Recap / Rick And Morty S 6 E 3 Bethic Twinstinct

Sometimes, you must learn to love yourself.

Original air date: 9/18/2022

Thanksgiving gives both Beths a chance to start bonding with each other, but they take it too far to Screw Yourself levels. Meanwhile, Rick, Summer, and Morty get addicted to a video game system that lets them adjust the "Realism" levels.

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Tropes:

• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear if the Beths' attraction to each other is genuine, or Space Beth's Venusian wine acted as a Love Potion of sorts. Even if the latter were true, we wouldn't be sure if it's a natural side-effect, or Rick drugged it to mess with Jerry. All the same, Rick hides the wine in the end to make sure nobody (even himself) drinks it again.
• Aside Glance: Morty makes one when he sees the two Beths make out in Space Beth's spaceship.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign:
  • Space Beth is fluent in Venusian, which is either genuinely French, or just sounds like it.
  • The French dub takes it one step further, having the Beths speak in Italian between themselves.
• Asteroid Thicket: A realism level of 4 in a space shooter plays out not unlike Asteroids. A realism level of 10 brings the sheer emptiness of space to such a level that the player dies of starvation before finding even one.
• BFS: A quick gag shows the "realistic" version of Cloud wielding his Buster Sword. The thing's so damn heavy he can't lift it.
• Brick Joke: The Asteroids game has a function where the player can record a message to their son if they die trying to find an asteroid when the "realism" slider is high. Morty tries recording a message to his son, which he fumbles through, likely trying to come up with what to say to the hypothetical son. At the end of the episode he is reminded he really does have a son.
• Brutal Honesty: Space Beth eventually gets tired of dancing around the truth and just bluntly admits to Jerry while the family eats ice cream together that she and Earth Beth had sex and loved it. Jerry turns this around by forcing them to confront the fact that they lied to him... then turning it into a sex game where Space Beth keeps trying to cuck him and he just keeps giving her permission and Earth Beth just gets more and more turned on by being their toy. Oh, and the rest of the family can hear them.
• Bus Crash: Rick hides the Venusian wine in a hidden shelf next to a Meeseeks box, and then destroys the key-remote. Looks like we won't be seeing Mr. Meeseeks anymore either...
• Character Development: Jerry's is highlighted here. While he uncomfortably says he would kill himself if Beth left him, and hides from the situation in a literal shell Rick designed for him, he ultimately comes out of the shell of his own will, admits he wouldn't really kill himself and that it was wrong for him to say that he would, and is assertive to the Beths about his feelings.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "The Wedding Squanchers", Rick makes the excuse that he's going to the Gloppydrop system for ice cream when he turns himself into the Galactic Federation. Here, both Beths make the excuse to go to the Gloppydrop system for some ice cream just to give themselves time away from the family. Apparently, Gloppydropulites make the single best ice cream in the entire galaxy.
  • The Beths decide to have their minds blown so they forget their affair, just as how Rick has been doing it to Morty. They don't end up going through with it, though, since Jerry emerges from his shell before they can.
  • When Space Beth leaves she says she will keep an eye out for her grandson in space.
  • Rick enters the episode in turkey form, apparently having gotten another presidential pardon for something.
  • Jerry and Beth both find that they're turned on by him being cuckolded, just like Jerry's parents. Also like Jerry's parents, they make the rest of the family very uncomfortable with it during a holiday.
  • Jerry's fetish for emasculation is foreshadowed as early as Season 2, where the couples therapy showed that their mental interpretations of each other (Jerry seeing Beth as a monstrous Xenomorph-like monster and Beth seeing Jerry as a spineless, submissive worm), despite being the worst couples' scenario the clinic had ever seen, actually worked perfectly together—as this episode shows, there's a reason their conflicting personalities work together so well.
    • Space Beth calls Jerry a worm, a reference to the same episode.
    • Jerry also shows a high level of understanding of how Beth works in that episode (namely correctly guessing that Beth's ideal vision of Jerry as a muscular fighter would in turn view her as a literal goddess). He uses this to his advantage in this episode.
  • The Jerryboree returns in The Stinger.
