Recap / Rick and Morty S3 E8 - "Morty's Mind Blowers"

"Enjoy a grab bag of Mind Blowers I call 'PoopAIDS_copy'."

Written by Mike McMahan, James Siciliano, Ryan Ridley, Dan Guterman, Justin Roiland, & Dan Harmon
Directed by Bryan Newton

"This, Morty, is my archive of all the experiences you begged me to remove from your life, lest you go insane. I call them Morty's Mind Blowers. And we'll being doing this instead of Interdimensional Cable."

— Rick Sanchez

Original air date: 9/17/2017

After Morty requests to have a traumatic memory deleted, Rick reveals a room where he has been storing several memories he has removed from Morty's mind. However, as it turns out, besides the memories that Morty did not want to keep from their adventures, the room also contains memories in which Rick was made to look foolish, so he had them forcibly removed from Morty. This revelation prompts a fight, during which Rick and Morty have their memories accidentally erased. Morty scours the memories around him to replace the ones he lost, but he is displeased with the truth he finds, and convinces Rick that they should kill themselves.

Summer enters the room moments before they commit suicide. At this point, it is revealed that Rick has a contingency plan should this happen. Following written instructions, Summer tranquillizes Rick and Morty, restores their memories, and drags them to the living room. Rick and Morty wake up on the couch, believing that they slept through an entire "Interdimensional Cable" episode.

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This episode provides examples of...

