Without question, one of the most intensely popular animated series in recent years is Justin Roiland’s Rick and Morty. Between its zany sci-fi rigmarole, inventive world-building and emotionally blind-siding character moments, its cultivated a loyal fanbase over its soon-to-be three seasons.
A point of extreme speculation for the show, however, is Rick Sanchez’s often hinted at yet never fully disclosed back story. The season 3 premiere went so far as to invest us in scenario where a loving family man watches his family blown apart by an alternate version of himself, only to pull the rug out from under the audience by revealing that it was completely fabricated in order to escape from an intergalactic prison and has absolutely nothing to do with his real origins.
A sly chuckle at audience expectations is all well and good, but what about Rick’s real backstory? We’re three seasons in and are no closer to figuring out what makes the nihilistic mad scientist at its center tick. Or… are we?
One fan theory that’s been making its way around the internet states that not only did the show’s creator slyly insert his backstory into the series already, but did so in the very first season. According to this theory the assumption that the “One True Morty” — Rick’s dolt of a grandson that follows him around on his interdimensional adventures — is not his actual grandson. Or, rather, he is not his original grandson.
The theory stems from the events of the first season episode “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind.” In this episode, an evil version of Morty frames Rick for murdering alternate versions of himself, resulting in his arrest by the interdimensional Council of Ricks, which governs the actions of the infinite Rick Sanchezes in the multiverse.
Although it is established in prior episodes that Rick has been absent from his family’s lives for well over a decade, a display of the captive Rick Sanchez’s memories show him holding his newborn grandson fourteen years prior: an event that it is firmly established that he should not have been around for. Furthermore, the memory causes him to visibly tear up, causing the Evil Rick – actually a robot built and controlled by Evil Morty – to comment that “if there’s any truth in the universe, it’s that Ricks don’t care about Mortys.”
Our first clue to this apparent break in continuity is found in the opening credits, however, which detail Rick and Morty’s many adventures. The first sequence shows the pair running from a group of giant green monsters. While Rick opens a portal to escape from them and jumps in, Morty trips; as he gets up to follow his grandfather through, the portal closes.
The second clue comes from the episode “Rick Potion #9,” where a love-struck Morty convinces his grandfather to make a love potion for him to get his crush to go to a dance with him. Through a series of miscalculations, the love potion piggybacks onto a virus and transforms the entire planet into Cronenbergian monsters. Rather than finding a way to reverse the effects of the potion, they abandon that universe for a nearly identical one: one where Rick saved the world and both he and Morty died in a freak accident moments before they arrived.
To calm down Morty, who understandably freaks out at the sight of his alternate self’s bloody corpse, Rick explains that “there’s an infinite number of realities, Morty, and in a few dozen of those I got lucky and turned everything back to normal. I just also had to find a reality where we both happen to die around this time, and now we can just slip into the place of our dead selves in this reality and everything will be fine.” The telling part, though, is when Rick says that “It’s not like we can do this every week anyway, we get three or four more of these tops.”
Not only does the series show us a version of Rick who leaves his grandson behind in a strange, alien landscape, we’re shown how Rick, with practiced precision, can take the place of an alternate version of himself. The implication — especially when he causally remarks that they can only do this a couple more times — is that he has done this same thing before, in another reality, taking the place of another Rick.
The theory goes that the original Rick (from Dimension C-137) accidentally left his original Morty behind on that alien world: a loss which rocked him to his core. Devastated, Rick did the only thing that he could think to do: find another dimension in which Rick Sanchez was dead, but Morty was alive, and take his place. This new reality is the universe that the show takes place in, at least before C-137 Rick and that universe’s Morty take the place of the dead, alternate versions of themselves.
The thing is, though, that the original Morty didn’t die on that alien world. Somehow, he survived, and the rage at being abandoned by his grandfather festered in him like a cancer. He became Evil Morty, using the knowledge of science he gained from his adventures with his Rick to commit multiversal genocide against every Rick in existence. C-137 Rick even comments that Evil Morty’s inventions resemble ideas that he had come up with in the past.
The obvious wrinkle in this theory is that Morty — “the One True Morty” that follows around the main Rick of the series — identifies himself as being from “Earth Dimension C-137.” The problem is, however, that Rick never identifies his grandson as Morty C-137, just himself as Rick C-137. It’s more than likely that this Morty, assuming him to be from the same dimension as his grandfather, mistakenly adopted the designation he overheard Rick using throughout the series.
While this version of events is not confirmed as official, the pieces perfectly fit together both narratively and tonally within the world of the series. There is precedent for them throughout the show and it goes a long way to explain Evil Morty’s fixation on framing this particular Rick for murder. And until something more convincing comes along, I will happily accept it as head-canon.
