Rick & Morty Season 9 Episode 2 Discussion (Spoilers)

Let's see if we have any Rick and Morty fans among us. The latest episode, S9E2: Ricks Days Seven Nights was very interesting to me, potentially the highlight of the season. Memories has ended up a core subject across the entire show and this episode delves heavily to it. Let me run a quick summary before putting my own opinions on it. Would be very excited to hear your opinions and reviews too.

At the start of the episode, we watch this crafty guy on a snowy nature area riding on a van. He comes to a bowling alley where everyone greeta him as a belowed seasonal visitor "Ted" and he's acting all natural with thrm but he looks just like our rick.

Turns out Rick occationally goes to these two week vacations where he erases his mind and loads a prescripted role, such as Ted, who supposedly works in PVC and comes to this snovy town in winter season for vacation. Ted character basically only exists during vacations and his normal "Rick" personality is turned off on that duration of a simple life.

Ted finds out he's an alternate persona of Rick, refuses to listen to Rick'a holographic guidance and decides to fighr back against emergency mechanisms to take him back and install Rick back, and his friends help him fight Ricks drones. He decides to strike ricks own world with his friends but after finding out about the family, is welcomed to stay for a while and adjust. Eventually the dread of a fake life gets to him and despite guessing very well that Rick isn't happy with his life, due to hia directionless misery and losing a few of his vacation friends, agrees to restore rick. In post-credits we cut to yet another vacation peraona of rick where he'a marrying a bride amongst ocean people and Summer and Morty intervene.

Naturally there are many references and inspirations to other pieces of fiction that delve into altered/erased memmories here, most notably with matrix through the use of red button/blue botton choice. Also Severence. But beyond the memmories, it employed another important theme of happiness, inqiring alongside the audience how happy and satisfied rick is with is life and how ignorance may be blisful at times.

My favorite callback was Rick's leg phone ringing to the tune of Arbolian Mentorososians from Get Schwifty. Anyone remember them? Regardless, a very solid episode, I give it 9/10 at this time, would say its in the top 25 episodes.

Anyway, lastly I want to mention how centrel thr theme of memmories has become in this show, anyone noticed that or is it just me. It feels like our first big memmory related episode was S2: Ricksty Minures where parasites inserted fame memmories of them as real characters in the main casts' lives and in S3: Morty's Mindblowers we made a crazy reveal to the mind erasing device, which has become one of the most commonly used tools of Rick. We famously had S5 episode Rickternal Friendshine of thr Spotless Mort where Rick restored Bird Person's memmories by grafting in their shared memories and lastly in S8 Finale where memmory Rick returned to save Memory Diane by altering Beth's Memmories. Let me know if I'm missing any.