In this week’s “Mortiplicity,” all that havoc is weirdly both confined to a single idea and sprawling so wide that Rick has to take a quick breather to draw up a diagram and explain.
As these encounters start to complicate themselves, with Decoys making their own Decoys, that chain starts to branch out in the wildest of ways, with links of every size and shape traveling in every direction.
This doesn’t necessarily mean “tear through enough plot and branching timelines in a way that will have Reddit timeline constructors going berserk for weeks,” but here that’s more of a natural byproduct than a driving goal.
That the answer is “It doesn’t matter because they’re all about to get neutralized by an interdimensional molecule zapper” certainly helps.
If anything, Rick pausing to explain his own “Highlander” joke is the closest the episode comes to getting sidetracked, but it’s also being delivered in front of a whiteboard illustration that anyone can choose to unpack instead.
Still, seeing Marionette Beth in charge of the underground resistance and Marionette Jerry becoming a breeding ground for a colony of beavers in that truly deranged extended tag are ideal ways to give the usual Rick/Morty dynamic a needed break.
The skill demonstrated here isn’t just in the written setups and payoffs, but in Lucas Gray’s direction, too.
You could make the argument that Mr. Always Want to Be Hunted is a Mr. Poopybutthole decoy of his own — if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best — but how was the show going to introduce a character like that and not pay off the name? The pairing of him and the episode’s first joke is the most thrilling kind of opening to a story: one that tells you everything that’s about to unfold before you even realize it.