• Accidental Murder: One of the memories is Morty flipping the wrong light switch in the garage, causing a remote storage unit full of people on life support to die.
• Aesop Amnesia: Invoked. Morty notes that with Rick wiping his memory whenever he makes a significant mistake, it's impossible for him to learn from his past. Rick shuts him down because he intended the experience to be mindless entertainment, though the conflict bites him in the ass when he forgets everything as well.
• Alien Geometries:
  • The alien's home in the Action Prologue is like something out of a M.C. Escher painting.
  • The perfectly flat surface that Rick creates could also count as one since it is so perfectly smooth that it drives Morty crazy by making every other surface feel incredibly uneven by comparison.
• And I Must Scream: The Meeseeks trapped in the Menagerie cannot fulfill their assignment and thus will suffer eternally.
• Anti Climax Cut: The episode begins mid-adventure, with Morty ruining everything by accidentally gazing into the Truth Tortoise's eyes and unwittingly throwing it into the abyss, causing the M.C. Escher-esque temple he and Rick were in to start dramatically collapsing unto itself. Suddenly, we cut to an establishing shot of Rick and Morty's house, post-adventure.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Played with.
  • At first, this is invoked by Morty in the case of Mr. Lunas, when he asks Rick how Rick could doubt someone living on the Moon after everything they've seen. Rick, however, justifies this by stating that he's been to the Moon in this and many other realities, but has never seen anyone living there.
  • Morty makes the alien warrior realize he has no evidence for his religion, and because he eventually dies outside the dictates of his faith, his soul gets dragged down to hell by demons. This means as Morty realizes, the alien apparently did have concrete evidence in the first place.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "What are the red ones?"
• Bilingual Bonus: Mr. Lunas is a pretty lame name for the Spanish-speaking audience, as it literally means "Mr. Moons".
• Black Comedy: Even by this show's standards, there's a ton of it in this episode. Everything from accidental pleasuring of a torture victim to watching someone go to his race's hell because he wasn't killed by Rick and was instead run over by a car.
• Blatant Lies: The squirrels promise to grant Morty wishes to test if he really can hear them. He doesn't fall for it, but the squirrels aren't buying that he can't understand them.
• Brain Bleach: Some instances of Morty getting his memory erased were to remove a particularly disgusting or unpleasant memory such as accidentally masturbating an alien.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Rick pointedly tells us they're doing this in place of Interdimensional Cable.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Poor Morty gets it really, really bad this episode. He ends up seeing and reliving numerous occasions where he catastrophically messed up on adventures or was forced to forget mistakes that Rick made, and even a scenario where Beth was forced to choose between her children and immediately chose Summer over him, which apparently eventually led to Morty being infested by an evil space worm that he was then forced to vomit up to get rid of it. And then halfway through the episode, he and Rick accidentally erase their own memories, and Morty attempting to replace those memories by injecting himself with dozens of Mind Blowers ends up nearly driving him to commit suicide.
  • There's also a nod to Jerry's butt monkey status in the fact Morty's mind blowers are all stored in cool-looking neon tubes whilst Jerry's are on VHS cassette.
• Call-Back: Rick warned Morty in "Rick Potion Number 9" that they can move to a new dimension 2-3 more times. He's angry because they need to use up one to escape a squirrel conspiracy.
• Cassandra Truth: Nobody believed Morty had seen Mr. Lunas wandering on the moon and was plotting something dark. The memory then unravels and reveals Morty was so wrong that he had literally confused a smudge on the telescope for Mr. Lunas (who had already been Driven to Suicide for being accused as a pedophile).
• Chick Magnet: Done quite literally. Rick keeps a magnet that has the ability to attract anything the user inputs. He uses it for zipties. Morty tries to use it on red-haired women. Hilarity Ensues.
• Clip Show: Anyone who are familiar with Dan Harmon's previous work on Community are probably already aware how this works. While the episode starts with a set-up deliberately overtly reminiscent of that of an archetypical Clip Show episode, everything in the episode is original material. It is even lampshaded:
  Rick: It's not a Simpsons Halloween special! It's more like a Clip Show made of... clips you never saw...!
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Subverted. Morty thought he was torturing code information out of an alien, but he was actually pleasuring him.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Rick attempts to deny that he would ever do something as childish as sorting the mindblowers into a color-based scheme, but as the episode goes on it becomes clear that is exactly what he has done. Morty's removed memories are colored blue for his mistakes, pink for family mistakes, and red for Rick's mistakes. Green and yellow memories can be seen in the background, but we don't get to see what those colors correspond to (apart from the Morty backup Summer uses to restore Morty's memory, but presumably that's just to match his shirt).
• The Conspiracy: Morty playing with an animal translation helmet leads him to one involving squirrels.
• Continuity Nod: Jerry's Mind Blowers contain memories like "Sleepy Gary" and "Apples Campaign".
• Crazy-Prepared: Rick had various scenarios planned out and contingencies in place in case something went wrong with the memory machine, including both himself and Morty falling victim to it.
• Crisis of Faith: The alien wanting to die was all set until Morty talked to him about evidence. He gets hit by a car while running away and finds out too late that the afterlife was real. Morty even asks why he would have a crisis of faith since being dragged off to Hell was pretty clear evidence of it existing.
