Original air date: 12/15/2019
Time travel shenanigans ensue when Morty discovers a civilization of space snakes after one near-fatally bites him. Jerry tries to survive a day being lighter than air.
Tropes:
- Actually Pretty Funny: When Beth asks where Jerry is, Rick makes a joke about him having an affair. The entire family, including Beth, laughs at the idea.
- Adam and Eve Plot: One faction of time-travelling snakes claims that all the snakes on that planet are descended from the Earth snake and her hybrid brood. Both they and the faction sent back in time to kill her quickly agree that this doesn't make any sense.
- Alien Arts Are Appreciated: "Snake Jazz" proves to be very catchy among Summer's friends.
- All for Nothing: While Jerry didn't ask for Rick to make him "floaty" long enough to set up his Christmas lights on his own, the point was to make sure he doesn't fall off and get hurt or die in the attempt. Even after all of the chaos of getting lost, Jerry manages to return home to finish what he started. He finishes the setup before falling off the roof anyway.
- Arc Words: "Stay in the car!"
- "Awkward Silence" Entrance: When Jerry enters a bar with a shoe missing and a boulder in his arms, the music goes silent while the patrons stare at him.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Slippy warms up to the scientist who translates for her because he's the first snake to talk her language, literally. She starts snuggling him and making suggestive hisses.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: One of the snake scientists Ate His Gun when Rick and Morty enter the lab.
- Binary Suns: The Snake Planet has three suns.
- Blasphemous Boast: Jerry's "I am the Jesus Christ of Christmas!"
- Blatant Lies: "Any snake over fifty bucks yearns for the beyond. I've seen them do it."
- Boldly Coming: The Earth snake engages in sex with the scientist snake who first speaks to it in its own language.
- Brick Joke:
- At the beginning of the episode Rick demonstrates a flat tire alarm that uses a recording of Christopher Walken. Later he uses a remote to pause Beth that he explains to Jerry he got from Christopher Walken at the said recording session.
- When Rick realizes he's going to have to invent Time Travel for the snakes he skips on having to do it right away by travelling back in time to give the time machine to his past self as soon as he comes up with the idea. At the end of the episode, Rick and Morty are ready to enjoy themselves but the Future Rick and Morty reappear to remind them that they still have to do the work they initially skipped.
- The future iteration of Morty has an unexplained black eye. In The Stinger, when present Rick and Morty are doing what their future counterparts did, Rick punches Morty for not staying in the car.
- Butt-Monkey:
- Morty suffers from a lot of snake bites throughout the episode, even while he's trying to do the best he can to fix the situation, which only leads to worse outcomes.
- Jerry's stubbornness to not accept any help from Rick makes Jerry the target of abuse from people he's trying to impress or get help from. And after he manages to come back down, he was busy putting up the Christmas lights on the roof while his family was fighting a snake invasion. The next moment, he slips down and breaks his right leg.
- The Bus Came Back:
- The Time Police from "A Rickle in Time" return, this time to regulate a Snake Planet that's gone overboard with using the technology.
- Also back are Nancy and the card game Downbeat.
- Call-Back:
- Rick falls asleep watching the Plumbus episode of "How They Do It".
- Rick solves the problem of snakes attacking the family by using a Batman Gambit to ensure that the Time Police from "A Rickle in Time" intervene and fix the issue for them.
- The head bust of Snake Lincoln in the Snake Alternate-History Nazi Victory is actually a head bust of a Snake version of Abradolf Lincler from "Ricksy Business" upon closer inspection.
- Rick tears up a card that tallies the number of adventures he takes Morty to before allowing the boy to request one himself. This is the same kind of card Morty used that began the plot of "Vindicators 3: The Return Of World Ender". Here, Rick counts the snake mess as Morty's adventure, robbing him of a chance to go to "Boob World".
- The Smith family once again plays the downbeat game.
Rick: How do you win this game?
Morty: We've never gotten that far. - Caught with Your Pants Down: A snake terminator appears in Morty's room while he was masturbating.
- Cassandra Truth: A cyborg human/snake hybrid shows up to rescue Jerry from clinging to the bottom of an airplane. Jerry refuses its help because he thinks Rick sent it, despite its claims it doesn't know who Rick is.
- Christmas Episode: Jerry's subplot begins and ends with hanging up Christmas lights.
- Christmas Light Chaos: How the B-plot begins.
- The Coconut Effect: Rick has a mechanism in his ship that alerts him to a "flat tire" while in space by making the whole thing rattle like it would if it were on the road. He chose that over the awkward recording of Christopher Walken announcing it with a pun.
