Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for Rick and Morty S8E4 “The Last Temptation of Jerry” (written by Heather Anne Campbell and directed by Douglas Einar Olsen)
Body horror, sodomy, and blasphemy, oh my! Strap yourself for a truly classic Rick and Morty episode with “The Last Temptation of Jerry!” This is a f*cking funny one.
The needle of Jerry’s passions always seems to move between irritating and endearing, but his excitement for Easter this week is damn near breaking the scale towards the former. Repurposing “Deck the Halls” for Easter and adorning the house with a vomitous excess of Easter decor, Jerry attempts to get each of his family members to participate in the Easter festivities. No one cares: especially Summer, who is packing for Spring Break. Around the dinner table, Jerry laments that no one celebrates Easter anymore, but also seems more focused on the festivities, failing to correctly identify the real reason for Easter when asked.
Driving down the road with his Easter decorations in tow, Jerry is briefly distracted by eating a chocolate egg and fails until the last minute to realize that there is a gigantic monster Easter Bunny in the middle of the road, hitting it with his car. Distraught, Jerry gets out and runs to the mangled, barely-alive beast, and proceeds to vomit repeatedly on it before the opening theme. “What a terrible time to have eaten so much candy!”
Jerry’s brought the Easter Rabbit corpse home, on which Rick finds a metallic cross necklace. Beth tells her panicking husband to go inside and get a glass of water. Instead of water, however, Jerry reaches for a head of lettuce and quickly devours it, and is unable to drink the water from a glass. It’s easier to repurpose a paper towel roll and knob to drink the water, not unlike an animal from a cage uses. Taking a sample of Jerry’s blood, Rick deduces that Jerry has been “Easter Claused” and will transform into the Easter Bunny in 48 hours—on Easter.
Rick freezes Jerry to slow down the transformation, gives Summer a second belly to process all of the alcohol she’s about to consume on Spring Break, and takes Morty to “go Indiana Jones.” What follows is the classic Indiana Jones red line traveling across a world map to indicate the travel trajectory, except here the line immediately portals in and then portals out at the destination in Germany. Finding a Were-Bunny-shaped opening in the ice, they go into town to get some answers. They come across a gigantic stained glass mural, from which Rick extracts a few pieces that form into an incomplete Easter egg from Andromeda.
Within seconds, a small group of robed, cross-shaped gun-wielding soldiers (“Space Christians? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” Rick inquires) shows up. During the ensuing brawl, another Space Christian manages to take the egg up to their ship, where the leader instructs his troops to travel to Andromeda and destroy all of the eggs except one, and then, once the Rabbit is captured, “Easter will be finished.”
Arriving in Andromeda, Rick and Morty find a chocolate-colored mural illustrating that killing the alien Easter Bunny will turn one into the Easter Bunny. They come across a massive staircase adorned with bones and murals of people fornicating. Rick deduces that the Easter Bunny is a pheromonal catalyst that makes people have sex until the planet is overpopulated and collapses: “f*ck-based terraforming.” A trio of Prometheus-coded aliens appear, sucking the pheromonal energy out of a feral Easter Bunny and inserting it into a giant egg, which Rick and Morty manage to escape with, as Space Christians show up and battle the Prometheus guys. With his portal gun damaged, Rick and Morty come across the Easter Island heads, which are spaceships that allow them to take their leave from Andromeda.
Back home, Jerry finds himself with a suddenly jacked physique, which Beth is immediately horny over. They do the deed, and Beth finds a massive hairy boil on his lower back. Within seconds, Jerry’s knees become inverted and his teeth begin to fall out. Beth panics, but Jerry feels better than ever, and leaps through the ceiling and into the dark of night. He proceeds to a bar and is dancing the patrons, until his brain sends out a pheromonal shockwave (don’t do a shot every time this happens unless you want to die) which sends the entire bar into a frenzied orgy, including one guy that attempts to make love to his motorcycle. “Societal collapse imminent!” Jerry proclaims, as his transformation into the Easter Bunny progresses. The Space Christians show up and capture Jerry, and his shockwaves do nothing against them.
Landing at Easter Island on Earth, Rick and Morty are immediately accosted by Space Christians, but the standoff results in one of them removing his helmet to explain that their agenda stems from their aversion to sex: they think it’s gross, and 2,000 years ago Jesus was sent by them to kill the Easter Bunny but was crucified first. The ship containing a captured Jerry arrives, and Jerry finally completes his transformation. A feral Easter Bunny Jerry easily slaughters the Space Christians. Proceeding to the city, Easter Bunny Jerry spreads the pheromones, whipping its denizens into a horny frenzy.
Arriving at the Smith home, we get some light horror movie vibes as Beth runs upstairs with Easter Bunny Jerry in hot pursuit. Beth resists the pheromones and pleads with her husband that she wants sex with him, not what he’s transformed into. This briefly appeals to the Regular Jerry trapped in the monster, but as he slowly loses control, Beth gets resourceful and gathers chains, wires, and one of Rick’s devices to make various objects impossibly heavy to restrain Easter Bunny Jerry.
As Rick sets up a device with the egg to extract the rabbit particles from his son-in-law, the frustrated Easter Bunny Jerry sends out a massive pheromonal shockwave that reverberates across the neighborhood, causing feverish fornicating. Rick firmly warns Morty and Beth that if they touch the beam from the device, they will become the Bunny. It’s working, but a Prometheus guy touches down, and in attempting to fight it, Rick accidentally breaks open the egg, passing the Easter energy to him and transforming him into Easter Bunny Rick and sending out another blast of energy. He lunges at Beth, but Beth fatally shoots him in the head, transferring the Bunny energy to her, resulting in another transformation. Another couple of blasts, another couple of transformations, and before long the entire neighborhood has combined into a tangle of bodies in a massive orgy mountain. Finally, the Prometheus guy is transformed and sends out an even bigger horny shockwave, but a final Space Christian, thought to be dead after being torn in half but somehow still alive, arrives in yet another Easter Island spaceship and manages to use the device to finally destroy the Prometheus Guy Easter Bunny before being ordered to get off the Smith lawn.
The episode closes with the Smith family and Rick aggressively tearing down holiday decorations and, throughout the year, continuing to do things like working on Labor Day and eating pizza on Thanksgiving, as well as sabotaging the festivities for all of the other holidays others are celebrating, set once again to a repurposed “Deck the Halls.” Everyone forgot about Spring Break Summer over the course of a year of ruining holidays, so in the pre-credits sequence she’s exhausted and and tired of doing poppers now that it’s December, honoring her friend that died because she didn’t have a second alcohol stomach, and that just kind of where we leave her.
“The Last Temptation of Jerry” is handily my favorite episode of Season 8 so far. It moves at an absolutely breakneck pace and is packed to the gills with ridiculous gags. You think it might go there, and then it does, and just keeps going. I had an absolute blast this week.
Best Moments
- Jerry tries to rope Morty into the festivities: “What? No! I’m streaming on Twitch! Fortnite just added JFK!”
- Rick says “God, I do not want to say ‘climate change’ on this show, I don’t know which way Zaslav voted” upon encountering a snowy destination that is less frozen than it should be.
- Jerry bloodily pulling out his teeth and not being particularly bothered by it.
- Beth comforts Easter Bunny Jerry: “You just wanted to celebrate a holiday with your family, now you know never to do that again.”
- Morty and Rick get into an argument which dissolves into them yelling “f*ck you” and calling each other old.
