Original air date: 5/24/2020
A camping trip is interrupted when a former conquest of Rick's contacts him informing him that she's pregnant...and also a living planet.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Gaia's divine baby daddy Reggie outright calls himself a Zeus-like God who only wants custody of his kids so he can raise them to worship him by teaching them to fear him through destroying the civilization they built.
- Rick and Beth don't act much better, setting their children up in a dystopia where their place is determined at birth and casually discarding the "unproductive".
- Accidental Murder: Morty and Summer accidentally murder Reggie by driving a spaceship into his brain.
- Anti-Climax: A staple of the series, but particularly noticeable here. Reggie is killed unceremoniously when Morty and Summer, completely high, accidentally drive a spaceship through his brain. There is just a little "pop" to indicate the death, Rick uncovers the ship and never comments on it again.
- The fight between Rick and Reggie is this - rather than a dramatic superpowered battle between two godlike beings, all they do is clumsily brawl and hit each other with rocks.
- Big Damn Heroes: An accidental example that's Played for Laughs. Reggie is about to murder Rick by choking and/or crushing him to death when the out-of-control spaceship that Summer and Morty rebooted flies right through the back of Reggie's head and through his brain, killing him. Rick enters the ship to find Morty and Summer both high as kites and praises them for saving him while they can only babble incoherently.
- Bolt of Divine Retribution: Reggie tries to strike Rick down with a bolt of lightning. Rick absorbs it with a device on his chest and mocks him for the attempt.
- Camping Episode: This is what Jerry is trying for, only it gets hi-jacked by Beth's demand that Rick go face Gaia
- Chekhov's Gun: Early on, Jerry shows Summer and Morty the "s'more sticks" he brought along for roasting marshmallows over the fire, including the fact that they extend when you push a button on them. In the climax, Beth falls into a chasm and is too far away for Jerry to directly reach her, so he extends one of the s'more sticks for her to grab onto.
- Chekhov's Skill: Deconstructed. Morty and Summer assume their interests in playing video games and getting high respectively will help them navigate the controls of an abandoned spaceship. However, they are instantly proven wrong the moment they turn the spaceship's engine on and lose control of the ship. It is shown that neither of their skills was actually effective in getting an advanced alien ship to work.
- Colony Drop: Reggie dropping on the city.
- Crazy-Prepared:
- Rick has outfitted the family sedan for space travel just in case he's separated from his own ship.
- Rick just presses a button that summons a small device that unfolds into a gigantic facility for sorting and processing the clay people. He did not build this device for this occasion. He did not know about Gaia's situation before the phone call in the car. He apparently just happened to have this device in the car at the time, just in case a situation like this occurred.
- Rick leaves the alien spaceship for the surviving clay people, but since he's sure Gaia will send them to Earth to get revenge, he hid a tracking device on board and has the ship rigged so he can remotely scuttle it if they get anywhere near Earth.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- When Rick tries to fight Reggie, he gets some hits in at the beginning but is soon handily overpowered, and this is after the latter shrinks down to Rick's size to make it a fairer fight. Once he grows back to his normal size, he's about to easily crush Rick to death between two of his fingers. Rick only survives because Morty and Summer accidentally crash a spaceship through Reggie's head from behind.
- Rick and Beth's clay people never stood a chance against Jerry's army of Unproductives. Reggie grants Jerry and his army his powers and Jerry wields a divine staff with biblical powers. Also, Rick abandons them to fight Reggie and he only gives Beth a weapon while the other clay people are unarmed.
- Description Cut: When Morty wonders how Jerry is doing on his own in the wilderness, Summer assumes that he is having the time of his life. Cut to Jerry trying to skip stones and ending up dragged away in the river currents.
- Distracting Disambiguation: After a prolonged fistfight with Reggie, a badly beaten Rick realizes he is on the ropes and surrenders. Reggie, however, swells to giant size and prepares to squish him between his fingers in order to make an example of him and teach his children a lesson about obedience and fear, declaring that "school's out!" Rick asks if he shouldn't say that "school's in" since he is trying to teach a lesson. An annoyed Reggie loosens his squeeze for a bit and begrudgingly admits that Rick does have a point, just long enough for Summer and Morty to accidentally hit him in the back of the head and kill him.
- Do Wrong, Right: Rick is annoyed at Beth attempting to rescue his clay progeny from the birth geyser that is spewing them out and getting them killed, but he at least insists on doing it right and builds a machine that rescues all of them instead of just a few with a trampoline, then organizes them into a society that can achieve space travel so they'll be self-sustaining.
