- [Michael] This video is brought to you by Surfshark VPN.
What's up guys?
It's definitely not a decoy Michael
to talk clones, gods and Pinocchio Jerry's.
The fifth season of Rick and Morty is already off
to a great start, offering the mind-bending hilarity
we've come to expect from our favorite geriatric genius.
- Okay, let's go. That's his magic ocean horn.
- But episode two, Mortyplicity, really intrigued us.
- Please Morty, is it there? God damn it,
just tell me if I'm real.
- Morty, do it.
(fart noise)
- And not just because it involved watching
every main character meet their early demise
a few dozen times.
Rather, we think the clue to understanding the episode
actually lies in the opening lines.
- Christian God is real. He's been asleep
for thousands of years.
We're going to sneak up there and kill him.
- [Michael] Specifically because killing God might be
the one task too ambitious for
the smartest man in the multi-verse. We'll explain
in this wisecrack quick dig on Rick and Morty
Why Rick can't kill God.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
But before I get into it,
I want to give a shout out to this week's sponsor
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And now back to the show. Now, as we mentioned,
the episode opens with one version of Rick and Morty eating
a high protein breakfast before their next mission,
killing the Christian God.
- Mob style.
- Whack his ass.
- [Michael] Of course, things quickly go awry.
The entire family is offed by some vengeful squids
who are apparently jealous of Rick's anatomy.
- Well, we're talking about me,
it could be anything. Maybe jealous of my penis size,
I had sex with their queen, my dick's too big.
- [Michael] The episode then seemingly abandons
the killing God plot line, instead exploring
the implications of Rick's totally normal
choice to build an entire race of familial decoys.
But we'd argue that on a deeper level,
the theme of wanting and failing to kill God remains a
poignant through line. Now, to be clear,
nobody would ever accuse Rick Sanchez
of being a religious dude.
His worldview is pretty squarely centered around a central
belief in his own genius. In this way,
Rick shares much with 18th century enlightenment
philosophers, who sought to relocate the place
of meaning and truth away from religion,
that is faith in some divine, all powerful being,
and instead center it around human thought and creativity.
This was the catalyst for that era's` shift from religious
faith to secular reason as the primary source
of human knowledge. In this way,
Rick is just a more ego maniacal, foul mouthed,
enlightenment style thinker, like uh,
like Kant if Kant partied.
And it's this shift from faith to reason
that one German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche,
was talking about when he famously,
and a bit mellow dramatically,
wrote that God is dead and that we have killed him.
See, as humans increasingly stopped needing religion
to explain how the world works or to set our moral compass
pointing north, we no longer needed God
and could instead chill out and
revel in our awesome humanity.
And that was the end of human suffering, right?
Well, according to Nietzsche's 19th century live journal,
not so much. Instead, Nietzsche called
this abandonment of God nihilism and not in an
edgy Cohen brothers way.
- [Woman] He doesn't care about anything. He's a nihilist.
- Rather, he thought that when enlightenment philosophers
sucked God out of their intellectual paradigm,
they also left nothing in God's place to give value,
meaning or purpose to human life.
Without the bearded guy upstairs to tell us
how to be good people, he argued,
life becomes as empty and meaningless
as a taco filled with air, which,
which I guess that's just a tortilla.
And this nihilism thing really seems to sum up
Rick's whole vibe. Nothing really means anything.
So why not fly around the multi-verse starting (beep)
with very little regard for either cosmic consequences
or the hurt feelings of his immediate family.
God is deader than dead and nothing has replaced him
except Rick's big, big brain.
But here's where we get to what's most interesting
about this episode, Rick, the OG anti-God guy goes on
to create decoys in his own image in a very God-like way.
And those decoys then go on to embrace,
of all things, religion.
We see this most explicitly when puppet Beth
riles up a crowd of decoys with her low key evangelical
preacher act, convincing them to join the cause,
which functionally seems to be a religion that views Rick
as a somewhat dickish God figure.
- We are decoys brought into the world by an unloving God.
- [Michael] Here, Beth's religious impulses
become a rallying cry that unites the decoys
in a common goal. At least until the flying squid decoys
wreck (beep) and this all raises a big question:
Is Rick secretly driven by religious impulses, too?
