Over its nine-season run, Rick and Morty has accumulated a huge cast of bizarre characters including clones, aliens, superheroes, cyborgs, and birdpeople. Most are just part of one-time gags during Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty Smith’s episodic adventures, but recurring allies and enemies like Birdperson, Unity, and Mr. Nimbus have helped expand the show’s rich mythology and develop Rick as a character. Rick’s recurring foil, President Andre Curtis, is even getting his own show. Now another fan-favorite character with spinoff potential is returning to the spotlight in Rick and Morty season 9, episode 5, which airs on June 21.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Rick and Morty season 9, episode 5]
In the second ever episode of Rick and Morty, “Lawnmower Dog,” Jerry gets frustrated that the family dog Snuffles keeps peeing on the carpet, so he asks his genius father-in-law Rick to make the pet smarter. This does not go well. While Snuffles becomes intelligent enough to use the toilet, he also starts questioning his role in the family and humanity’s treatment of dogs. He renames himself Snowball and builds a robotic suit for himself and other dogs, whose intelligence he amplifies to match his own.
The whole episode is a hilarious parody of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, with Rick infiltrating Snowball’s dreams to persuade the dog to change his plans to take over the world and turn humanity into pets. Snowball instead chooses to lead the dogs through a portal to another world. The episode ends with a meta joke that a planet run by dogs could be fun to visit, possibly in a storyboard-driven show with 11-minute episodes. Ever since then, Rick and Morty’s writers have been considering ways to pay off that gag.
“It’s been a longstanding thing at the top of the season when we’re coming up with ideas,” series creator Dan Harmon tells Polygon. “That first episode with Snowball specifically ended with a meta reference to the idea of a spin-off or something, so it was deliberately like maybe there will be more to this story.”
In Rick and Morty season 9 episode 5, “Jer Bud,” Morty finally goes to visit Snowball’s planet. He soon finds that the intelligent dogs have been selectively breeding a native hominid species to keep them as pets, and Snowball becomes very self-conscious about Morty’s reaction to the disturbing results. (The entire premise is a brutal reflection on the real-life practice of puppy mills and selective dog breed.)
Before too long, Morty’s plans to have a good time at Snowball’s palace are disrupted when he’s unwillingly recruited into a hominid uprising that plunges the planet into war.
“We got attracted to the idea of Morty returning to a The Last King of Scotland-type thing with an already very complicated relationship with an old friend, but an old friend who’s gotten himself in an even more complicated situation,” showrunner Scott Marder tells Polygon. “It just felt like it had a lot of fun conflict there.”
In the end, Snowball and Morty make amends, while the dog planet is left in ruins. Maybe Snowball will really change his ways this time, or maybe he’ll get up to something even more horrifying. Hopefully, it won’t take another eight seasons and 13 years to see the character again.