Justin Roiland Wants to Bring Snowball Back to 'Rick and Morty'
The canine won't be in Season 3, but he might return in future seasons.
There’s one character Rick and Morty’s co-creator Justin Roiland really wants to bring back to the show sometime after Season 3, and it’s a deep cut from the show’s early days: Morty’s lovably tyrannical pet puppy, Snuffles, aka Snowball.
Based on comments from the creators, we know that Rick and Morty Season 3 won’t feature characters like Mr. Meeseeks or episode formats like Interdimensional Cable, but if Roiland has his way, then Snuffles might return, one day.
In an interview with The Daily Beast published on July 27, Roiland and fellow co-creator Dan Harmon spoke about the positive impact a gender-balanced writers’ room has had on Season 3. But when asked about parts of the show they want to return to, Roiland said:
“I mean we have a ton of seeds that we’ve planted that we could come back to. There’s a bunch that I would do something with, but the one that I would really love to think about more is Snowball. I feel like that could potentially be really cool.”
The original Snuffles was just a regular dog.
Snowball, aka Snuffles, appeared way back in the second ever episode, “Lawnmower Dog.”
In that story, Rick and Morty try to incept Morty’s Math teacher for better grades. (Yes, “incept” as in “plant ideas into his subconscious via dreams,” just like Leo DiCaprio did in Christopher Nolan’s Inception).
Before diving into the dream world, though, Rick gives Snuffles a helmet back at the Smith home that enhances the dog’s intelligence, and he eventually gains sentience, speech, and a badass robotic exoskeleton. Before long, dogs take over the world with these robotic exoskeletons with Snuffles as their leader. (Snuffles rejects his “Slave Name” and assumes the new name of “Snowball,” for his “fur is pretty and white.”)
Eventually, Rick brings the two plots together by creating a dream for Snowball/Snuffles in which Morty is kept as a pet that gets very sick. The nightmare frightens the dog enough to call the whole world domination thing off; he realizes that he loves Morty too much to harm him.
When Snuffles says, “We are not them,” it’s proof that these good dogs are far better than any humans, especially when compared to the humans in Rick and Morty.
The last we saw of the white dog, he had led his army of intelligent dogs to colonize a dimension far away from petty humans. To honor Morty, he also resumes his original name of Snuffles.
Snuffles and the rest of the hyper-intelligent dogs won’t be back for Season 3 at all, but if Roiland has his way, we might see them in Season 4 or beyond.
Rick and Morty Season 3 continues on Adult Swim Sunday at 11:30 p.m. Eastern.