• Contrived Coincidence: To ensure Jerry doesn't see the Beths making out, Summer and Morty have him play a video game with them and let the console choose it randomly. It turns out to be about a woman cheating on her husband with another woman.
• Cringe Comedy: The episode ends with Beth, Space Beth, and Jerry reconciling by Jerry having them have sex with each other while he watches and joins in a bit later. Cut to downstairs where Rick, Morty, and Summer can hear their entire exchange, their reactions shifting from shell-shock, to disgust, to despair at how long it's going on for.
• Depraved Bisexual: The Beths start cheating on Jerry with each other and making their family uncomfortable. Rick, who is older and more comfortable with his pansexuality and past history of Screw Yourself, tells them to just be careful and thoughtful about it (which is wild, considering it's Rick.).
• Diabolus ex Machina: In-Universe. Rick is playing a text-adventure game on the Game Pod XL which consists mostly of the player character wandering blindly through a forest, trying to meet their mother at the airport. The character enters a clearing and the game immediately ends, stating that "the vampires won" with no further context. Morty gets outraged at how unrealistic and random it was that the game didn't even bother to explain why the vampires won or what they had to do with the plot in the first place.
• Do Wrong, Right: Though he doesn't outright say it, Rick expresses disapproval not of Beth's fling with her clone, having implicitly done the same with alternate versions of himself, but their clumsy and transparent methods of hiding it.
• Electrified Bathtub: Jerry mentions this as his preferred suicide method in case Beth would become unfaithful to him.
• Elephant in the Living Room: When Morty and Summer independently come across their mother cheating on Jerry with her clone, they are absolutely horrified but refuse to mention it directly, instead avoiding the subject by playing video games, and using metaphorical jargon to discuss the matter with each other.
• Emasculated Cuckold: Rick directly refers to Jerry as "your cuckold husband" at one point when talking to the Beths about their relationship. By the end, though, it turns out that Jerry and the Beths are turned on by them cuckolding him right to his face while he approves of and actively encourages it, to the point that it's implied to turn into an outright threesome soon after. It probably helps that 1) there's some Girl on Girl Is Hot involved for Jerry; 2) Beth is "cheating on" him with herself, not a separate third party (Space Beth straight-up claims that it's "not even cheating"); and 3) Jerry implies that his main problem with it is just that they didn't tell him and tried to hide it from him, and Beth admits this was a mistake. Jerry asserting his own agency and feelings by "permitting" and egging them on to get it on in front of him makes the experience enjoyable for all three of them.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Jerry activates a pillbug shell that Rick drunkenly gave him due to being emotionally overwhelmed by the Beths' affair with each other. It stays active for a while but Jerry exits the shell when the two decide to have their minds blown to resolve the problems said affair is causing. He's utterly offended at their choice and makes it clear that his problem wasn't the affair but them trying to hide it from him. He also tells them his words about killing himself were just a very bad joke that he now deeply regrets saying.
  • Rick's advice to Beth about "forgetting the ice cream" isn't so much moral but logical. That doing it too much creates secrets, and it's far better to be honest about your actions as "Lies pile up like credit card debt." However, Rick draws a line at them using his holodeck to see how far their relationship could really go. At that point it's more than just some goofing around with each other and something that is seriously impacting the whole family. Plus, they aren't even keeping it secret too well since he, Morty and Summer already figured it out. He also protests them trying to mind-blow themselves as a solution to the problems they're causing, trying to tell them it's just going to cause more issues.
• Flashback: When Space Beth tells Jerry about her and Earth Beth's affair, he has one to when he and Beth were in high school, showing Jerry mooning over Beth and deciding to ask her to prom, disregarding his friend's attempt to dissuade him by saying "I'd be happy to be torn apart by Beth Sanchez." Notably, this is the first-ever flashback scene to Jerry's and Beth's younger years that contains dialogue.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: The Beths are goaded by Jerry to have sex while he watches. Earth Beth is a bit worried that she likes this.
  Earth Beth: I'm freaked out by how hot this is.
