The Rick And Morty Episode You Never Got To See
When it comes to Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's witty, weird adult-centric animated series Rick and Morty, it seems just about anything goes. An entire storyline parodying Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, a character who has the DNA from Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, whole episodes featuring vignettes from television series that only air in other dimensions? Yeah, all that stuff happened on Rick and Morty. This is to say that viewers have watched with delightful eyes many a bizarre Rick and Morty episode — making it easy to believe that every idea the creative team has pitched, no matter how bonkers it may be, gets accepted.
But that isn't the truth.
As it turns out, there was one idea Harmon and Roiland had that didn't come to fruition. Here's the Rick and Morty episode you never got to see.
The creative pair, who introduced Rick and Morty to the world in December 2013, recently revealed to Entertainment Weekly that they abandoned an episode of the upcoming fourth season of the show while it was still coming together. According to Harmon, the episode would have needed a lot of elbow grease to be suitable for mass consumption, and fixing the problems with it would have taken far too long. Thus, it was tossed in the bin.
"Justin is going to kick me under the desk here, but I've been pushing to show at Comic-Con an animatic for an episode that we aborted in the early stages. We could fix it, but fixing it would take as long as doing a new episode," Harmon said, adding that the episode's logline is "as simple as the title."
Though neither Harmon nor Roiland offered explicit details about the Rick and Morty episode that never was, Harmon noted that fans would flip over the footage they have tucked away in the proverbial safes at Adult Swim, but probably wouldn't like the episode if it was ever completed and included on a season of the show.
"Fans would love to watch that. They wouldn't love it as much as [an episode] from season 4, but second to that," Harmon said. "Me being a fan of, I don't know, Breaking Bad, if there was an episode that they killed, I assume it would be pleasing to fans. And I anticipate that when presented in that context fans would say, 'I love that, why don't you make that?' But I would say that if we broadcast it that you would think it sucked."
Roiland then joked that he and Harmon would crowdsource funding for fans to fix the rejected Rick and Morty episode, because, as Harmon said, if the animatic is out there, people will find a way to animate it in full.
It's hard to say what the scrapped episode of Rick and Morty was about — especially since there aren't any ideas or recurring tropes that Harmon and Roiland have banned from revisiting. In fact, there's nothing that has been "banned," so to speak. So long as an idea feels worthy of telling, and doesn't even approach fan service territory, then it's a-okay to explore. Whether it blossoms into a full episode, however, depends.
As Roiland explained, "We don't have any rules like that that I can think of. One philosophy we tend to adopt is to keep moving forward with new ideas, new worlds, and not look back as often as other shows might, just in fear of that coming off as disingenuous fan service. But there's nothing 'banned.' Like if we came up with an idea to bring back a character and it was a clever idea, we'd do it. The problem with bringing characters back is you're putting all your weight on that character coming back and people want to see the same thing they've already seen with that character. That's the closest thing we have to a ban, but I wouldn't call it a ban."
Whether the Rick and Morty episode that never made it to the small screen will ever be unveiled remains a mystery. But if the undyingly passionate fans of Rick and Morty managed to help push McDonald's to bring back its limited-time-only Szechuan Sauce after it was mentioned throughout the series, then there should be little doubt that they would band together and figure out a way to get the unmade episode animated and released.
Until that miracle happens, we'll be spending our days speculating what the rejected episode of Rick and Morty centered on. A Morty with three heads battling a sea of monsters that all look like Rick? The paranoid kid and his alcoholic grandfather being forced to compete in an intergalactic Amazing Race-style competition series? Morty's dad Jerry getting his hands on a piece of Rick's technology, sending himself to space, and becoming the ruler of a far-off planet? Oh, the possibilities.