• Darker and Edgier: It's a replacement for the "Interdimensional Cable" episodes. Instead of being a relatively lighthearted (for this show) series of commercials full of improvisational humor, this one is a series of small scripted stories with a lot more Black Comedy than normal.
• Death Seeker: One memory titled "The Whole Enchilada" has Rick and Morty being visited by an alien who seeks to be killed by a "warrior" (i.e., Rick) to achieve an orgasmic afterlife as per his religion. He ends up having second thoughts after Morty makes him doubt his religion, only for him to get run over by a car and his soul dragged off by dark spirits to Hell.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Turns out on at least one version of Earth, the entire planet's societal and economic development is the result of a massive conspiracy run by squirrels.
• Dragged Off to Hell: After the alien gets hit by a car, he becomes a spirit and hooded figures appear to drag him off to their version of Hell.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Mr. Lunas commits suicide after being accused of being a pedophile.
  • Morty himself, after all of his memories are accidentally erased and he replaces them with his various Mind Blowers. When he threatens to kill himself, Rick decides to join in as well. Luckily, Summer walks in before they actually shoot themselves.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: As the spirit of the alien is being carried into a dark abyss, he blames Morty for him questioning his faith and dying a cowardly death.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Principal Vagina assumes that Morty is accusing Mr. Lunas of being a pedophile, rather than literally insinuating that he lives on the moon.
  • Morty assumes that the alien who wants a ritualistic execution has evidence on his planet on how the afterlife works. The alien then claims he doesn't and has a Freak Out on realizing he doesn't want to die. Then he gets dragged down into hell after a car hits him, killing him instantly. Morty lampshades that there was evidence after all, with horror.
  • The astronauts who build the spaceship and arrive to Rick and Morty in the People Zoo assume they are aliens who have taken on human forms. Rick was counting on this to escape and leave the astronauts in the zoo instead.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Rick refuses to brutally torture an alien for information on how to save Earth. He's okay with letting Morty jerk the alien off for the info, though.
  • The alien who forced Beth to choose between saving either Summer or Morty's life is visibly disturbed at how easily Beth chooses Summer, showing little concern for her son.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Morty is horrified by all of his mistakes, and more horrified that Rick wiped all these memories instead of letting Morty learn from them.
  • Summer while Bound and Gagged is horrified that her mother would immediately choose her life over Morty's.
• Evil Is Petty: Rick erases any mistakes that he makes from Morty's mind, including such things as mispronouncing words and losing a game of checkers, just to continue appearing infallible.
• Expy: The being they steal the Truth Tortoise from in the cold open strongly resembles The Sandman's Dream of the Endless.
• Fantastic Arousal: The alien's sacks on his chin, to Morty's surprise.
• Filler: In-Universe. The space zoo memory has astronauts Morty had never seen before take more focus than he and Rick trapped in a cell. Morty then questions Rick about never seeing their lives play out before arriving at their cell, though Rick says he had to elaborate the story just to make the mind blowers work better.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Just before Rick tricks Morty into jacking off the alien in the interrogation flashback he calls him a "jackoff."
• Foreshadowing: One of the memories includes Rick telling Summer he will do something to Morty's memory and she reacts nonchalantly. At the end of the episode, it turns out Summer is aware of Morty's Mind Blowers and is actually responsible for safeguarding Rick and Morty from possible scenarios (at least four) that might arise from them tampering with memories. Her response to the scenario being only a little surprise implies that this is not the first time this has happened.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Two instances in one of the menagerie prisons. One has two Meeseeks trapped in it, and another has three female Gazorpians.
  • Summer's "in case of Class 4" instructions are fully written out, but they are only onscreen for a second.
  • Two of the memory vials are labelled "Stanford" and "Bill C."
• Hard-Work Montage: Rick building a true-level surface for Morty is captured in a couple of key shots.
• He Knows Too Much: The squirrels grow suspicious when Morty overhears their conversation thanks to a translator. A neighborhood's worth of squirrels then goes after him before Rick stops them. Rick seems familiar with The Conspiracy and berates Morty for being involved as they prepare to leave the dimension.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Rick, Beth, and Summer do this to help free Morty from the parasite possessing him, but as the parasite continues to stick out of Morty's mouth, they continue to make fun of him.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Rick uses a device to erase certain memories from Morty. When Morty loses his temper and they get into a fight, both get exposed and forget their lives.
• Look Behind You: Morty tricks Rick into looking behind himself so he can grab and load another memory tube to confirm whether or not Rick was erasing Morty's memories of witnessing Rick himself making mistakes.
• Lucky Number Seven: Venzenulon 9 has a night temperature of 300 below. Luckily, for the titular duo, they ended up stranded on Venzenulon 7, which does not.
• Malaproper: Rick thought it was "Taken for Granite" instead of "taken for granted."
• Martyrdom Culture: The alien assassin wants to die a glorious death until Morty asks if he has proof of that afterlife, making him have an utter existential crisis. The alien is then run over by a car and taken to Hell.
• Meaningful Name: Mr. Lunas' name comes from the Latin word for "moon." Ultimately, Morty's paranoia is utterly unrelated, however.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Morty has gotten a lot of people killed through his ignorance, naivete, or simply by following Rick's orders.