• Guide Dang It!: In-Universe. The text game they were playing gave absolutely no clues on how to win or even what to do. They spend hours wandering around in the forest, only to find a clearing and lose the game because apparently, they were safe in the forest from the vampires they didn't even know existed until then.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Despite all of the things that Rick points out—that the Beths' affair is their own business, but it also affects their families and that what they are doing is selfish—the Beths refuse to heed his warnings or any of his "I told you so's" because Rick is guilty of all of this and has also spent his life deflecting blame or ignoring the consequences of his actions.
• Implied Death Threat: Space Beth dops this in case the rest of the family tries to reveal both Beths' affair to Jerry before Earth Beth does:
  Space Beth: You can deal with it or you can deal with me but, you should know, I have all the Predator weapons.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Jerry and the Beths engage in some uncomfortably passive-aggressive softcore S&M role-play towards the end of the episode. They're rather loud about it, mortifying their children to tears who are trying to have dinner in the kitchen on the lower floor.
• Jerkass Ball: Space Beth shows the same abusiveness towards Jerry in this episode that Beth had in Season 2. Whereas in "Solaricks", was at least friendly to him, here, she feels almost no remorse in attempting to break his marriage with Home Beth, even going as far as to admit the truth to Jerry just because she doesn't want to be inconvenienced by hiding the affair. This level of rudeness however appears to disappear when she says her goodbyes to the family when she leaves earth for a while.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Beths decide the only way to move forward is to have Rick mind blow them into forgetting their affair entirely. Rick calls them out on how this does absolutely nothing for the rest of the family remaining glaringly aware of their tryst and being forced to swallow the subsequent discomfort to maintain their ignorance, not to mention they may easily fall in love again later. The Beths laugh this off because it's Rick saying it and he regularly does equally selfish things. It takes Jerry unrolling and confronting them to prevent this.
• Limited Wardrobe: Played for Laughs when Jerry begins packing, his closet is revealed to have nothing but copies of his trademark green shirt with the two horizontal stripes.
• Made of Indestructium: Rick lets the Beths know that Jerry's Pillbug Protocol is impossible to break through. When we cut back to the Beths and Jerry in his Pillbug later on, we can see a mountain of broken tools on the floor, implying they unsuccessfully tried to break out Jerry.
• Mood Whiplash: Jerry, true to form, does this to himself. He makes a sweet speech to the whole family as they prepare to have Thanksgiving dinner together, including saying how thankful he is for Earth Beth, which makes her and the kids say, "Aww!" He then quickly makes everyone uncomfortable and irritated when he claims he'd kill himself if she ever left or cheated on him.
• Narcissist: The Beths literally fall in love with themselves, taking "go Screw Yourself" to an entirely literal level. Earth Beth even muses that she isn't sure if she has the most healthy or least healthy relationship in the world.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Rick needed another presidential pardon, having arrived as a turkey.
  • Apparently, Rick and Jerry went drinking one night and Jerry asked for an indestructible "emotional defense system", while Rick got tattoos of himself and Jerry as eagles on his buttocks.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Lampshaded. With the family celebrating another Thanksgiving, Morty outright asks Summer how old the two of them are supposed to be.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Beth and Space Beth are absolutely not going to let Rick live it down that he cloned his own daughter.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Summer and Morty, having just had a confrontation (along with Rick) with the Beths about their affair, are chowing down on their ice cream to avoid conversation when an oblivious Jerry points out that their moms supposedly went to space to get them ice cream and asks if they thanked them for "doing it" (getting the ice cream). Morty (reluctantly) and Summer (sarcastically) thank them for "doing it" (having sex with each other).
• One-Liner, Name... One-Liner: The ending dialogue.
  Jerry: Well, seems like we all learned a little lesson this weekend. At least I know I did!
  Rick: Me too, Jerry. Me too.
• Pac Man Fever: The games available on the "Publokian GamePod XL" are all inexplicably primitive-looking, in spite of the console's supposed advancement. There's a game resembling classic Asteroids, a 2D Street Fighter-like game, Final Fantasy VII, and an old-school text adventure. The most modern-looking one is a Visual Novel, complete with SFC-style music straight out of a JRPG from the 1990s (though with the same artstyle as the rest of the show). It turns out that "most realistic" does not refer to the graphics, but to the gameplay (e.g. The opponents in the fighting game have to commute through the city to find each other first.) Morty is not impressed.
