[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Rick and Morty, Season 5, Episode 9 and 10, "Forgetting Sarick Mortshall," and "Rickmurai Jack."]

It's not controversial to say that this season of Rick and Morty has been largely uneven. For every great clone episode, there were two bad episodes about turkeys and incest babies waiting to disappoint. Thankfully, the show finished its fifth season strongly, with a funny episode about Rick learning the important lesson that crows are cool, and an episode that drops some delicious lore and continuity while confronting the toxic relationship between the titular grandpa and grandson, cue "For the Damaged Coda."

So far, Season 5 has played fast and loose with continuity, teasing small changes that have been lurking in the background, with subtle differences in the way certain characters act that seem to indicate they've changed after all this time. The big problem in the season is that many of the episodes felt like they were sidetracking the character dynamics we know and love in favor of wacky sci-fi concepts, and every time two characters were on screen together, something felt off. While the finale doesn't retroactively fix those problems, it does provide a thin layer of continuity that makes the feeling of something being off lead to a big change in the main dynamic of the show, as Rick fires Morty once and for all.

Episode 9, Forgetting Sarick Mortshall, starts with Morty pissing Rick off so much by messing with the portal gun — to literally fix the many problems Rick leaves behind — that he pulls out the Wheel of Sidekicks Better Than Morty and decides to team up with two crows. Most of the episode's humor lies in Rick learning that crows are "empathetic as fuck" and extremely cool. Meanwhile, Morty teams up with yet another seemingly innocent person that turns out to be a violent psychopath. This time, it is Nick, a guy that hung out with Rick once and now lives in a mental institution because of this experience. Turns out, Morty and Nick are linked because they both accidentally spill some portal gun fluid on their bodies, creating a direct portal between them. After Nick kills a bunch of people in his quest to fuel his own portal gun, Morty decides to leave him, pulling a 127 Hours to cut his own hand off and then throwing it down Nick's own portal hole, killing him.

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Image via Adult Swim

Now, the idea of an episode where Morty and Rick split up is nothing new, but what matters is the emotional and grounded way in which the episode ends, with Rick finally acknowledging his own toxicity, and deciding to leave Morty himself rather than firing him. "What we had was abusive... I’ll always be your grandpa, I’m just kind of obsessed with crows now," Rick says in a rather teary farewell. Sure, we know this is only temporary, but as I've noted before, the show doesn't have to actively remind us that things have changed for us to know that things have changed, and even though Rick and Morty will probably largely ignore the events of this episode in the future, the audience knows what Rick said, and it does change how we view their relationship from here on out. The scene also works because it forgets about the crude jokes, the sci-fi concepts and the crows, and focuses on what made this one of the best animated comedies of the past decade, the relationship between the characters.

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And then we have Rickmurai Jack, an episode that personifies the TV sitcom episode equivalent of the "Finally, some good fucking food" Gordon Ramsay meme. No, not because of the return of Evil Morty, but because we finally get a good anime parody after that awful Voltron episode. The episode starts with Rick living his best Samurai Jack life, acting as an anti-hero slashing and dicing bird people around the universe, and even getting his own catchy anime opening song that perfectly combines the aesthetics of Vampire Hunter D with the visuals of any modern isekai show — the best part? That the sequence added sing-along lyrics in both kanji and romaji.

After Rick realizes that his archnemesis, CrowScare is having sex with his crows, Rick leaves his dark companions and returns to Morty, who turned himself into a 40-year-old to guilt Rick into coming back home because he is starting to recognize that he desperately wants to get back together with Rick, as he's become codependent on their relationship and adventures.

In order to fix Morty, they head to the Citadel, which Rick wants to avoid because it "runs on canon." After a dinner invitation by President Morty, fans finally get the full continuity and lore meal they've been asking for. In case it wasn't obvious before, the Rick and Morty writers absolutely despise continuity, and it's hard not to see why, given that the moment the show leans too heavily on it, it effectively ends, with new episodes having to build upon what came before and not repeat any plot point. Indeed, Rickmurai Jack even includes its fair share of meta jokes about how they're doing all this for the fans, and how we better enjoy it now because it won't last — there is even a comicbook-like editor's note with Rick as Stan Lee reminding us when Evil Morty first showed up.

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Image via Adult Swim

Here we get a couple of huge lore dumps, the first of which is confirmation of Rick's backstory. Yes, the flashback from the Season 3 premiere was real, Rick's wife did die in that explosion, along with Beth. Grief sent Rick down a path to find the other Rick who introduced him to portal gun tech, and who killed Beth and Diane, leading Rick to kill hundreds of other Ricks, until he agreed to a truce and created the Citadel of Ricks. Sure, the frigid wife and dead daughter backstory is a bit cliche at this point, but it works because of Rick's clear disdain for it, he knows how obvious a motivator this is, and he hates it.

The other bombshell of a reveal is that the Citadel is actually a breeding ground for Mortys. You see, Rick was either the first one or one of the first Ricks to have realized the potential in having Morty as an adventure partner, and soon enough other Ricks started wanting a Morty of their own, so they started manipulating infinite Beths to have sex with infinite Jerrys to produce infinite Mortys, and when that wasn't enough, they started cloning them inside the Citadel, making them both companions and their work force to maintain a wall that cordons off all the universes where Rick isn't the smartest man in existence, or as Morty calls it, an "infinite crib built around an infinite fucking baby."

Evil Morty's plan has been to break the Rick and Morty dynamic once and for all, destroy the wall, and go to a universe where Rick isn't the smartest man, something that makes perfect sense and somehow had never seemed like a possibility before.

Again, the revelations are huge, and the ramifications endless, but it all works because of our Rick and Morty. It works because of how Rick admits that Morty should go with Evil Morty because it is the more sound plan, because he finally has run out of ideas on how to solve this. It works because Morty admits he also needs Rick, and decides to stay with him and escape the Citadel together.

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Image via Adult Swim

It works because, even if we don't hear from Evil Morty again, his story came to a satisfying conclusion that played on what we know of the show, and what we know the show could be. Will these revelations impact Season 6? Probably not, given how eager everyone, including Rick and Morty, seem to be to return to simple, episodic adventures. And yet, Rick's portal gun doesn't work, and now there is a hole to another reality, one we could always return to.

Interdimensional Lost & Found

  • That instrumental rearrangement of "For the Damaged Coda" was great.
  • This week's political joke: a pair of Morty cops shooting an unarmed Morty, with Rick telling the cop, "You're about to get suspended with pay."
  • And this week's big pop culture reference: Rick describing a crow spaceship as "very Dark Crystal meets Hot Topic."
  • We get another cool new one-off character, Gargabe Goober! An alien that literally eats garbage. And in yet another excellent post-credits stinger, turns out Goober is actually named Harold, and he went to Harvard Medical School!
  • We also get another somber post-credits scene with Mr. Poopybutthole talking about his broken relationships and his sad life. Justice for Poopybutthole.

KEEP READING: How 'Rick and Morty’s Dynamic Has Changed With Season 5