Although the decoy-destroying antics of “Mortyplicity” initially look like an average episode of Rick and Morty, the outing secretly set up the tragic events of season 5’s finale. Rick & Morty is a sneaky series. While the show is outwardly raucous, goofy, and gory, the anarchic animated comedy sneaks in some moments of unexpected pathos from time to time and has set up some devastating twists over its 5 seasons.
Take, for example, Rick & Morty’s season 4 heist movie spoof, where an increasingly absurd deconstruction of the genre turned to be something far darker. The revelations of Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale made it clear that the “joke” of Rick stealing Morty’s hopes and dreams to ensure his continued compliance with his grandfather’s schemes was not a throwaway punchline at all. Instead, the gag was an early bit of foreshadowing designed to warn viewers that Rick’s tendency to view Morty as a commodity will come back in darker terms.
Similarly, the plot of “Mortyplicity” (season 5 episode 2) also seems like one of Rick & Morty’s goofier outings at first, only for the season 5 finale to also underline its secret depths. In “Mortyplicity,” the Smith family is forced to kill endless versions of themselves in an episode that features some of Rick & Morty’s grossest (and most obscure) gags ever. However, under all of the double-crossing, shootings, and graphic flaying of its characters, the episode’s storyline also hints at a darker twist on this tale that arrived with the destruction of the Central Finite Curve.
A goofy, gory standalone adventure, “Mortyplicity” introduced countless versions of the Smith family, each of which acted as the episode’s protagonists for a few minutes before being killed off by the “real” Smiths (who were then also inevitably outed as decoys and killed off in turn). The joke of the episode was, much like the earlier heist parody, that viewers could never trust what they were seeing and even the characters themselves had no idea whether they were the real heroes of Rick & Morty or not. On first viewing, the episode, like season 4’s “Claw and Hoarder” or season 5’s later “Rickdependence Spray,” seems like evidence that Rick & Morty is content to balance poignant, thoughtful episodes with more ribald, nihilistic plots. However, that’s not quite the whole story.
The sight of countless Rick and Mortys slaughtering countless alternate versions of themselves, with each character thinking they alone are justified in this action, was darkly mirrored when Rick & Morty revealed the reality of the Finite Central Curve. Moreover, the fact that Evil Morty felt okay with ending the feedback loop on endless violence even though this involved mass murder is echoed in how Rick leads the endless Smith families into a battle Royale with the same twisted justification of his actions. Rick & Morty’s tragic season 5 finale saw Evil Morty claim that, even though he was killing a huge number of Mortys and Ricks, he could sleep soundly knowing that his actions were ending a pattern of exploitation that would otherwise last forever.
Similarly, Rick’s claim that he should lure all of the Smith decoys into one place and leave them to kill each other (and eventually even him and his family) was a similarly nihilistic outlook. Rick claims that the ends justify the means despite the ends including him killing countless versions of himself and others, meaning it is no surprise when Evil Morty makes the same claim later in Rick & Morty season 5. Although Rick and Morty’s philosophies diverge in many ways, Rick and Evil Morty think alike, as evidenced by the comical, but deeply cynical and amoral choice that Rick makes in “Mortyplicity” and the fact that Morty essentially does the same in the season 5 finale.
Beth confronts Rick near the end of “Mortyplicity” and her frank refutation of his claims forces her father to realize that he has been acting like a monster to preserve his life and family, not because he doesn’t care about them. This moment appears to imply that Rick might not be so hard on himself after "Mortyplicity" ends, with Rick saying a heartfelt apology and admitting that, even if he is a decoy, there is a version of him out there that is able to hear her criticisms and improve his self-image. The scene implies that Rick & Morty might redeem Rick as the character stops seeing himself as the villain of his story.
However, Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale proves that he completely forgot this lesson (or that the Rick who learned it really was a disposable decoy) as Evil Morty’s expose of the Central Finite Curve proves Rick is still exploiting and killing countless Mortys across countless realities to his own ends. Where “Mortyplicity” offers some light at the end of the tunnel and a hint that Rick can be changed by characters imploring his better nature, Evil Morty’s season 5 finale gambit proves that Rick would never change unless the system that underlies his comfortable existence was torn out from under him. That is not, however, necessarily true of Rick & Morty’s deuteragonist, as the same episode proved.
Morty’s choice to help out Rick in the season 5 finale, despite all that his grandfather has put him through, was made out of the goodness of his heart rather than because Morty feared he, too, could be a decoy. As such, the interaction is more authentically decent than any of "Mortyplicity"’s sentimental scenes and works better as a happy ending, since the scene that proves Rick & Morty’s hero has grown over the course of the show. While the series often teases a better, more caring side to Rick, as proven by the end of “Mortyplicity,” the season 5 finale proves that show also often hides its real hero in plain sight. By doing the right thing despite not having nearly superhuman intelligence, Morty is the more heroic of the two title characters, as proven by the contrast between Mortyplicity’s ending and the season 5 finale it foreshadowed. This essential difference between the two leads of Rick & Morty gives the series its dramatic drive, as Rick avoids growth at all costs while his young nephew’s experiences shape him into a more morally upright character.