• Parental Sexuality Squick:
  • Morty and Summer are absolutely horrified at separately bumping into their mother getting involved with a clone of herself.
  • Once again, Morty and Summer play it straight and Rick inverts it when they all hear the Beths having sex while Jerry watches, encourages them and then joins in with them. The siblings are clearly uncomfortable and eventually break down in tears, having no way to simply leave.
    Morty: Wh-fo-Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME!? Why? WHY!? [weeps]
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: In bed! Jerry keeps giving the Beths permission to have sex, with Space Beth constantly belittling him and Earth Beth getting way into it. Turns out everyone involved has a massive cuck fetish, which Jerry keeps undermining by giving Space Beth permission, forcing her to get more dominant to both of her partners.
• Pet the Dog: Rick gave Jerry a pillbug shell as the "ultimate emotional defense" while the two were drinking one night and Jerry told Rick this is what he wanted the most. And Rick gave it to him completely in good faith, with no unexpected or unintended consequences. Jerry is the only one who can turn it on and off, and not even Rick himself can deactivate the thing. Given the vitriol between the two, this is astonishingly kind of Rick.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: Rick starts out the episode transforming back into a human from a turkey (having once again tricked the President into pardoning him), and walks around stark naked until Jerry tells him to put pants on for Thanksgiving dinner. Rick gives him a sarcastic response before generating his usual clothes back.
• Redundant Parody: The quick gag about Cloud being unable to lift his sword if the game is put at greater realism levels was already something poked fun at in the original games (namely, that Cloud being a SOLDIER was the only reason he could use the Buster Sword with any effectivness) and the remake also poked fun at it by showing Cloud being unable to draw it while standing under a doorframe.
• Right Through the Wall: Rick, Summer, and Morty overhear Jerry and the two Beths "sort out their issues" with each other and they each try desperately to think about literally anything else.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Subverted. When Jerry finally gets out of his pillbug shell after learning of the Beths' affair, he plans to pack his bags and leave the house. However, the Beths follow him up to their room to try to talk things out with him, and it leads to them reconciling (with some Girl on Girl Is Hot and Three-Way Sex involved).
• Screw Yourself:
  • Beth and Space Beth realize that being themselves allows each other to fall in love with who the other Beth is. They do a pretty bad job at hiding it, so Rick calls them out on it. Avoiding this conflict is what drives Summer and Morty to seek out escapism with video games.
  • When Earth Beth first talks to Rick about what she and Space Beth are doing, Rick implies he has also had flings with himself, though being Rick these flings are also implied to be pretty shallow.
  • The Stinger shows Jerry going to the Jerryboree with the ulterior motive of possibly feeling up other Jerries to experience the same situation as the Beths. The receptionist tells him that Jerry's aren't allowed to check themselves in without a Rick present for that very reason. Another Jerry is waiting for him outside, the two give each other a smooch, and move on in satisfaction.
• Seen It All:
  • Rick has been completely naked around the rest of his family so many times before that nobody reacts to it except for Jerry, who asks him to put on pants, and even that just seems to be less about discomfort and more for the sake of table manners.
  • Rick has also fucked himself so many times that he's utterly blasé about his daughter doing the same thing.
• Smash Cut: Summer, then Morty, are stunned to learn about the two versions of their mom having an affair, and the scenes immediately cuts to them playing the Game Pod XL to suppress the discovery.
• Snowball Lie: Discussed. Rick warns Beth that her lies may pile up like credit card debts.
• Space Whale: Rick fashions a third game controller from the esophagus of a "bionic space whale". Strangely, the whale has far more organs inside it than could possibly have fit in its body and isn't killed by having its guts ripped out. Rick assures Beth he's doing it a favor by upgrading it in exchange for the parts he's harvesting.
• Status Quo Is God: Whatever personality change Morty underwent in the previous episode disappears here.
• The Stinger: Jerry goes to the Jerryboree hoping to engage in some Screw Yourself activity, but discovers that Jerrys are not allowed to come check in there by themselves specifically to avoid this exact scenario. He ends up encountering another Jerry in an alley nearby; they share a quick kiss, thank each other, and head on their way.
