Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for Rick and Morty S8E1 “The Summer of All Fears” (written by Jess Lacher and directed by Fill Marc Sagadraca)
Rick and Morty S8E1, “The Summer of All Fears,” opens on a crowd standing at the gates in front of a skyscraper from which an adult Summer, described by a news reporter as a billionaire and tech leader, looks down on them. An assistant enters the office and states that “the device” is ready to launch. Summer asks if they have eyes on Morty and opens a wall fixture with a photo of the Smith home and a handwritten note stating “None of this is real.” “This just in,” continues the reporter. “Phone chargers are very important, so never, ever steal them!”
Summer boards a helicopter and her assistant reminds her that if she borrows Morty’s phone charger, she must give it back. Summer lands to meet her brother, an unshaven and miserable man living in a cabin in the woods. Summer tells Morty that it’s almost 9PM in the “real world” and they can only “get out” if they time it with Mom pouring her bedtime wine in the kitchen. Morty doesn’t want to go, but Summer tells her brother that it only works with the both of them. They each put in an earpiece, and Summer declares that they are ready to launch.
A beam fires into the sky, and the crowd finds that their phones can now charge independently, rendering chargers obsolete. Summer laughs triumphantly, because this also means that the Matrix no longer works. Morty and Summer wake up in the garage, strapped to chairs below a screen reading “Never take grandpa’s phone charger.” It turns out that Rick put his grandkids into the Matrix to teach them a lesson about taking his phone charger, fell asleep, and 17 years passed inside the Matrix.
Rick prepares to erase the kids’ memories, but they declare that they’d rather keep them. Summer, now with a 34-year-old’s mind and memories of vast success, proudly strides into school, which she finds completely trashed and still containing the same old bullies. She lets it get to her, but also finds herself connecting with Beth on a whole new level. “Isn’t comedy just the revelation of an unacknowledged truth?” Summer says after giving her mom a jokingly hard time about her attire. But Beth eventually begins to sour on Summer’s constant put-downs and new controlling personality earned from her time in the Matrix.
Morty, for his part, is doing some maintenance on Rick’s Death Race Car, and Rick is thrilled. He tosses Morty a beer, but it misses and smashes on the ground, and Morty flashes back to the Matrix where he’s robbing an electronics store with Summer. Morty is arrested, accused of taking a phone charger, and sent to prison (with the guards emblazoned with phone charger symbols), where he becomes accustomed to life on the inside. Once back out, he finds himself unable to get a job because of the accusation. He makes a friend, CJ, and they eventually join the military after seeing a terrorist chop a phone charging cable in half.
Morty snaps back into the real world, and continues to vibe swimmingly with his grandpa, possibly better than they ever have. Beth and Summer arrive home, with Beth’s phone dead. Rick offers her to borrow his charger. Morty panics. “You—you’re going to give that back, right??” Morty flashes back again to the battlefield, where he is killed but terrifyingly brought back to life repeatedly by the Matrix. Snapping back, Morty tells Beth to take whatever she wants because “nothing out here f*cking matters.” Summer and Morty have each become uglier, older versions of themselves thanks to the Matrix.
Beth is fed up with Summer, and attempts to chase her daughter down to erase her artificial memories of the last 17 years. Summer, however, says she “thought they were friends,” hotwires a car and drives away. Morty, meanwhile, is fed up with Rick. He manages to stun his grandfather with a reverse-engineered charger, and throws Rick into the Matrix before taking off in the Death Race Car, now repurposed as a tank. Rick wakes up in the Matrix, and is approached by a civilian. “You haven’t been putting people into Matrixes, have you?” The stranger says. “Because that’s something you should never do.” Morty has done the very thing Rick did to him to teach him a lesson.
Back in the real world, Morty is rampaging though the city in his Death Race Tank, intending to ram it into the nuclear power plant. Beth finds Summer in a pottery studio, and tells her daughter that she doesn’t have to be a middle-aged CEO. She doesn’t have to be her friend, because she’s her daughter. Seeing Morty’s rampage on the news, Summer vows to stop him. “You know how to do that?” Beth asks. “Mom, I’m a tech CEO,” Summer declares. “So even if I don’t, I’ll pretend I do.” Loving the vibes of the pottery studio and its comforting middle-aged women, Beth ops to stick around. Rick, having constructed a massive network of people-powered pods in liquid (like in the 1999 hit sci-action film The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves), escapes the Matrix.
Morty, slamming the Death Race Tank repeatedly into the power plant, flashes back once again to the battlefield, and enters a bunker to find a dying CJ looking at a photograph of a charger. “She’s beautiful,” he whispers, before expiring. Morty furiously kicks down the doors deeper in the bunker and, after a brief fight, kills the terrorist they’d been hunting: Osama Been Chargin’. In the real world, the Death Race Tank breaches the outer walls of the power plant, heading towards the reactor. The soldiers declare that if he reaches it, the chain reaction would render North America uninhabitable, and, worse, disable all cell phones.
Moments away from hitting the reactor, Morty stops when Summer steps in front of the Tank. Summer tells him that doing this won’t bring CJ back, finally getting Morty to stop. Summer climbs into the tank and apologizes for not treating Morty like he mattered in the Matrix. She describes how she fabricated the inciting incident of the cable cutting, and, knowing Morty’s immortality, cruelly weaponized him to win the war—all to claim the world’s lithium. Morty, crying, says the memory of CJ was all he had left of him, and wants to go home, and they reconcile.
Climbing out of the tank, Morty says he’s good. The scientists state that that wasn’t what they were worried about and Morty really shouldn’t be stealing his grandfather’s inventions.
Uh oh.
Morty and Summer have had enough. They run straight for the panicked scientist and proceed to beat the stuffing out of him before Rick steps out of a portal and stops them, reassuring them that they are not, in fact, still in the Matrix—that scientist was just making a very valid point. The plant starts to crumble, breaching the reactor, and an irritated Rick springs into action to save the day. Later, Morty gets a tattoo to help him remember CJ, and, at his and Summer’s request, Rick wipes their memories of their time in the Matrix.
Climbing into bed, Summer plugs in her phone charger, and finds a message from herself. As the camera pushes into Summer watching her phone, Matrix Summer’s message gets a little more profound, and—Summer closes the message. “Ugh, send a text!” She calls her friend Trisha: “What are we having tonight, biiiiiiitch?” Matrix Summer might have changed the world, but our Summer is still the one we know and love.
“The Summer of All Fears” was a terrific way to kick off Season 8. It’s classic Rick and Morty: a dash of character development—presumably undone by the episode’s end, but equally possible to pay off later—-and a generous helping of nihilism and existential dread. Rick and Morty is back, baby!
