Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for Rick and Morty S8E10 “Hot Rick” (written by Albro Lundy & James Siciliano and directed by Brian Kaufman).
“Hot Rick” opens on Rick and a new alien woman named BugAnne in bed. She invites him to a family event—some kind of ceremonial tournament—and he’s reticent to accept. BugAnne knows why: he still hasn’t moved on from Diane, and what’s more, the Omega Device Rick Prime used to erase her from all realities has tampered with his memories of her. “Beth only thinks she remembers her mom.”
Back home, the Beths are giving Rick a hard time for not moving on from Diane. Jerry interjects to ask why, and declares that Rick has always been a loving family man for as long as he can remember. That’s certainly not the Rick that any of the others know, and Rick quickly deduces that Jerry is thinking of Memory Rick: an alternate version of Rick from the past who is much more loving and kind than our Rick. Memory Rick snuck out of BirdPerson’s mind and into Rick’s own, and then into Jerry’s brain when their brains got shuffled. Rick plugs Jerry into a device to remedy this.
In Memory Rick’s world, a wormhole opens and sucks Memory Rick through a 2001: A Space Odyssey vortex and into the room from the movie. Memory Rick seemingly knows exactly what’s going on, and is furious. Our Rick declares that Memory Rick ruined Jerry’s brain and he had to do something. “Jerry likes me now, it’s awful!” Rick has built a massive “ant farm” world for Memory Rick to inhabit, but Memory Rick just wants to get back to his family. As our Rick’s family exits the garage, Summer makes an offhand comment about wanting to erase her memories of her exes. Rick glances back at the device, thinking of something, before shrugging and going outside to mainline some beers.
After a few drinks, Rick goes back inside and builds a new device, writes a note, and plugs himself in. Inside, he travels down several conveyors until he arrives to sorrowfully watch Memory Diane on the shooting range. He reaches for a button that asks him to “confirm transfer,” and presses it. As he leaves, a wormhole opens and swallows up the room Memory Diane was in. As he groggily wakes up from the device, we see the note he wrote was to himself. He removed Memory Diane from his mind to be more emotionally open. He immediately calls BugAnne to agree to go to be her plus one.
Memory Rick might be a kind version of Rick, but he’s still Rick, the smartest person in the universe, so he gets to work dismantling the room to repurpose it into a pod. Entering the garage, Beth curiously turns back on the original device, opening the channel for Memory Rick to escape. As he powers up the pod, the device Beth just turned on sends out a shockwave, doing something to her.
This is where things get a little complicated.
We zoom into Beth’s mind, where Memory Rick has escaped. He sneaks past the Smiths in the dining room and into an air duct, where he goes to another room. In this room, Rick C-131 (I think?) is packing stuff into a duffel bag and abandoning an adolescent Beth. Falling out of the ceiling, Memory Rick tells the young Beth that they’re going to save Diane from the memory prison. Memory Rick also knows that our Rick will be paranoid, so they have to be crafty.
We flash forward to when Young Beth is older, and she and Memory Rick repeat a mantra about being the only ones who can save Diane from the sub-basement, ending with, “This is how we stay a family.” We get a montage of Memory Rick training Young Beth in stealth, combat, and survival. Back in our world, Beth is seemingly in a trance as she prepares some food. She asks Space Beth if there are any specific parts of the sub-basement for important stuff. When asked why, Beth simply says she wants to do “something nice” for Rick.
At the ceremony BugAnne invited Rick to, her extended family is all there. Even Jak-Pu, BugAnne’s ex-boyfriend, is there for some reason. Rick makes the mistake of mentioning that he and BugAnne have been hooking up outside of marriage, which is forbidden in their culture, and leads to Rick and Jak-Pu forced into a fight to the death or surrender, with the yielding party conceding that they are incapable of love and commitment. During the fight, Rick argues with BugAnne, who says that Rick didn’t have to remove Diane from his head. Rick counters that he told BugAnne that getting closer would be dumb. Jak-Pu tells him that it doesn’t sound like Diane was the problem, and Rick portals out to rectify his actions.
In the sub-basement, Beth seems to have inherited her training with Memory Rick (since all of the Memory Rick/Young Beth events happened in Beth’s brain), and straps on the second device. Inside, Memory Rick finally finds Memory Diane at the shooting range, and they share a passionate reunion. In the real world, Beth falls out of the chair and the device. Space Beth has followed her, asking her what she’s doing, and why Beth had mentioned that Rick is paranoid. Beth says it’s something that Rick said in their teens, but Space Beth reminds her that Rick wasn’t in their teen years since he abandoned them. Beth attempts and fails to knock out Space Beth, leading to a knock-down, drag-out fight that results in Beth—yelling “This is how we stay a family!”—accidentally snapping her counterpart’s neck and killing her.
