Rick and Morty Writer Breaks Down the Difficulties of Season 5’s Decoy Episode

Rick and Morty‘s writer opened up about the difficulties of the Season 5’s decoy episode in a special new video released by Adult Swim! The fifth season of the fan favorite Adult Swim animated series is now well underway, and while the premiere episode offered a fun return to form, the second episode completely blew up fans’ pre-conceived notions about what we can expect to see from the rest of the new season. It was soon revealed in the second episode, “Mortyplicity,” that Rick had created a series of decoy families to keep his own family safe.

Adult Swim has released a special look inside into the making of Rick and Morty Season 5 Episode 2 featuring writer behind the episode, Albro Lundy and co-creator Dan Harmon as they opened up about what went into making such a wild episode possible as they had to keep track of all the decoys that had fans feeling lost during its premiere. You can check it out in the video above!

As co-creator Dan Harmon explains, the idea for the decoy family had been bouncing around the writer’s room for a while before they finally turned it into a full episode (much like the idea for Rick’s nemesis, Mr. Nimbus in the season premiere). The initial issue was making sure to define how the decoys were different from other science-fiction elements that the show already tackled previously such as androids, clones, and more.

As writer Albro Lundy explained about the process of actually making the episode, Lundy thought it would be cool to explore an anthology version of the idea where it first explored the mystery of the decoy killer and then following up with the fallout of the discovery that these decoys were just killing one another. The main difficulty in making the episode, however, was that fans were likely going to have lots of questions while watching. But the fun came from exploring how the family would respond to the situation in different ways while staying in character.

Lundy himself even admitted that he spent a lot of time breaking down how the “Asimov’s Cascade” of the episode would work, and even says that he did drawings much like Rick did in the episode. But as fans did see, we eventually figured out that everyone on Earth was a decoy and the “real” Smith family was actually out in space with Space Beth.

But what did you think of Rick and Morty’s newest episode? Were you able to keep track of all the decoys, fake outs and swerves in the episode? Is the Smith Family we see at the end the real one? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!