Rick And Morty Season 6 Episode 6 Recap: Dinosaur Communists From Outer Space

Contains spoilers for "Rick and Morty" Season 6, Episode 6 — "Juricksic Mort" 

This week's episode of "Rick and Morty" brings dinosaur-themed communism to the people of Earth, while also doing some housekeeping to reset the canonical playing field ahead of the show's Thanksgiving hiatus. Mimicking a scene from Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival," a series of ovoid spaceships land in major cities across the world. National leaders stand by with armed troops ready to confront whatever may emerge. But when the vessels breach, humanity is not confronted with aliens. "Dinosaurs are back?" asks an incredulous Egyptian leader, to which a brontosaurus responds, "Apes went bald?" Roll the horrifying intro credits.

At a United Nations symposium, the three dinosaurs reveal that, contrary to popular belief, not all of them went extinct. Rather, a portion of them became so enlightened and technologically advanced that they decided to leave Earth and spread their enlightenment to other worlds long before the meteor hit. The upshot is that they learned how to make technology work in harmony with nature, rather than destroying it. Now, they're back, and ready to run the planet again. "Surely," a triceratops says, "there was some point between gunpowder and something called Amazon Prime that you folks had to think, 'Are we supposed to be running a planet? Wouldn't we rather make Marvel movies?'"

As the brontosaurus points out, this is not an invasion, it's a chance for humanity to unshackle themselves from the burden of stewarding a planet. "You must be exhausted. Put your feet up. Get more tattoos. Finish rounding out this Ant-Man character." None of the world's leaders can disagree, and as The President (Keith David) points out, poor people would murder them if they made the dinosaurs leave.

The effects of dinosaur leadership transform Earth into a utopia. Scarcity becomes a thing of the past. Food and consumer goods are free, money is abolished, and nobody needs to work anymore, meaning everyone can pursue their passions. Essentially, the world becomes a platonic ideal of communism. However, everything is not well in paradise. Back in the Sanchez-Smith household, Beth (Sarah Chalke) feels useless without her veterinary work. Summer's (Spencer Grammer) dance videos are no longer popular on TikTok because all the pedophiles have been kicked off the platform.

Only Rick (Justin Roiland) is nonplussed since he already does whatever he feels like. "I do think it's kind of funny that you're all basically Jerry now," he says, prompting the family to run into the living room and ask Jerry (Chris Parnell), "How do you do it?" It's the moment Jerry's been waiting a lifetime for. It turns out he's already written a book entitled "Never Trying Never Fails," which he decides to send out to publishers.

The President, too, is unhappy with the new arrangement and begs Rick to get rid of the dinosaurs. Rick agrees, but only on the condition that he gets to host the Oscars. He approaches the trio of dinosaurs and offers to transport them to another universe. They reply that, although they have portal tech of their own, they've settled on a single-universe policy. Additionally, they sense Rick's portal gun is broken, so they furnish him with one of their own. It's sleeker and more advanced than Rick's, generating see-through portals rather than the slime-green swirl Rick's creates, and this is what finally pushes Rick to develop a personal grudge against the dinosaurs. In what's become a continuing theme this season, Rick's stubborn pride drives him to recklessness.

Back in the garage, Rick crushes the dinosaurs' portal pistol and tells Morty (Justin Roiland) he's going to dig up dirt on them, declaring, "Only people who really f***** up in the past need to virtue signal this hard." Rick and Morty travel to all the previous planets the dinosaurs have visited, and on each one, they're extinct, with a meteoric impact crater as the last evidence of their existence. In one such crater, Rick finds a fragment of the meteor. When he scans it, he finds that it contains sentient life, making the truth clear.

On Earth, the dinosaurs are holding a keynote to answer questions from humans who are struggling to adapt to their new way of life. They're promoting Jerry's book as a guide and plan to distribute it worldwide. Jerry is elated until he noticed that his name has been scrubbed from the text. "Whoever wrote it must be above needing credit," they explain to his dismay.

But before Jerry can protest, Rick crashes the event to reveal his horrifying discovery. As dinosaurs evolved to become entirely selfless, another life form developed to become equally hateful. That species, made of barely sentient meteoric rocks, now hurtles through space in pursuit of dinosaurs, destroying all life on planets with them — and one of the meteors is now headed directly for Earth. The revelation creates an impasse for the dinosaurs, who refuse to destroy the meteor because of their pacifist ethical code. In order to prevent humanity from being destroyed along with them, the dinosaurs leave Earth, which quickly returns to its previous levels of capitalism, violence, and Exxon Mobil oil spills.