- Contrived Coincidence: In all of infinite space, a free-floating snake astronaut just happens to run into Morty and bite him. Rick finds the chances of it incredibly likely, however, because literally, everything is in space.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As Rick repeatedly states, the whole snake thing could have EASILY been avoided if Morty had just stayed in the car while in space.
- Dead Person Impersonation: What Morty hopes to accomplish when he buys a snake at a pet store, copies the dead astronaut snake's patterning on it with a marker, stuffs it in the astronaut's spacesuit, and sends it to the Snake Planet. Since these are not actual snakes but snake-like aliens with human-level sapience who live in a perfect 1:1 parallel of human society, it goes as well as you would expect.
- Didn't Think This Through: Morty, feeling bad for inadvertently ruining the snake planet's space program, decides to send an Earth snake colored like the original astronaut!snake and send it back to snake world. He apparently never figured the fully sapient snakes would figure out the ruse.
- Dramatic Space Drifting: Discussed and Defied. Rick tells Morty to stay in the shuttle because he saw the movie where two guys leave the ship and one guy goes spinning away.
- Enemy Mine: Rick goes on a rant about Morty having unwittingly united the rivalling snake races with dangerous results.Morty: I-I-I helped them.Rick: You gave them proof that there was something bigger and scarier to unite against, you little idiot! They would have gone back into the Dark Ages for a couple of generations, but instead, they dedicated themselves to making universe-destroying, un-thought-out technology like Time Travel all so they could try to kill a little shitsack on Earth who couldn't let a dead snake be dead even after it bit his ankle! Next time, stay in the fucking car!
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: While Beth is concerned about Jerry setting up the Christmas lights on his own, even after Rick makes him "floaty" to avoid falling off the roof, Rick assures everything will be fine. Jerry being Jerry, however, Rick discovers this possibility:Rick: He won't be in the sky, Beth. Unless it's possible for Jerry to fuck up wearing shoes. [Beat] Oh crap, he's gonna die.
Beth: What were you thinking?! - Eye Scream: Morty's eyes nearly pop out when Rick gets out of the spaceship while still in space, momentarily causing it to decompress.
- Fantastic Racism: The sapient alien Snake Planet is divided into many nations on the brink of extinction-level war with each other, based on race. With Hypocritical Humor, Rick bursts out laughing at the snakes for fighting each other over something so petty:Rick: How funny is that? Imagine being a racist snake. "Hey, other snake, I hate you because you're the wrong color snake."
- Fingore: When Jerry's floatiness wears off, he's hanging onto the bottom of a plane. The tips of his fingers are bleeding the next time we see him.
- Forced Transformation: Rick incapacitates a snake soldier by shooting it with a ray that makes it grow spindly legs it doesn't know how to use. He scares off the other snake soldiers by threatening them with it.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- Somehow, despite being a snake, this version of Hitler also has a pet German Shepherd (presumably Blondi, the real Hitler's pet) and loves her enough to have her framed picture in his quarters.
- When the snake time traveller returns to his own time after thwarting the assassination of snake Abraham Lincoln, the lab has a gold bust of snake Abradolf Lincler.
- When Rick and Morty land at the snake Pentagon in order to give the snakes time travel, the future version of Rick's car can be seen already parked in the distance, where future Rick and Morty watch their past selves enter during the stinger.
- Funny Answering Machine: Beth's goes "Hi, you went directly to voicemail because your number's not on my phone. Don't leave a message." Jerry leaves one anyway.
- Getting the Boot: Jerry is physically thrown out of the bar, which sends him where he started — floating in the sky.
- Godwin's Law of Time Travel: Snakes in the snake 80's saving snake Lincoln from assassination somehow leads to snake Hitler leading snake Nazi Germany to victory.
- High Collar of Doom: The snake President has the collar of his suit turned up and it extends past his head.
- High-Five Left Hanging: In the closing scene, Jerry wants to fist-bump Rick but the latter rejects the gesture.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: A snake time traveller tries to kill snake Hitler. It then flies over the parody line when more and more snake time travellers show up to either save or kill snake Hitler, causing their corpses to flow over the balcony. It's implied that Rick deliberately invoked this in order to cause a temporal incident of enough magnitude to attract the attention of the Time Police.
- Honor Before Reason:
- Jerry feels slighted by everyone in his family thinking he needs supervision to hang Christmas lights or else he'll die. So, after screwing up Rick's precaution of making him "floaty", he purposely refuses help because if he survives, he'll have proven himself, but if he dies, then the blame falls on Rick for making him "floaty" in the first place.