• Milkman Conspiracy: Squirrels secretly rule at least one iteration of Earth. Rick is forced to abandon that one when Morty accidentally listens in on their conversation and they realize he knows.
• Mistaken for Pedophile:
  • Principal Vagina interprets Morty's accusing Mr. Lunas of "living on the Moon" to be code for saying he's a pedophile.
  • When hit by Rick's memory ray, Rick and Morty immediately note that a young teen and an old man are in a closed-off, confined space and draw the obvious conclusion. Rick immediately tries to shift the blame on Morty.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Rick uses scientific precision to create truly level ground. The result is so life-changing for Morty that Rick had to erase his memory because he couldn't handle the "crooked" normal reality.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Morty's reaction to accidentally driving Lunas to kill himself.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Morty accidentally gets Mr. Lunas fired and later the poor guy takes his own life as a result.
  • Morty also causes Zick Zack to doubt his own religion (he can only achieve an orgasmic afterlife if killed by a warrior) and tries to get out of it, but instead gets hit by a car.
• Noodle Incident: A whole bunch this episode, since a lot of Morty's memories pick up in the middle of various situations/adventures. Some examples:
  • How Rick and Morty ended up getting trapped in a menagerie by the giant alien who collects various species of creatures.
  • How Beth, Summer, and Morty ended up in the situation where Beth was forced to choose between them.
  • What Rick and Morty were doing or trying to accomplish when they were wearing full-body suits and shooting at enemies chasing them; we don't get to see how that mission ended, as the memory was erased by Rick after Morty begins making fun of Rick for his Malaproper of "taken for granted".
  • The alien that Rick and Morty were interrogating apparently tried to kill Jessica.
  • As Morty rapidly swaps through his removed memories, the final stretch is filled with these:
    • Morty and Rick burying Santa.
    • Rick juggling the pieces of Morty's body.
    • Ghost Morty trying to hide from Ghostbuster Rick.
    • Morty's head on Snuffles' body.
    • Mr. Poopybutthole proposing to Morty.
• Not-So-Innocent Whistle: Morty tries this when the squirrels catch on to him, but it doesn't work.
• On Three: Morty and Rick's Suicide Pact gets interrupted by Summer after Morty counting "two".
• Papa Wolf: Rick initially thinks the alien wanting to die means them harm, so he tells Morty to get behind him.
• Parental Favoritism: When Beth is given a Sadistic Choice where she is forced to choose between Summer and Morty, she immediately picks Summer.
• People Zoo: In one of their past adventures, Rick and Morty were trapped in a menagerie of sapient beings by an advanced alien observer.
• Perfection Is Addictive: Morty greatly enjoys the square of "true level" that Rick prepared for him. However, as soon as he steps off, he begins to panic when he notices how crooked the world is in comparison.
• Please, I Will Do Anything!: Morty begs Rick that he'll do anything to escape from the menagerie. He gets what he wants when he and Rick leave two scientists behind.
• Power Floats: Morty starts floating in the room when turning into Voltamatron.
• The Power of Love: The intergalactic parasite inside Morty is taken out of him through the power of love. Parodied when it turns out to be quite massive and the family has trouble maintaining their encouragement as Morty struggles to vomit it up.
• Religion Is Right: The alien who believes he'll get to go to a wonderful heaven if killed by a warrior-like Rick is convinced by Morty that his religion may be a lie. Then he's hit by a car and demons show up to claim his soul for dying a dishonorable death.
• Saying Too Much: Morty talking with Zick Zack the Floop-Floopian about evidence of the afterlife is what caused the latter to die a cowardly death and Dragged Off to Hell.
• Seen It All: Summer isn't even fazed when she stumbles upon a mind-wiped Rick and Morty in the act of committing a double suicide, and only is mildly surprised when it turns out that Rick had also erased his memories and not just Morty.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Morty thinks that Mr. Lunas is some malevolent being from the moon after seeing him on a telescope. When he tells Principal Vagina this, this causes everyone to believe that he's actually a pedophile and leads to Lunas killing himself. Morty later learns that not only was Mr. Lunas a decorated marine, but he simply had a Lunas-shaped smudge on his telescope.
• Shirtless Scene: Rick gets one when he builds the perfectly level surface.
• Shoot the Dog: A flashback shows Rick slicing open his alien companion Beebo's body to save him and Morty from freezing to death on Venzenulon 9, resulting in Beebo's death.
• Shout-Out: Quite a few for one episode.
  • To escape the People Zoo, Rick recreates the plot of Contact to get some unwitting scientists to teleport a ship to him and Morty while tricking them into taking their place in the zoo.
    • The interdimensional craft built by the NASA scientists strongly resembles a Saiyan pod from Dragon Ball Z. Likewise, the armor Rick and Morty are wearing in the "taken for granite" scene resembles that worn by Frieza's soldiers.
  • The alien Death Seeker getting dragged off into Hell by dark spirits strongly resembles the same thing happening to the antagonists in Ghost (1990).
  • The way the alien in the intro chasing Rick and Morty is drawn pretty frail and surreal, alongside his command of "Return the Truth Tortoise", makes him pretty similar to King Ramses and his demands to "Return the Slab" from Courage the Cowardly Dog.
  • Rick cutting open an alien beast so that he and Morty can escape sub-zero temperatures by laying in its innards is taken from The Empire Strikes Back.
  • The squirrels Morty eavesdrops on at one point suspect him of being a "possible Dolittle", and has some sort of plan to deal with it.
  • The scene from Jerry's Mindblowers of Morty and a group of schoolkids evading police officers on bicycles so that they can send an alien home is taken from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
  • Two of the vitals are implied to be holding the memories of Ford Pines and Bill Cipher.
  • Sophie's Choice when the alien makes Beth choose which of her children to save.
