Warning! This article contains spoilers for Rick and Morty #3 Throughout the course of the Rick and Morty series, Rick Sanchez has committed more than his fair share of atrocities, but nothing can compare to the hands-on brutality of his actions as Pickle Rick. However, those actions weren’t without their consequence, as Rick and Morty gave Rick the perfect punishment for his Pickle Rick murders.
In Rick and Morty season 3, episode 3 “Pickle Rick”, Rick does as advertised and turns himself into a pickle. He does this to get out of going to family therapy following Jerry and Beth’s separation. Though after his family sees through his feeble ploy and eliminates the possibility of Rick turning himself back into a human the moment they were gone, Rick is stuck as a pickle until the therapy session is over. However, Rick’s adventure doesn’t end there. He is knocked off his table by a cat then washed into the sewer by the rain where he is attacked by cockroaches and rats before eventually building himself a biomechanical rat exosuit and kills an entire building filled with Russian operatives. Many people died the day Rick turned himself into a pickle, and even more rats. And it’s the murders of those rats that he pays for in the latest installment of the franchise, and his punishment is the perfect level of shame and embarrassment: Rick has to rely on rats to pull off a mission, and then he has to tell them he loves them.
Rick & Morty’s Pickle Rick Didn’t Value Rat Lives, Until He was Forced To
In Rick and Morty #4 by Alex Firer and Marc Ellerby, Morty has decided to leave Rick’s side after Rick left Morty’s new girlfriend Noelle to die in a hellish dimension in the previous issue. Morty didn’t tell Rick or anyone else where he was going, but he made it clear that he was determined to find his own way to save Noelle, which meant that he was trying to get his hands on portal tech. Given the severity of the situation (and the fact that he secretly missed him), Rick committed himself to finding Morty. But, Morty could be anywhere in the world, so Rick had to use the one creature he previously treated so harshly: rats. Rick evidently set up a world-wide network of rats to have eyes and ears everywhere. When one of the rats actually finds Morty, the rat forces Rick to say ‘I love you’ when the information is given–which makes Rick incredibly angry and even more embarrassed.
When Rick first upgraded his Pickle Rick body with pieces of rat corpses, he went on a rat killing spree that culminated in a final battle with the biggest, most intense-looking rat of them all. However, Rick murdered this rodent with ease, and then went on a long tirade about how this rat meant nothing to him, and wasn’t even significant enough for a name. Killing the rats was one thing, but Rick made it clear that they weren’t even worthy of having life to start with. They were of no value in Rick’s eyes, and he saw murdering them as nothing more than a fun way to spend the day trapped as a pickle. But now, Rick needed the rats he so cruelly tore apart–both in words and actions–in order to find the one person he actually cares about, Morty. Then, to top it all off, Rick had to further display his admission of need by saying he loves the rat that gave him the information, which is something Rick has almost never said to anyone, let alone a rat.
Rick actually had to admit that he needed someone other than himself in order to pull off a particular mission, and that someone was a rat, which is the perfect punishment for all the rats he killed as Pickle Rick in Rick and Morty.
Rick and Morty #4 by Oni Press is available now.