- Rick counts the whole snake thing as a Morty adventure and tears up Morty's card. He tells Morty "Tough luck" when he says he wanted to go to "Boob World", but Rick clearly wants to go himself.
- Human Outside, Alien Inside: A non-humanoid variant. The snakes look like ones from Earth, but they have very different biochemistry considering what one's bite did to Morty. The tests run by the scientists on Slippy are also implied to have revealed a very-to the alien snakes- alien organ structure.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Rick tells Morty to stay in the car, where it's safe, then opens the door, sucking out the air while Morty's eyes bug out, then closing it and leaving him gasping for breath and in pain.
- Rick is appalled by his future self being an asshole to him. The same Rick who is generally an asshole to everyone (including very much in that very episode).
- I Hate Past Me: When they meet at the snake lab, Future Morty acts hostile to his past self. Later revelations make it understandable since he'd just received a shiner from Rick for his past self's screw up.
- Inexplicable Cultural Ties: The Snake Planet has a culture uncannily similar to Earth's, including their own version of Jazz, the 80s and historical counterparts to Lincoln and Hitler.
- In Spite of a Nail: Thwarting the assassination of snake Lincoln doesn't stop the rise of snake Nazism, snake Hitler, and nor do snake Nazis winning World War II stop the development of the snake 80s' fashion trends.
- Intelligent Gerbil: Rick and Morty encounter a planet inhabited by a species of sapient snakes that have a civilization almost exactly like humans, and despite technically being aliens, can interbreed with Earth snakes.
- Interspecies Romance: Implied; when the snake linguist can translate Slippy's hisses, he tries "speaking" to her in the lab. However, Slippy is instead attracted to the linguist and begins to have sex with him. The linguist looks enthusiastic but the other snakes are weirded out by this since Slippy is an alien with animalistic behavior. This leads to war because the snakes can't agree if Slippy is the future of the snake race or its downfall.
- It's All My Fault: Morty worries that he has doomed an entire civilization of snakes after killing their astronaut. Rick reassures him that the snakes did it to themselves because the astronaut's first interaction with an alien was to bite it. Morty only killed the snake in self-defense.
- Jive Turkey: Jerry, when talking to the group of streetball players."What up, homeys? Shooting hoops, I see."
- Jerkass Has a Point: As callous as the family is towards Jerry, infantilizing him and not even trusting him to wear shoes, doing work on a ladder with a second person to spot you is a basic safety measure. Sure enough, at the end of the episode Jerry accidentally falls off the roof and breaks his leg.
- Jerkass: When Nancy brings up that Rick and Morty may have altered the Snake Planet's evolution by killing its first astronaut, Summer dismisses her as a giant nerd. Their other friend (Tricia Lang) also adds that later they're going to talk about Nancy's appearance and weight.
- Kick the Dog:
- Jerry attempts to call Beth only to get an automated voicemail which she says got sent out because whoever's dialing isn't on her phone.
- The bar patrons when they toss Jerry out of a bar even though he's floating, and screaming that he's going to die if they do that because the antigravity will wear off, leading to a potentially deadly fall.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: The terminator-like snake robot gets stomped on by a frightened Beth after trying to assure he will protect her.
- Magic Antidote: Rick's antivenom heals Morty instantly.
- Meaningful Background Event: During the snake invasion in the garage, in the background, Rick's "Time Travel Stuff" box on the shelf is tipped over, indicating that the show is finally doing a proper Time Travel episode.
- Midair Bobbing: When they stop in space to fix a tire. Compare Space Is an Ocean.
- Minor Injury Overreaction: As Jerry solemnly looks through photos before his gravity power runs out, one of them shows him openly crying over a small cut.
- Mistaken for Racist: Jerry awkwardly using racial self-referential humor to an interracial group of basketballers in the park, and then trying to clarify he just wants to play with his "power" while he can, gets him mistaken for a Nazi.
- Must Make Amends: Morty feels guilty for having potentially doomed the Snake Planet with its 19 billion inhabitants by accidentally killing their astronaut in self-defense, and decides to help them. This did more harm than good.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Morty feels guilty about the dead snake astronaut, he picks up a $50 snake at the local pet store, stuffs it into a spacesuit and drops it onto the planet of snakes. Unfortunately, this causes the snakes to break into two major factions: some believe the alien snake will seed new life onto the planet and others say it will destroy them. Sometime after, a lot of pissed-off snakes start to appear at the Smith house to kill Morty. Rick calls out Morty that if he just left things well enough alone, the snakes would fall into the dark ages for a couple of generations before recovering, instead of rising against an otherworldly lifeform which is him. Long story short:Rick: Next time, stay in the fucking car!
