Rick and Morty mocked A Nightmare on Elm Street in the series’ second episode, “Lawnmower Dog,” and the show has kept parodying horror movies ever since, most recently mashing up The Santa Clause and Prometheus in season 9’s “The Last Temptation of Jerry.” Most of these episodes focus on meta gags in the same way the show pokes fun at movies across genres from Total Recall to Freaky Friday. But one episode genuinely leaned into horror and transformed the entire series.
The show’s sixth episode, “Rick Potion #9,” starts by following a similar formula to other first season episodes “Lawnmower Dog” and “Meeseeks and Destroy.” Tired of being used by Rick (Justin Roiland), Morty (also Roiland) demands that his grandpa do him a favor and make a love potion he can use to woo his crush, Jessica (Kari Wahlgren). The episode came out 13 years before Obsession, but it uses many of the same classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for tropes.” Jessica’s love — fueled by an infusion of vole oxytocin — leads to her being embarrassingly affectionate at the school’s flu season awareness dance. But then the episode takes the first of several even more disturbing turns.
Previous episodes had hinted at Rick’s recklessness and nihilism, but it’s on full display in “Rick Potion #9,” where he is so confident of his skills that he both ignores a big flaw in the initial scheme and repeatedly offers solutions that just make things worse. Jessica has the flu, which causes the serum to spread to the whole school. All the students and faculty begin violently pursuing Morty in a plot similar to the misfiring love spell in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 episode “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
Rick’s quick fix is to expose everyone to praying mantis DNA, which is when the real horror starts. Everyone in the world is transformed into hideous monsters with mantis eyes poking out from the rictus masks of their former faces, their jagged arms covered in fleshy bits. The visuals are genuinely disgusting, yet once again, Rick is so convinced he can set everything right that he encourages Morty to enjoy the spectacle before unleashing his second attempt at an antidote.
Rick is smug as the treatment just turns everyone human again, and is more concerned with Morty getting to say “I told you so” than the actual horror of watching everyone erupt into even more twisted forms. The whole planet becomes a David Cronenberg-inspired nightmare covered with shambling mounds of teeth, tentacles, and oozing flesh. The animators did a remarkable job with the sheer variety of twisted bodies attacking each other and shambling around the globe.
Roiland wrote “Rick Potion #9,” and his last twist is the episode’s most disturbing. After blaming Morty for causing the whole mess because he wanted to “roofie” Jessica, Rick offers one last solution. A cut to the duo returning home to news that the “genetic epidemic” had been averted appears to be a classic reset button, returning everyone to the show’s status quo so they can find a fresh way to mess things up the following week. But then Rick and Morty are killed by the device Rick was fiddling with at the beginning of the episode, and the Rick and Morty from the Cronenberg World appear to bury their bodies and take over their lives.
Rick and Morty embraces existential horror
The revelation that Rick is a multiverse traveler with no concerns about ruining an entire world and leaving it behind transformed the entire nature of the series. Rick has seen an infinite multiverse, and he’s both destroyed the world and saved the day countless times. He’s concluded that nothing matters, and he wants Morty to accept that same bleak truth. It’s a concept that shakes Morty to the core, manifesting in his haunted stare as Mazzy Star’s “Look on Down From the Bridge” plays to close out the episode. The scene of Morty’s parents fighting juxtaposed against the ending on the Cronenberg World — where the whole family is happier without Rick and Morty around even though they’re surrounded by monsters — is an extra dagger, meant to ask if the entire universe might be better without Rick and Morty in it.
Morty returned to his original world twice over the course of his adventures. Most notably, he’s banished there by a portal reset in season 6 and discovers that even the seemingly happy ending the rest of his family got at the end of “Rick Potion #9” was short-lived. His mother and sister are dead, and only Jerry (Chris Parnell) has survived and become just as nihilist as Rick. Maybe the Cronenberg versions of Rick and Morty are happy with the outcome, but Jerry spent years suffering for Morty’s mistake.
As disgusting as all the body horror in “Rick Potion #9” is, the core of the episode is really about the existential dread that would go on to shape most of the show’s best episodes. It’s an episode that set the stakes of the show, making it clear just how powerful and dangerous Rick’s science becomes when left unchecked. But it also challenged the very nature of consequences, making it clear that when the show did reset to the status quo, the psychological trauma would remain. Rick and Morty is a silly show that constantly lampoons pop culture, but it also has a deep emotional core, and “Rick Potion #9” embodies these two core facets of the show’s greatest strengths
Rick and Morty is streaming on HBO Max.