- Dumbass Has a Point: While Jerry isn't the most capable person in the family, he's right when he tells Morty and Summer they won't survive in the wild on their own without their technology as they get lost in a swamp where they're cold and dirty.
- Evil Is Petty: After Morty and Summer save Rick by killing Reggie (completely by accident, thanks to getting super high and losing control of the ship), he promises he won't sell them out to their parents. Naturally, at the end of the episode, when Beth chastises Rick for (unintentionally) putting her in danger and praises Jerry for saving her, Rick promptly rats out his grandkids as a way to spite Jerry and Beth by disparaging their parenting skills.
- Eye Scream: The spaceship exits Reggie's brain through his left eye. Not a gorgeous sight.
- Flying Car: Rick turns the family's station wagon into a spacecraft.
- Foreshadowing: An early hint that the kids aren't Ricks is that they get ejected from Gaia shouting "I am!". It's a whole Christian thing. "Before the Father was, I am." - Jesus
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Reggie reveals that the reason he changed into a cloud was to be more appealing to Gaia.
- Garden Garment: Jerry swaps to a leaf covering his crotch when he leads the rejects to survive in nature. It does not cover his ass, which is shown several times.
- Generation Ships: Rick's ultimate goal for the society he's developing is the explicit creation of this.
- Genius Loci: Gaia is a living planet that Rick had sex with.
- Get Out!: Gaia screams this at the end when she wants Rick off her back.
- Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Subverted. Jerry proposes this after he rescues Beth and she lands on top of him in a very suggestive position. However, Beth, despite assuring Jerry that she loves him, turns him down because he smells awful after roughing it in the wilderness for almost a week.
- Hidden Depths: It turns out that Jerry is 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.
- Higher Understanding Through Drugs: This is what Summer thinks she's achieving when she starts inhaling the strange-colored liquid on the alien spaceship, believing that she's taking in the knowledge of the aliens who built the spaceship by doing so. Once Rick finds them and reconnects the pipes on the ship, though, he informs her that, no, she was pretty much just huffing the alien equivalent of brake fluid, and mocks her for this later when ratting her and Morty out to their parents.
- Horror Hippies: Rick calls Jerry and the Unproductives "hippies". Combine that with the fact that they did not come to make peace but attack.
- Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Rick had sex with a living planet, and though we can put together how he managed that feat, it's still a rather impressive difference in size. Turns out it was Reggie with whom the planet sired the children.
- How Do I Shot Web?: Jerry initially aims his powered staff the wrong way around so it shoots out the backside.
- Hypocrite: Rick, the man who can build and create anything with his superior intelligence, has the nerve to call Jerry out for not using his divine staff for beneficial purposes to help people. Of course, Rick openly doesn't care about other people while Jerry acts like he's a Nice Guy, so it considered him viewing his son-in-law as this. Although, Jerry was using his staff to help people (leading a revolution against the dystopic regime set up by Rick and Beth, and his people didn't appear to need the medical help suggested by Rick), didn't wield the power long enough to learn to control it and was on another planet, so it couldn't have helped Earth anyway.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- After Summer delivers a very harsh "The Reason You Suck" Speech to her father who then leaves, Morty criticizes Summer by telling her to stop hanging out with Rick, despite the fact he's almost always hanging out with him himself. Though, it should be noted what he actually meant was to stop trying to be like Rick, which Morty usually avoids.
- Rick criticizes Summer for huffing what is essentially brake fluid, only to take a hit himself after fixing the ship. Then again, Summer thought she was gaining the knowledge of its builders by doing so; Rick, who knew how to reassemble the pipes, was chastising her more for not knowing what she was doing.
- I Just Want to Be Special: Jerry admits at the end that the camping trip was his attempt to feel important for a change. This confirms what Summer accused him of earlier in her The Reason You Suck speech.
- I Know Mortal Kombat: Deconstructed. Morty thinks piloting an advanced alien spaceship will work just like a video game. Only to be proven wrong when the ship starts up. Rick even lampshades the ridiculousness of the concept.Rick: And Morty, the fucking moron. He thought the ship worked like a game controller. What in the Disney Channel fuck is that?
- Insane Troll Logic: Summer's first guess on what the strange fluid on the ship is is that it's knowledge from the crew.
- In Working Order: Subverted. Morty gets the crashed alien spaceship to start up with the first button push but then it spins out of control.
