and laziness - in other words, he's just like her father.
- Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty: Morty eventually calls his left arm, "Armothy."
- No-Tell Motel: Jerry is now living in a motel after the divorce. It's apparently frequented by prostitutes, which Jerry completely missed.
- Once for Yes, Twice for No: Morty communicates with Armothy in this style, but it leads to a prolonged session of ambiguous responses that eventually leads Morty to just ask the arm to make a fist if their revenge isn't complete (it isn't).
- Organ Autonomy: Rick extracts the muscle memory of a buff severed arm and injects it into Morty, which puts Morty's left arm under the control of the former owner of the severed arm.
- Pet the Dog:
- After an entire episode of being shat upon by his apathetic family, his divorcee living situation and even nature itself, Jerry has a brief moment of catharsis when his daughter visits him with a souvenir from her adventure, using it as a means to give him some helpful advice about moving forward, and lovingly embraces him.
- Before that, Morty notices how badly everyone else is bullying Jerry and asks when they can visit him to give him a little peace of mind.
- Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: When Robot!Morty interprets the [[quotemode]] tag as part of the sentence.
- Right in Front of Me: Rick makes remarks in front of Jerry, though Jerry notes that Rick was looking at him before that.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Armothy recognizes the man in the audience who ravaged and slaughtered the village that its original host came from and then goes on a killing spree to hunt down everyone responsible for that incident.
- Robot Me: Rick tried making robot versions of him, Morty and Summer while they're gone to keep Beth happy. It just wasn't the same.
- Sequel Episode:
- Deals with the aftermath of the season opener, particularly Morty and Summer trying to cope with their parents' divorce. Summer becomes a Straw Nihilist and tries to start a new life in the Mad Max dimension before realizing that running away from her problems makes her no better than her parents. Meanwhile, Morty seems relatively fine with the change but a couple of days of cathartic violence unearths his hidden anger against Jerry.
- This episode also deals with Rick's claim that both Morty and Summer are replaceable. He tries to ditch them in the Mad Max dimension but realizes that replacing them is actually more work than just convincing them to come home.
- Jerry becomes even more of a Butt-Monkey than he was before, being bullied, ignored and verbally abused when he attempts to maintain even the barest relationship with his children. Despite Beth having chosen Rick over Jerry, the children blame Jerry exclusively for the divorce, because he's the one who dropped an ultimatum on her. Even nature gets in on the action, with the wind calling him a loser and a wolf eating his unemployment check.
- Shout-Out:
- The episode contains a lot of Mad Max references. For starters, Summer kills an Expy of Immortan Joe and her wasteland outfit is modelled after that of Auntie Entity's dress from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Hemorrhage is clearly a stand-in for Lord Humongous.
- The ending scene in the Mad Max universe is very reminiscent of Fallout 4.
- The title of this episode and Rick's goal of gaining the isotope is based on Romancing the Stone.
- "Shut Up" Kiss: Summer gives one to Hemorrhage when the latter cannot stop talking about his mustache.
- Sorry to Interrupt: The guy doing a coffee run walking in on Summer and Hemorrhage making out on a table.
- Take a Third Option: When Rick gives the kids the choice of either returning home with him or being abandoned in the post-apocalyptic dimension, Morty questions why they can't come up with a less dramatic arrangement that suits everybody. In the end Rick ends up having to take a third choice of convincing Summer to come home after he finds that ditching the kids isn't as simple as it sounds.
- The Stinger: The aforementioned scene of a wolf eating Jerry's unemployment check just to make him suffer.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Beth, Morty and Summer view Jerry as this, mercilessly belittling every attempt he makes to maintain a relationship with his children.
- Troubled Backstory Flashback: Morty gets one from the owner of his left arm. In it we see his village being pillaged.
- Unfinished Business: Armothy's desire to kill the man responsible for the death of his family is lampshaded by Morty, who asks if it's an "unfinished business" kind of thing. Armothy gives a "maybe" gesture in response.
- Valley Girl: Summer's robot replacement is programmed to throw in "totally" into every sentence.Rick: Summer, state your deal.Robot@Summer: My deal is that I am, like, totally fine.
- Visit by Divorced Dad: Jerry stops by to pick up some things with a moving van, but the entire family is uninterested in talking to him (though Morty is a little more kind than the rest).
- We Can Rule Together: Hemorrhage proposes this to Rick, Summer and Morty after the latter killed the former leader.
- Weirdness Censor: Beth thinks Morty and Summer are acting a bit strangely, but doesn't seem to cotton to the fact that they're robots, even when the real ones come back seconds after the robots leave, with their clothes torn and their hair disheveled.
- We Need a Distraction: Rick wants Morty to take part in the Gladiator Games so he can steal the isotope sample while everyone is distracted.
- Working Out Their Emotions: At first Morty is horrified by the Gladiator Games, but then he gets really into and uses his opponents as a proxy for yelling at Jerry. Summer is doing the same thing by raiding the wasteland and gets angry when Rick ruins it by bringing back civilization.
