Rick and Morty‘s finale ended season 5 with the biggest cliffhanger twist in the entire series. Evil Morty finally made his move on Rick Sanchez C-137 (our series “hero”) in order to gain the key knowledge needed to escape the “Central Finite Curve” of influence that bonds Rick and Morty across the multiverse. While Rick has always been agitated by the idea of having to adhere to the canonized story (and thereby address major lingering questions about himself), Evil Morty simply wants to be done with all – and by the time season 5 ends, Evil Morty has seemingly done just that.
(Major Spoilers Follow!) Evil Morty’s master plan to take over the Citadel of Ricks is revealed to be a resources gathering scheme. Evil Morty uses the various Ricks and Mortys and their collective tech (plus the unique knowledge in C-137’s brain) in order to build a vessel that can breach the Central Finite Curve and essentially allow Evil Morty to escape the cycle of horror and exploitation that Mortys are bound to through Ricks. When Evil Morty escapes the boundaries of the universe and fate he knew and steps off into a mysterious golden portal that will take him off into some kind of new horizon – leaving the original Rick and Morty to an unknown fate.
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Rick and Morty showrunner and executive producer Scott Marder talked with fan podcast Interdimensional RSS about the challenge of continuing to craft the series canon, after the Season 5 finale:
“We’re towards the end of writing Season 7 right now. We’ve really gotten the show moving, but that’s to say Season 6 is animating, everything’s in the process. We ourselves, even before [Season 5] aired, were like ‘Oh it would be fun to give things a little bit more continuity, make things feel like they’re not so standalone.’ Which feels to me like the big note that I feel like I’m generally getting on Season 5 like, ‘Fun episodes, but we want to feel like ‘A equals B’ and they’re all kind of moving, and relate to each other and don’t just ignore things from the past.’ Certainly not the goal out of the gates for Season 5.”
Indeed, the makers of Rick and Morty may have made a timely about-face in their thinking about what to do with the serialized canon of the series. As Marder points out, fans were at the point of being frustrated with Rick and Morty’s lack of addressing its own main storyline and canon – and they’d certainly grown weary of the makers of Rick and Morty poking fun fans’ desire to know it. The mid-season 4 episode “Never Ricking Morty” pushed things to the brink: the episode took all the big canon fans wanted to see and made a literal joke out of it. Needless to say, fans didn’t react to the joke very well. At all.
Now, in a sense, Rick and Morty has freed itself from obligations to all its big canon theories and questions, as Evil Morty has literally and figuratively stepped out of the frame of the series. It’s going to be great to see how that plays out in season 6.