- Jerkass Gods:
- Reggie, the god who is the true father of Gaia's children and shows up to take custody of them. He's called out for being a deadbeat dad who only arrived after all the work of rearing them was done. He also explicitly calls himself "a Zeus" who wants faith from worshippers, his children in this case, garnered through fear.
- While not explicitly called a goddess, Gaia is a more selfish version to her Greek-mythology counterpart. She cheated on Reggie with Rick, lied to Rick that the kids were his so he could raise them since Reggie wasn’t interested in raising them, and then wanted Rick to leave so she could live with Reggie. When Reggie dies due to Rick’s shenanigans, she tries to kill him but ends up killing most of her children, with only the Unproductives that Jerry raised surviving.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While Summer is unnecessarily cruel to Jerry when she chews him out, she ends up being correct about his motives. While Jerry does genuinely possess some useful skills that Morty and Summer could benefit from, the true purpose of the camping trip wasn't about helping his children but feeding his own ego. She's correct about Jerry trying to lower the bar enough that he could feel useful, as seen when he forces the Unproductives to remain at a basic level lest they outperform him.
- Kick the Dog:
- Rick asks Reggie to at least keep the society he and Beth built because it means a lot to her, but Reggie mocks the request and says he'll burn it down because he wants his children to fear him.
- Summer goes on a tirade against Jerry that is especially cruel, completely unwarranted, and rooted entirely in the fact that she can't get off her phone to try to enjoy camping for a minute. Even Morty says she went too far, despite his own disinterest in the wilderness.
- A Kind of One: Rick says that Reggie is "a Zeus", implying that there is an entire species of Zeus' out there. This isn't so far-fetched given that other species with god-like power have been shown to exist.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Summer unleashes a massive "Reason You Suck" Speech at Jerry, claiming that he's not actually good at camping and that he's terrible for trying to highroad them. However, she proves him right when she is shown entirely incapable of surviving in the wild with Morty while Jerry is quite adept with it.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Played With - everyone thinks the clay people are Rick's, which he denies, of course. Turns out Rick's right, hi Reggie!
- Man Bites Man: More like Man Bites God. During their brawl, Rick fights dirty by biting Reggie's hand.
- Manipulative Bastard: It’s implied that Gaia has no real feelings for Rick and only used him to get Reggie to return. She lied to Rick about being the father of her children so he could raise them since Reggie didn’t want to be with her and raise the kids at the same time. Once Reggie returns to claim the kids, she asks Rick to leave despite him being a far better father figure than Reggie. She becomes enraged when Reggie dies and tries to kill Rick with a volcanic eruption, but ends up killing all of her kids, sans the Unproductives who were raised by Jerry.
- Medieval Stasis: Enforced by Jerry when one of his Unproductives builds a crude house and Jerry immediately tears it down, as it would defeat the purpose of the camping lifestyle he's taught them. Doubles as Evil Luddite and Tall Poppy Syndrome, since the reason Jerry decried the shed building was that it would have compromised his elevated position amongst The Unproductives.
- Nature Lover: Jerry enjoys the outdoors very much.
- Negated Moment of Awesome: Morty puts on a Determined Expression as he starts up the spaceship's engine. The music swells. Now is the time for our Kid Heroes to shine. Cue the wing falling off along with a Sudden Soundtrack Stop. That did not go as planned.
- Never My Fault: When Gaia starts going nuts after Reggie gets killed, Summer says she doesn't blame her because "you killed her slam piece, Grandpa!"...except it was Summer and Morty who killed Reggie (by accident, but still) after crashing a ship through his head. Granted, Rick was the one who picked a fight with Reggie first when they happened to crash.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: Discussed by Summer when she and Morty get lost in the woods. She tells him not to eat her butt if she dies because she finds it to be weird.
- Non-Protagonist Resolver: The fight between Rick and Reggie gets decided by the runaway spaceship with Morty and Summer inside.
- Packed Hero: Jerry getting trapped in the "clay people assessment" factory line and being tossed out with the other Unproductives.
- Parting the Sea: Jerry uses his powers to part the river so that his men can cross over to the city.
- Pet the Dog: Jerry making sure all the surviving clay people get on board the spaceship before he does.
- The Pigpen: Realistically, Jerry has become this after spending several days camping out in the wilderness. When he saves Beth and suggests making love, she refuses because he smells so bad.