Back in the world inside the sub-basement, Diane recounts that she’s a memory from the past, and they’re in Beth’s brain in the future. Memory Rick mentions the “ant farm” that Rick originally put him in where they can live forever, but something’s wrong with the pod they’re in. Since Beth failed to transfer them from the sub-basement to the garage, they’re stuck. Memory Rick leaves to investigate, and Memory Diane, ignoring her husband’s instructions, exits the pod as well, where she encounters Young Beth. Young Beth, not realizing that Memory Diane has already been rescued from the sub-basement, experiences a bit of a crisis upon learning that she’s just a memory. Running back to Memory Rick, her husband surmises that Real Beth has gone rogue, and, upon hearing that Diane told Young Beth that she’s just a memory, tells Memory Diane that that news will wake up Real Beth—and that’s really bad.
Real Rick has portaled into the sub-basement, where he finds the dead Space Beth. A screwdriver emerges from his finger, and he inserts it into Space Beth’s spine, begging repeatedly, “Please work.” It does work, thankfully, and Rick and Space Beth run to the garage, where Rick realizes that Memory Rick is now in Beth’s head, where a full-on outbreak is likely to happen.
Memory Rick and Memory Diane rush through Beth’s recent memories (moments from across Season 8) in an attempt to get to her most recent ones to communicate with her in real time. In the room where Memory Rick and Young Beth were planning the rescue, Young Beth is suddenly faced with three versions of herself across the training montage, who tell her that they’re all just memories, and they need to kill Memory Rick.
Real Beth, still believing that she killed Space Beth, gets in the car and races away, repeating, “This is how we stay a family,” and pursued by Rick and Space Beth. In Real Beth’s mind, Memory Rick and Memory Diane encounter more and more Beths from across the episode and season, running away from them as they try to get closer to Real Beth’s more recent memories. They finally get to the moment Real Beth gets into the car, and climb in. In the back of the car, Memory Diane asks Memory Rick what they should do, but Memory Rick hasn’t planned that far: “I never had to actually be a parent!” Real Beth cries that she can’t live without the loving version of her father and her mother, and realizing that none of this is “real,” drives the car off a cliff.
In the real world, Rick in his spaceship manages to catch the car with cables, and Space Beth climbs down to try to talk some sense into Real Beth. They fight on the suspended car, with Space Beth countering and evading Real Beth’s blows, trying to explain to her that Memory Rick and Memory Diane are not her real family. Reaching the ground, Beth says she just wants it to end, and puts a gun to her head. Back in her head, the Beths pull Memory Rick and Memory Diane out of the car, and prepare to kill them as retaliation for the years of Rick’s indoctrination.
Outside, Beth cries that she remembers loving her dad, then hating him. Before she can pull the trigger, Rick shows up, admitting that he wasn’t there for her, but he is now. Beth lowers the gun and throws her arms around her father. While I don’t doubt that Rick was being sincere, it was a distraction: Rick inserts a finger syringe into Beth, rendering her unconscious. As he affixes a new device to Beth’s head back in the sub-basement, Beth wishes she could have known Diane. Rick counters that she did, because Diane raised her. Thanks to the Omega Device, they only have lingering memories of Diane, but Rick remembers enough to know that Diane loved her.
With things mostly back to normal, Morty asks Rick what happened to Memory Rick. Rick responds that he’s “gone,” but in the next scene Rick has driven to a patch of empty space, and pulls up another “ant farm” with Memory Rick and Memory Diane. They thank him for not killing them, and Rick, bidding goodbye to Memory Diane (and possibly the last time he’ll ever get to interact with any version of his wife), ejects the pod for them to live with each other far away from him and the Smiths as “Don’t Look Back (Diane’s Version)” by Kotomi & Ryan Elder begins to build.
I’ve loved Season 8 of Rick and Morty, and the emotional final moments cemented how the show continues to develop the characters. It’s a wacky, creative, vulgar, and hilarious show, but what makes it most admirable is when it sidelines those elements to give the characters a chance to grow. Rick in particular has grown so much, and as much fun as Rick and Morty is, him pushing forward is really what makes the show sing. Here’s to more of that in Season 9.
Best Moments
- The show the family is watching is called Fake or Cake, Rick and Morty’s version of Is it Cake? This episode is a baby that may or may not be a cake. The contestant is a man named “Mr. Stabby” who has swords for arms and a nose. We don’t see it, but you can imagine the outcome. Jerry tells the family as much and says that Mr. Stabby is “canceled.”
- Not a funny moment, but Rick’s monologue opening up to his daughter as she weeps and holds the gun to her head was the most emotionally affecting moment of the season. It’s such a powerful scene as all of the Beths, Memory Rick and Diane look on. He wasn’t the father Beth deserved, and he might not ever be, but at least he’s finally starting to try.
- Ohhhh-whee! As expected in the mid-credits, Mr. Poopybutthole shows up breaking the fourth wall and closing out the season by reminiscing about the episodes that have come before. We zoom out to see that he’s talking from a monitor, where scientists and Mrs. Poopybutthole watch. They surmise that this Mr. Poopybutthole is an imposter who has replaced her husband given her suspicions from last season’s finale. Mrs. Poopybutthole narrows her eyes and we cut to black.