To figure that out, let's turn to French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, who believed that eradicating God
from Western thought wasn't just a one and done thing.
He argued that even if we consciously relinquish our faith
in God or make our Reddit username sexyatheist69,
there's still something going on in our little brain parts
that remains out of our control, our unconscious.
And according to Lacan, our unconscious belief in God
never fully goes away.
Even after we find out that our dental insurance plan
doesn't cover mouth guards.
In Lacan's theory of the symbolic, humans still need
some kind of big other to orient our lives and values,
especially when it comes to things like philosophy and
politics. And this kind of explains why Rick
is driven to start playing God,
replicating the act of creation by making tons of decoys.
Sure, he says he's doing this to protect his family.
- After that trouble with space Beth,
I made passable copies of the family and placed them around
the country as a buffer zone to protect.
- Why does he always want to be hunted?
- Jerry.
- It's not important right now, Dad.
- [Michael] But he clearly gets a real kick
out of playing Old Testament God.
- But that's just it. I'm not a man.
I'm God, you're just made in my image.
- (beep) you.
- [Michael] Indeed, the dynamic that manifests
between Rick and his decoys is very much one of creator
and their created. Much like the dynamic between the divine
and humanity in the Bible and other monotheistic texts.
Like the grumpy God of the Old Testament,
he has no qualms about destroying his creations.
That is to say killing his own children.
Though, I guess at least the old Testament God
gave his children a chance to live by uh,
by smearing dead animal blood on their doors.
And in turn, just like God's sex positive human creations,
Rick's decoys quickly go ham on religion,
first playing God themselves by creating more decoys,
and then by forming nascent religious structures.
Why? One of them explains pretty succinctly.
- I might not be the real Rick, but even if I'm not,
he made me, or the me that made me,
which means somewhere inside of him is a version of Rick
capable of hearing that. A version of Rick who's sorry.
I'm sorry about the clone thing too.
- This suggests that they're propelled by the same
generative drive that compels Rick
to start making decoys in the first place.
What's more, the decoys seem to accept Rick as their God,
even as they resent him. Remember this?
- Decoys brought into the world by an unloving God
and driven to destroy ourselves
by the uncertainty he creates.
- [Michael] Here, Beth's rallying the crowd
into a sort of religious fervor,
which fits Lacan's point that these religious structures
are so ingrained in our psyches
that they're functionally inescapable,
but Lacan's idea that religion isn't escapable shows up
most literally in the show's after credits coda.
We learn that wooden puppet decoy Jerry
is now a mortal traveling aimlessly through time,
much like a God who can't die, even though he really,
really wants to. Eventually, his head is nailed
to the top of the cross during a public crucifixion.
- Christianity again?
= Here, poor sentient puppet Jerry
finds out that in some future society,
Christianity is going to get a fun reboot.
This perfectly fits Lacan's theory, that this religion stuff
sticks around in our unconscious.
So of course society will eventually reproduce it.
A few moments earlier though,
we get the real punchline of the episode.
When what seems to be original Rick and co.
had been flying above the earth in a spaceship
this whole damn time.
- Ah, (beep). It looks like someone killed the decoy family.
- [Michael] Get it? Like a transcendent God
floating around in the heavens
lording over their creations on earth.
It's pretty cool.
So why can't Rick kill God? Because he is God,
or at least a blue haired version of some divine creator.
No matter how much he's consciously a nihilistic atheist,
he's still motivated by an unconscious drive towards
religion, towards replicating biblical lore.
And this is why for Lacan, no matter what kind of
mafia tactics Rick and Morty employ,
they'll never be able to murder God once and for all,
because God will always live on
in our collective unconscious.
But what do you guys think? Is Lacan right
that it's impossible for us to escape some unconscious
desire to believe in a divine being who creepily
watches you pee, or did he just die too early
to bro out at the global atheist convention?
Let us know in the comments and definitely check out our
Rick and Morty podcast, the Squanch, to hear
our thoughts on this episode and the rest of the season.
Big thanks to our patrons for all your support.
Decimate that subscribe button like you're a decoy
killing yourself and don't forget to ring that bell.
And as always, thanks for watching. Later.
(theme music plays)