Rick and Morty Producer Talks Season 5’s Most Heartbreaking Ending

Rick And Morty’s fifth season has come to a close on Adult Swim, with the juggernaut of a series recently bringing in Christopher Lloyd to portray the mad scientist in a mind-bending number of promos for Cartoon Network, but an executive producer on the series decided to dive back into a previous episode to break down one of the most heartbreaking endings of the latest instalments. When Morty met the faux Captain Planet known as Planetina, the grandson of Rick fell in love with the environmental superhero but had to deal with the horrifying actions she unleashed as a result.

Episode three of Season Five, “A Rickconvenient Mort,” took a number of swings at the animated series Captain Planet, adding in the Planeteers as middle-aged nare-do-wells who were using Planetina to make a quick buck and were thinking of selling her to the highest bidder. Though Morty was able to free his lady love, he discovered that the superhero wasn’t afraid to destroy anything that was even the slightest threat to the environment at large, with Planetina killing a number of oil workers and others in the process. With Morty deciding to end their relationship, the episode comes to a close with him hugging his mother in a touching sendoff.

In the podcast, Interdimensional RSS: The Unofficial Rick And Morty Podcast, Executive Producer and showrunner Scott Marder had this to say about the surprisingly tragic ending to the Planetina episode:

“It ended up with a broken heart, but that was a big win for [Morty] that episode, getting to go that far with someone… It was important to us to actually live in that in the end because we could’ve easily undercut that moment at the end and gone for a laugh, but it was kind of cool to just watch him fall into his mom’s arms and cry it out.”

With Planetina surviving the events of her premiere episode, flying away with tears in her eyes following her breakup with Morty, we definitely wouldn’t be surprised if the character voiced by Allison Brie will make a return in season six or the future of the Adult Swim franchise.

Do you think we’ll see the Captain Planet doppelganger return in the future? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of the Smith family.