"Rick and Morty" has often taken a dim view of humanity, but even so, this feels particularly nihilistic. Then again, the show's writers live in the same world as the rest of us.

As promised, Rick gets to host the Oscars in return for ridding the world of dinosaurs. He shows up hammered, makes Tom Hanks yell, "Wilson!" and, once backstage, tells Morty that everything at the Oscars is scripted, even "that one thing." But when Summer informs him that the dinosaurs are now living on Mars, waiting for their inevitable death by meteor, Rick can't abide it. He flies to the red planet and calls their bluff, telling them he's there to die alongside them. Although they protest that he's only doing it out of pettiness rather than selflessness, Rick replies, "How is anybody supposed to know the difference? Consider it a game of virtue chicken."

The dinosaurs try to teleport Rick out of danger, but he's already dino-proofed his tech. As the meteor approaches, the T-Rex finally relents, destroying the sentient rock with a laser beam. The dinosaurs are furious that Rick forced their hand, but he scoffs, "Yeah, but you're alive. No David Foster Wallace-ing in my galaxy. You don't get to be so smart that you remove yourself from everybody."

To spite Rick, the dinosaurs use one of their spaceships to close the rift in space that was opened by Evil Morty in the finale of Season 5, which he had told them not to fix earlier in the episode. In a classic bit of "Rick and Morty" meta-humor, Rick cries that the rift was important to the show's canon and could have been milked for an entire season, "or, like, a three-episode arc, at least."

The dinosaurs leave, having compromised their ethical code. Rick, for his part, got what he wanted: proof that deep down the dinosaurs are as flawed as any other sentient beings.

With everyone back at the house, Rick calls Morty into the garage to announce that he's finally fixed portal travel. But before Morty can finish celebrating, he begins blasting portals everywhere, sending Morty careening through them while yelling, "It's gonna be classic episodes ... Social commentary, crude characters. Here we go, 'Rick and Morty' time!"

From a purely structural perspective, this episode closes out the main threads which have thus far sustained Season 6 of "Rick and Morty," namely the lack of portal travel and the collapse of the Central Finite Curve, which presumably reestablished itself with the disappearance of the rift in space. Thematically, though, it's another example of Rick's desperate need to prove that no one is better than him. As he tells the dinosaurs earlier in the episode: "Welcome to life. It's a big boat with a lot of holes, but we're all in it together."

In a video from Adult Swim in 2017, Dan Harmon explained, "[Joseph] Campbell calls God an impersonal cosmic force. That's the most terrifying thing about it. It doesn't give a f*** about you. Rick is the seam between God and man." Indeed, Rick repeatedly refers to himself as a "godlike being" throughout this episode, and his function is ultimately to return the universe to its natural state of chaotic equilibrium. If the dinosaurs represent pure selflessness and the meteor is pure destruction, then that balance lies somewhere in between, because doing things the dinosaurs' way leads to total annihilation by the meteor. Rick, as the "impersonal cosmic force," is there to restore the middle ground between the two extremes.

Or maybe it's just a fun story about space dinosaurs.

Following this week's Jurassic extravaganza, "Rick and Morty" will be going on hiatus, and Season 6, Episode 7, titled "Fully Meta Jackrick," will air on Sunday, November 20 at 11 p.m. on Adult Swim. For now, you can put away your fan theories and wubalubadubdub tee-shirts, enjoy your Halloween, and join us back here at that time for the next recap.

With "Juricksic Mort" finally resetting the ongoing threads so far this season, it's anyone's guess what we might expect when the season picks up in six weeks. The title is a clear reference to Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam war drama, "Full Metal Jacket," so perhaps we're in for some military-related drama — but even then, that doesn't necessarily mean we'll stay on Earth. One admittedly far-fetched possibility is that we might get a canonical episode exploring Rick's past during the Gear Wars, where he fought alongside Birdperson (Dan Harmon).

Now that the rift in space is closed and portal travel is reset, "Rick and Morty" has a wide berth to tell almost any story it pleases. Although Rick insists at the episode's close that we'll be returning to "classic episodes," fans should know by now that this a show which delights in pulling the rug out from under its audience.