- Plot Tailored to the Party: Subverted. In this episode, Morty is addicted to video games and Summer is upset that she's not doing drugs at parties with her friends. They find a crashed spaceship with controls that look like a video game's and tubes of mysterious gas that Summer assumes contains the former crew's collective knowledge. Summer huffs the "knowledge" gas and helps Morty label the controls... and the ship's wings fall off and it takes off out of control.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
- Summer chews out Jerry for taking the family on a camping trip just so he'll have something he can pretend to be good at. Unusually for a speech aimed at Jerry, it turns out to be inaccurate. Jerry really is good at camping. Morty then calls out Summer for being way too mean to their dad and says she should stop hanging out with Rick. However, she was correct in that the camping trip was more for feeding Jerry's ego than helping her and Morty develop useful skills.
- Not wanting Jerry to feel superior over him after Beth defends him, Rick rats out Morty and Summer for getting high and killing Reggie to spite Jerry and Beth so he has an excuse to call them out on their poor parenting skills while calling Morty and Summer idiots for their actions.
- Rhymes on a Dime: Rick breaks out another Catchphrase: "She's addicted to what Rick did."
- Riddle for the Ages: While Gaia and Reggie claim the latter to be the real father of the children in the end, we are never actually given any actual proof about it, and we are just supposed to take their words at face value.
- Rousseau Was Right: Rick attempts to uplift the "newborn" clay people into a self-sustaining, space-capable civilization - which involves heavy social engineering, separating the productive members of society from the "Unproductives". Rick openly admits this is social Darwinism, and he abandons the Unproductives to die on their own. When Jerry stumbles into them, the Unproductives are just drooling idiots sitting around in the mud and waiting to die. Under Jerry's influence, however - one mediocre man with a decent knowledge of basic camping skills and the willingness to actually teach them - the Unproductives manage to develop a reasonably functional Neolithic-level society, with mastery of fire and basic shelters. One of them actually innovates the idea of more permanent houses made of wood, without Jerry's intervention at all. Rick's belief that they were literally useless and incapable of surviving without his social engineering turned out to be wrong.
- Scare 'Em Straight: Summer admits to being scared straight after she and Morty get high fixing up an old ship, and instead get taken for a horrifying ride when it loses its wings just before the engine fires.
- Screaming Warrior: Jerry and his people let out a war cry to intimidate their opposition.
- The Social Darwinist: Rick at first refuses to rescue his clay progeny because he figures natural selection will kick in and some of them will develop a way to survive being shot into the air and landing on solid ground.
- Space Is Noisy: Rick's noisy fight with Reggie in outer space.
- Spiteful Spit: Reggie spits on Rick during the brawl.
- Squee: Beth's reaction to Rick complimenting her work on the civilization they're building.
- Stealth Pun: Quite a few surrounding the god shit in this ep.
- Continuing the fairly subtle digs at Christianity (see Foreshadowing above), the god who knocked up Gaia refers to himself as "a Zeus"... "á Zeus"... "Jesús". It's a Spanish thing.
- How does the Zeus die? A deus ex machina. Double pun, because he's an ex-deus because of a machina.
- The Stinger: Rick watches an ad for a dating site for living planets. He quickly hides it when Summer walks in, but she informs him she'd been watching for a few minutes. Rick quickly defends himself as watching it because it's a funny premise.
- Super-Empowering: Reggie gives Jerry biblical powers to fight against Rick's civilization.
- Take My Hand!: Jerry to Beth after she falls into a chasm and loses her grip on the rocks. She's actually too far away for him to reach directly, so he extends his s'more stick for her to grab onto. He accidentally pokes her with it, but it still works.
- This Means War Paint: Jerry has blue war paint on his face when confronting Beth and Rick.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: Things go a bit better than usual for Jerry in this episode. He is not only proven right against Summer, but is shown to be capable of surviving while camping, and even turning the "Unproductives" into a functioning, albeit primitive society, and towards the end, Reggie gives his staff divine, magical properties. Then, he is able to make up with Beth by saving her life, and while she does refuse to make love with him because of how much he stinks, she still does assure him that she loves him, and sticks up for him to Rick.
- Tom the Dark Lord: The god explicitly compared to Zeus is named Reggie.
- Too Important to Walk: Jerry is carried on a chair by his people.
- Took a Level in Badass: When Rick starts trying to ghost Gaia, Morty recognizes that he's building a Faraday cage and asks why.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Beth's reaction when it's revealed that Reggie is the father of the clay people and not Rick.