• Swallow the Key: After Rick hides the Venusian wine in his secret stash, he drops the stash's remote into the kitchen sink garbage disposal so this plot doesn't happen again.
• Take That!:
  • The Game Pod XL takes the idea of making games more "realistic" and lampoons it by showing what it would be like if the games were literally more realistic. No Artistic License – Space, no Artistic License – Physics, or any of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality that make video games the way they are.
  • When describing Jerry's "emotional defense shell" ability that he gave him, Rick states it can be useful for things like "flying coach" and "when Summer asks your thoughts on Wonder Woman 1984".
• Teeny Weenie: Jerry mentions his "weird little dick" when calling out Beth for her unfaithfulness. 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. Turns out, it helps set up their roleplay.
• Thanksgiving Episode: This is another episode set during Thanksgiving, although it has a lot less to do with the holiday than the previous, outside of the family eating a turkey dinner and a throwaway gag at the beginning showing Rick had to turn into a turkey again. It mostly just functions as an excuse for why Space Beth is staying over for a few days.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: After witnessing her mother and Space Beth get affectionate with each other, Summer wears this expression. This is then followed by Morty. And near the end, Rick joins in only because they keep hearing the Beths having sex while Jerry spurs them on and then joins in.
• Three-Way Sex: Though not shown, the audible dialogue implies that what starts out as Jerry watching the Beths cuckold him with each other soon turns into a threesome.
• Translator Microbes: Space Beth gives Earth Beth an implant that allows her to speak Venusian (which is mostly French).
• Troubled Fetal Position: Exaggerated; When Jerry finds out about the Beths sleeping together, he rolls into a retractable shell like a pillbug. Rick explains that he drunkenly gave an equally drunk Jerry this ability as the "ultimate emotional defense", where he can remain indefinitely and trying to force him out can harm him.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: In-Universe. Morty is disappointed to discover that the Game Pod XL's "realism" is this trope rather than graphical realism. An asteroid Shoot 'Em Up turns into the spaceship pilot dying of starvation before encountering a single asteroid, Street Fighter starts with the two fighters having to go through their regular morning routines before encountering each other, and Final Fantasy VII has Cloud struggle to lift his massive Buster Sword. Strangely, the effect is inverted for an Interactive Fiction game, where it suddenly ends with the player letting the vampires win... by stepping into a clearing (it never mentions the player dying), which Morty calls out for how unrealistic that suddenly became.
• Unusual Euphemism: The Beths leave Earth together to go get "the best ice cream in the multiverse" for the family, but end up making out, having sex, and completely forgetting to actually get the ice cream, which they only realize once they've returned. Earth Beth asks Rick if he has a way to replicate the ice cream to cover with the rest of the family for them not getting it, and in their ensuing conversation, "forgetting the ice cream" becomes a euphemism for having a relationship with another version of yourself.
• Visual Pun:
  • Jerry becomes a far more mature and savvy person once he comes out of his pillbug form to stop the Beths from mind-blowing themselves. In other words, he has literally came out of his shell.
  • If you take a glance at the Secret Alcohol Compartment Rick accesses in the end of the episode, you can see a bottle of what is presumed to be Tequila with a miniature Morty inside of it. In other words, Morty is a worm.
• Wham Shot: At the end of the episode, Rick takes the Venusian Vine bottle and puts it in a secret compartment (which has several of the alcohol bottles Rick drinks with) and then renders the compartment inaccessible by destroying the key in a Sink Grinder. Besides Rick wanting to remove the thing associated with some bad memories, there is an implication that Rick may have dropped Alcohol, or at least alien alcohol for good. ...Or he's simply swearing off hiding things using secret compartments.
• What the Hell, Hero?: The Beths get it from everyone in the family for sleeping with each other behind Jerry's back and leaving them all uncomfortably aware of the whole thing. It ends with Jerry also doing it when they're prepared to wipe their minds and force everyone else to shoulder even more discomfort maintaining their ignorance of the truth.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The Beths use Rick's holodeck to speed-run their relationship and see how far it goes. The two are well into old age before being interrupted by Rick, Morty, and Summer.

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