- No Gravity for You: Rick blasts Jerry with a ray that makes him lighter than air, then blasts his shoes with another ray that weighs him down just enough to make him jump twice as high and fall half as fast. Jerry, being a screw-up, manages to lose a shoe and thus risk his life inside of an hour.
- Non Sequitur: When Rick generates a fake Jerry head to emulate his voice, the head suddenly throws in the line "I will eat your world." Beth dismisses the statement for a double entendre.
- Noodle Incident: Beth asks Jerry why he didn't come down from the roof to help her fight off the snake aliens, and he responds "I couldn't hear your screaming over my own screaming! We've talked about this."
- "Grandpa, did you trap dad in a painting again?"
- Not Bad: While invading the future of the Snake planet, Rick and Morty are stopped by a snake piloting a mini-mech. Rick stops to say it looks cool until it starts shooting and he's forced to kill it.
- Pet the Dog:
- One of the snakes in charge of communicating with the Earth snake clearly praises the scientist who manages to translate its hisses.
- Rick quickly recognizes the severity of Jerry's predicament and offers to rescue him and salvage his wounded pride by not letting Beth know he screwed up, even putting her in stasis so she can't listen to their conversation. Jerry throws it in his face and says that even dying would be a win for him since it'd leave Rick culpable for his death.
- Even after the above, Rick was still nice enough to fix Jerry's broken leg at the end of the episode. Albeit only partially as he likely realized that completely healing it would just earn Jerry's resentment for saving him from his mistake. Luckily it works and Jerry is thankful for it.
- Police Code for Everything: After the Clock Roaches get a call from Rick, one of them notes "We got a 10-51 on a goddamn snake planet."
- Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Jerry tries impressing some basketball players with his floatiness by saying "this white guy can jump." It doesn't go well before he is mistaken for a nazi when saying he wants to use his new power.
- Reality Has No Subtitles: The Snake language remains untranslated.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Aside from the chaos of the whole Time Travel incident, the first snake we meet in the episode—the astronaut—literally just floats over to Morty and bites him unprovoked. This is the snake's First Contact with alien life, and her first action is to bite him before he even knows she's there, even having modifications to her helmet specifically so she could do so.
- Rewatch Bonus: When Rick and Morty arrive on Snake Planet during the battle, the ship of their future selves can be seen outside near the building as the two land on the surface.
- Running Gag: Snake Jazz.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Rick uses a gun to make a snake soldier gain legs it can't properly use, he threatens its other two companions with the same effect. They simply toss down their weapons and slither away.
- Shout-Out:
- The episode title is one to Battlestar Galactica.
- Rick has a remote he can use to pause real people that he got from Christopher Walken.
- There's more than a few references to Terminator:
- The first Snake Resistance member is dressed as Kyle Reese from The Terminator and the snakes mimic the time sphere travel method.
- Snakenet is a reference to Skynet.
- The snake android is a direct reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
- Slippy's role in the story and the alien snakes' response is similar to Planet of the Apes (2001), with sapient aliens meeting their animalistic equivalents.
- When Rick and Morty go to Snake M.I.T. in 1985 there's a poster of Back to the Future on the background wall.
- Sickening "Crunch!": When Jerry falls from the roof and breaks his legs in the final scene.
- Space Is Noisy: Downplayed. Rick makes noises while repairing the shuttle's flat tire.
- Space Whale Aesop:
- Stay in the spaceship when you're told or else you'll be bitten by an astronaut snake. Then you'll return a random Earth snake out of guilt, which unites a planet of snakes formerly on the verge of a global race war to discover Time Travel and try to kill you.
- A possible alternative: Don't replace the alien astronaut, which you accidentally killed, with a similar-looking animal from your own planet, because if you do, they'll decide to put aside their differences and cancel their apocalyptic war to dedicate their entire civilization to waging war upon you, which eventually will result in them messing with time travel and attracting the attention of the Time Police which will go back in time and beat the snot out of said aliens' ancestors which will at the very least prevent them from discovering time travel and at the most possibly prevent them from ever becoming sapient in the first place. So yeah. Don't do that.
- Space "X": Literally everything is in space including space snakes, apparently. Anything can happen in space as well.
- Sssssnake Talk: The snake language has lots of "sss" sounds.
- Stable Time Loop:
- Played straight with alternative Rick & Morty whose interference is part of the original timeline.