• Sincerity Mode: Rick normally reacts to religious people and people who unduly flatter him with derision. However, he seems genuinely honored that the Death Seeker alien considers him a "great warrior", even inviting him for a friendly lunch during which they can discuss the finer details. It probably helps that, as Morty later points out, there is plenty of evidence that the alien religion was legitimate and reaching an eternal, orgasmic afterlife is a goal Rick can probably respect.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: In one of the memories, Morty asks Rick to make a device to allow him to understand animals, which backfires quickly once he uncovers a conspiracy involving squirrels, forcing him and Rick to move to another reality.
• Status Quo Is God: Midway through the episode, Rick and Morty get into a physical fight that snowballs into them accidentally erasing their memories, and Morty ends up replacing them with the Mind Blower memories, leaving him more and more unstable until he's Driven to Suicide. Just as he and Rick are both about to kill themselves, Summer shows up, assesses the seriousness of the situation, tranquillizes them both, and uses memory vials locked in a safe to return them to normal, with Morty seemingly not remembering any of the Mind Blowers that Rick gave him during the course of the episode.
• The Stinger: Jerry comes by Rick's garage to find his putter, only to discover his own version of Mind Blowers. He replays one named Gobo, about the Smiths trying to get an alien home ET The Extraterrestrial-style, but he neglects to bring the alien to the drop-off point, inadvertently causing it to die in his locked car.
  Rick: Oof. Dibs on his stuff.
• Suicide Pact: After an amnesiac Morty is Driven to Suicide by refilling his brain with dozens of Mind Blower memories, an also-amnesiac Rick decides to kill himself together with Morty, though luckily they're interrupted by Summer before they can go through with it.
• Tainted Veins: Morty gets them when turning into Voltamatron.
• Take That!:
  • Morty stating that basically anyone is qualified to be a guidance counsellor.
  • Rick derides Men in Black II as being a joyless cash grab with an endless string of references to the first movie.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Removing these from Morty's mind is the reasoning behind certain Mind Blowers.
  • The Truth Tortoise nearly drives Morty insane after granting him knowledge of everything.
  • Rick creates a perfectly level square for Morty to experience, which makes everything else seem unbearably crooked in comparison.
• Third-Person Flashback: Morty points out how his memory of the menagerie featured material he wasn't present for. Rick admits he occasionally edits in material to the Mind Blowers to help the clips play better.
• Title Drop: Rick near the beginning and Summer near the end. Makes sense since "Morty's Mind Blowers" are what they've actually named the collection of memories.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: The show for the most part has shown Beth to be loving to Morty, or at the very least not abusive, while she and Summer have had a much more fraught relationship (from Summer learning that Beth wanted to abort her and still having resentment about Jerry knocking her up and having a shotgun wedding to her memory in "Total Rickall" of her drunk mother accidentally hitting her with a bottle and then while still under the influence asking her to cover her bruises with make-up). Her willingness to throw Morty under the bus in an admittedly grim situation (which given the multiple universe-skipping situations may not even be the main Beth), does seem to come out of nowhere.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Both Rick and Morty are unintentionally this to Summer after she flawlessly (except that she failed to do the final step that was "leaving the room") executes Rick's "Scenario 4" recovery sequence, returning them both to their normal selves in a fashion that convinces them that nothing untoward happened. They assume she let them sleep through Interdimensional Cable, which is probably why the final step was leaving the room.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Morty looks at the moon through a telescope in the front yard when he notices something/someone standing in a mid-stride walking pose. He tells his family about the strange sight, but nobody believes him; they suggest that it was probably a smudge on the lens. The next day at school, he finds out that Mr. Lunas is a real person that came to work as a guidance counselor. Later on, Morty snaps pictures of Lunas, and tells Principal Vagina that he thinks the guy is "up to something" and "lives on the moon". Mr. Vagina mistakes him for a pedophile and confronts Lunas, ending with the former punching the latter in the face and firing him. As a result, Mr. Lunas commits suicide. A few days later at his funeral, it's revealed that Lunas was a Marine, and that "from a certain angle, some people would say he looked like a smudge." Morty runs home and sees that there is, in fact, a smudge on the lens.
  • A Floop-Floopian named Zick Zack teleports to the Replacement Dimension and explains to Rick and Morty that to achieve an orgasmic afterlife, one must be killed by a great warrior (in this case, Rick), but decides to get lunch at a Mexican restaurant first. While Rick goes to the bathroom, Morty talks about evidence of the afterlife, but Zick Zack says that the Floop-Floopians don't have evidence, which makes the latter doubt his religion, and as a result, tries to back out of the deal. Rick and Morty chases him down the street, with Zick Zack getting hit by a passing car; he is then Dragged Off to Hell because he wasn't killed by a warrior.
• Voice of the Legion: Morty when possessed by the Voltamatron.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Morty attacks Rick when he finds out a number of his erased memories were just embarrassing mistakes Rick made and didn't want them thrown in his face.
  • Even the child she chose to live and the alien that forced her to make the sadistic choice give her a stunned look when Beth immediately picks Summer over Morty.
• You Can't Go Home Again: One of the memories shows Rick telling Morty they need to leave to another reality again to escape from the squirrels that Morty angered, though when this happened exactly is unknown.

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