Rick and Morty Just Brought Back a Brilliant Character We Never Thought We’d See Again
Memory Rick Is Back, Baby!
Who can save the multiverse from the monstrosity that is Jerricky? Only Memory Rick, apparently.
Rick and Morty Season 7, Episode 2, “The Jerrick Trap” delivers a fun and mostly satisfying Rick and Jerry adventure with lots of body horror. But it’s the post-credits stinger, featuring the return of a Rick variant we haven’t seen since Season 5, that raises the most questions. What’s the deal with Memory Rick? And could he return in a future episode? Let’s dive in.
Rick and Morty Season 7 Episode 2, Explained
When Morty is captured by space gangsters, only Rick (and Jerry) can save him.
At the beginning of the episode, Rick swaps his mind with Jerry’s to make a point about his son-in-law’s stupidity. Of course, this backfires almost immediately. Jerry (with Rick’s mind) immediately shoots himself in the head out of sheer misery, while Rick (with Jerry’s mind) accidentally murders himself with his myriad of cybernetic implants.
The Freaky Friday situation gets even more dire when the garage’s artificial intelligence tries to put them back together but fails miserably. Both bodies wind up with multiple facets of each other’s mind and brain, so they’re both Jerry and both Rick. After a bit of squabbling, the duo become best friends, setting off on a series of heists under the ‘90s TV-inspired pseudonyms “Burger and Fries.”
The adventure comes to a head when the rest of the family is kidnapped by space gangsters. To save the day, Burger and Fries fuse their bodies together to become an all-powerful eight-limbed monstrosity that calls itself Jerricky.
Jerricky seems borderline omniscient and can “hear the symphony of atoms dying in space.” After saving the family, he announces plans to leave, but in the episode’s final moments, Jerricky steps on a metal rake. The impact snaps Jerry and Rick out of their trance-like state.
“Morty, we’re still in here!” Rick screams. “There’s a memory of myself as a 30-year-old. He kept our egos intact! He saved us! It was a whole action movie, Morty. Memory Rick — he’s still trapped in here!”
Who Is Memory Rick?
Back in Rick and Morty Season 5, Episode 8, “Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort,” Rick inserts his consciousness into Birdperson’s psyche in an effort to save his dying friend. While traveling through Birdperson’s memories, Rick is confronted by a version of himself in his 30s that has long hair. (Someone on Reddit pointed out a few weeks after the episode originally aired that the design for this Rick seems based on Australian musician Nick Cave in the ‘90s with his vest and hairstyle.)
The protagonist Rick calls him Memory Rick on account of the fact that, unlike Ricks from alternate universes, this version is a manifestation of Rick based on Birdperson’s memories. As such, he retains a similar level of brilliance, caustic humor, and compulsive behavior. But his memories before meeting Birdperson are “generic and bird-themed,” and Portal tech doesn’t work because Birdperson never understood the device’s function properly. He’s also less jaded than his elder counterpart, so Rick calls him an “idealistic hipster douche.”
Rick also says that Memory Rick is 35 in “Rickternal Friendshine” and not 30, so Season 7 presents a minor continuity error here.
Memory Rick insists on helping save Birdperson and is vital to the success of the mission as they adventure through various memories, including the infamous Battle of Blood Ridge.
Where Did Memory Rick Come From?
Rather than accept Rick’s offer to become real, Memory Rick chooses to stay as a sentient memory roving through Rick’s mind.
While they’re all trying to escape Birdperson’s psyche, Memory Rick tackles a memory of Tammy to save them. But after Birdperson and Rick return to their bodies in the real world, Rick twitches, saying, “I think Memory Rick ditched Evil Tammy and snuck back over into my brain. I have a pubescent memory of my older self in my closet.”
Memory Rick propagated himself into Rick’s mind so he could live as a sentient memory, and we see this unfold in the last scene of “Rickternal Friendshine.” Rather than accept Rick’s offer to become real, he chooses to stay as a sentient memory roving through Rick’s mind.
All this time later, the post-credits scene of “The Jerrick Trap” shows teenaged Jerry. It’s revealed that Memory Rick wound up trapped in Jerry’s mind for more than a week after he and Rick’s brains were scrambled and mixed up by the garage’s AI.
Hilariously, Jerry remembers all technology “as being powered by springs and gears.” So while Memory Rick tries to harvest any kind of technology to build something that might help the situation, all he ever finds is springs and gears. He wiles away the time building sculptures in the neighborhood out of all those springs and gears. It’s never explicitly made clear what happened during “the whole action movie” sequence that allowed Memory Rick to preserve Jerry and Rick’s egos, but we also don’t know exactly how Jerry-Rick and Rick-Jerry constructed Jerricky to begin with.
Will We See Memory Rick Again?
We never thought we’d see Memory Rick again after Season 5.
Like so many one-off characters that have appeared on the show never to be seen again, Memory Rick seemed like he’d suffer the same fate for almost two years since he was marooned in Rick’s mind. But this new episode provided the perfect premise for him to play a vital role in fixing things.
The show at large is getting a lot better at integrating new characters over time, like Space Beth. Even Gene has had two fairly significant roles in Season 7 thus far, so it stands to reason that Memory Rick probably will show up again at some point. Remember that when Rick confronted Memory Rick inside his pubescent memory, he offered to bring Memory Rick to life.
We can only assume that it’s still completely possible. Maybe that’s one of the developments that’ll happen when Rick is finally ready to confront Rick Prime?
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