- Averted with Rick's ploy to get rid of the snake invasion via Time Police. We see Beth and Summer fight off a snake invasion in the present. Cut to the two Clock Roaches killing the "too advanced" caveman snake in the past. This has an instant effect on the present timeline where the snakes vanish in front of our heroes' eyes.
- Start X to Stop X: Rick's solution to the snakes abusing Time Travel is to go and allow them to invent it even earlier, making the problem so bad that the Time Police are forced to intervene. It works but it's implied that the snakes' entire species never got a chance to develop as a result.
- The Stinger: Present Rick and Morty prepare to "become" their future selves by making snake costumes and inventing Time Travel in the snake language, and travel to the Snake Planet to give these things to their past selves. When Morty notes that he feels like they're forgetting something, Rick punches him in the eye for disobeying his orders and not staying in the car, explaining where Future Morty's black eye came from.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: Both Rick and Summer's friend Nancy point out on how bringing an Earth snake to a planet of snakes would alter the course of their evolution.
- Tainted Veins: Morty, after being bitten by the space snake. Rick notes how he's starting to look like a 90's Japanese ghost.
- Take That!: Throughout the show, there's a jab at the concept of Time Travel stories, with Rick's garage having a box called "Time Travel Stuff" on the shelf (as in, it's been shelved). Here, we finally get to see what that entails in this show, and it gets as ridiculous as you would expect from it.
- Temporal Paradox: Rick and Morty show up from the future wearing Santa hats; they then give them to their past selves.
- Terminator Impersonator: The Snake Resistance sends a cyborg back in time that has quite a resemblance to the original Terminator, down to the glowing red eye.
- Terminator Twosome: Spoofed left and right.
- A dozen snake terminators get sent back in time to eliminate the ape child Morty to protect the timeline. Meanwhile, the Snake Resistance sends its own terminator to protect Morty from Serpacorp.
- A similar scenario unfolds on the snake planet with hordes of opposing terminators battling over the alien snake and her brood.
- Happens again with the battle over snake Hitler.
- They Just Dont Get It: The residents of a bar tell Jerry to get rid of the large rock he's carrying, even after he explains that it's the only thing weighing him down while his "floaty" state is still in effect. They then order him to stop floating even when he tells them he simply has no control and is hit by ceiling fans. They simply throw him out.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Jerry ends his phone call with Rick with a "Merry Christmas, bitch."
- Time Is Dangerous: This episode illustrates why Rick doesn't indulge in Time Travel; besides not wanting to deal with Time Cops, because as he says it's poorly thought out and potentially universe ending.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: Morty's attempt to give back a snake astronaut leads to snakes creating Time Travel, and from that a snake SkyNet trying to kill him. Rick messes with the timeline so the snakes invent time travel even earlier and go crazy with it, causing the Time Police to intervene and erase their whole species.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- Everyone in the Smith family thinks that Jerry needs supervision to hang Christmas lights to keep him from accidentally killing himself, a perception Jerry doesn't help by falling off the ladder within a minute of being told this. Even after he manages to set up the lights by himself, he still falls off the roof and breaks his leg.
- Rick warned Morty that anything can happen in the void of space, which is why he was told to wait inside the car. Whether it be debris that causes a flat tire, or a snake attacking from out of nowhere. Morty stepped out of the car and soon gets bitten.
- Literally the snake astronaut when it comes to encountering Rick and Morty: where it bites Morty through its' own helmet causing the snake to suffocate from a lack of oxygen; before Morty pummels it to death with a hubcap.
- Turbine Blender: Jerry mistakes a snake terminator for a minion of Rick's and kicks it into the turbine of the airplane he is clinging on to.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: Just like the previous episode, the main plot involving the snakes runs parallel with a subplot involving Jerry being lighter-than-air, and the two storylines don't really intersect until near the end.
- Uncertain Doom: If the Time Police erased the snakes from existence, the episode never shows if Slippy ended up back at the pet shop or not.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- Poor Slippy didn't ask to be part of the adventure. All it took was her coming onto a snake scientist, and time travel soon ensues.
- Morty's refusal to wait in the car while Rick fixes it ultimately kicks off the plot.
- Variations on a Theme Song: The theme song at the end features snow bells.
- Wait Here: Rick tells Morty to stay in the shuttle while he repairs the broken tire. Naturally, Morty doesn't comply.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: It's unclear of what became of Slippy the Earth snake and her children after the alien snakes were wiped from history.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The second half of the episode is pretty much Terminator with snakes, what with all of the Time Travel and Killer Robots.
- Xenofiction: About five minutes of the episode is done entirely in the snakes' point of view... with no subtitles.
