Rick and Morty Season 4 Premiere Kills Off SPOILER, But There's a Twist

After years of long waiting, contract negotiations, arguments, riots at McDonald's over condiment sauce, and questions about Kanye West, the most random animated series that requires a high IQ to truly appreciate has finally returned. That's right, Rick and Morty is back on Adult Swim. And if you thought the show might skip a step in its comeback, you must not have a death crystal implanted in your forehead. Rick and Morty came back with even more clever twists on sci-fi tropes while relying on the show's tried and true formula, and even killed a major character off in the process.

But if you know Rick and Morty, you know that the more things change — they always stay the same.

Spoiler warning for the Season 4 premiere of Rick and Morty below.

Early on in the episode, Rick and Morty decide to harvest what are referred to as "death crystals," which allow whoever holds them to look at all of their alternate futures and see them change as they decide their actions. Morty immediately becomes obsessed because he sees a possible future in which he dies as an old man with Jessica, the classmate he's obsessed with, by his side and telling him that she loves him.

Morty then does whatever it takes to make sure this future comes to pass, even asking Rick to drive flying saucer so he can ensure the best possible outcome happens. But in doing so, he ends up crashing the saucer and kills Rick in the process, sending him out of the glass casing and impaling his grandfather on a nearby jagged rock.

While Rick does have protocols in place to revive him, they rely on Morty to inject his DNA into a machine to recreate his body — but the death crystal shows Morty that his best chance to die in Jessica's arms is to NOT revive Rick, so he decides to ignore the Artificial Intelligence that attempts to provide counsel after Rick's death.

But of course, Rick has plans within plans and a contingency for everything; so his consciousness is rigged to revive his body in one of his parallel universe counterpart's cloning contraptions. This results in Rick being reborn in multiple fascist regime, in the body of a shrimp, and in the body of a hornet until he's finally able to make his way back to his reality — where he stops Morty from overtaking the world after becoming overtaken by the death crystal.

And of course at the end, the universe is saved and Rick and Morty continue to have more adventures.

New episodes of Rick and Morty air on Sundays on Adult Swim.