One of the best things about Rick and Morty is the enthusiasm to take its comedy to unexpected places. Although many of the stories delve into absurdist meta-humor or spoofs of popular sci-fi tropes, the Adult Swim hit has a serious side as well. The combination of the somber and the silly has become a trademark of the series, leading to some of Rick and Morty’s best episodes.
In these instances, the same irreverent comedy is present, but concepts of death, grief, and abandonment are treated with care, adding depth and context to well-established characters. By digging deep into the emotional scars of Rick, Morty (both originally voiced by Justin Roiland) and their family, the characters continue to evolve in a way uncommon in the majority of other animated series. The following episodes of Rick and Morty are the darkest, ranked by how well they explore painful subjects in a relatably humorous way.
10
“Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind”
Season 1, Episode 10 (2014)
The first season of Rick and Morty was packed with popular self-contained episodes, but it would also introduce one of the most intriguing long-term villains in “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind.” Rick and Morty are brought in front of the Council of Ricks, where Rick is accused of killing 27 different Ricks across various timelines. Rick easily escapes, but he’ll need to clear his name while being pursued by vengeful versions of himself.
“Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind” introduces the Citadel of Ricks, a concept that will be pivotal to the overarching narrative of why Rick came to live with Beth (Sarah Chalke), and casts a cynical shadow over the perceived bond between him and Morty. Not that Rick was ever particularly kind to Morty, but the reveal that Ricks keep Mortys around as brainwave camouflage is crushing to the grandson, and seeing infinite versions of the boy perpetually tortured to hide Evil Morty takes the idea to a heinous level of execution. Evil Morty hates Rick, but he shares the genius’s lack of respect for his alternate version.
9
“The ABCs of Beth”
Season 3, Episode 9 (2017)
Beth has revelations about the past when she learns that the imaginary world from her childhood was Rick’s creation in “The ABCs of Beth.” When Beth realizes she may be responsible for the disappearance of a boy from her childhood, she asks Rick to take her to Froopyland, a pocket dimension he turned into a play area. To their surprise, they find the boy, Tommy, now a grown man, thanks to disturbing methods, and he reveals secrets about Beth’s darker nature.
The way Tommy made his food in Froopyland is Rick and Morty taking a joke into grim territory, possibly made worse by seeing it reenacted via a mutant-inbred children’s stage play. Beth has held a high moral stance on Rick’s actions, but when faced with sins from her past, she’s quick to resort to similarly lethal problem-solving. “The ABCs of Beth” was important for the future development of Beth, adding a duality to the character that will extend into the arrival of Space Beth.
8
“Hot Rick”
Season 8, Episode 10 (2025)
Season 8 of Rick and Morty ends on a high note when a sentient memory of young Rick attempts to rescue the last memory of his dead wife, Diane (Kari Wahlgren). After being removed from Jerry’s (Chris Parnell) head, Memory Rick escaped into Beth’s head, where he discovers a memory of Diane still exists in Rick’s lab. Memory Rick implants himself into Beth’s memory to reunite the family, but his efforts cause havoc on his daughter when the manipulation of her past leads to a breakdown.
The emotional torment Beth endures while Memory Rick attempts to save Diane leads her to temporarily kill Space Beth and almost commit suicide, before Rick saves her from driving off a cliff. While Memory Rick and Diane receive a possibly happy ending, the real Rick is left without the last memory of his wife and an unanswered text from someone he saw a romantic future with. Rick needed to move on from Diane, no matter how much he loved her, and although there’s an emptiness where her memory was held, he now has a pathway to personal growth.
7
“Rickmurai Jack”
Season 5, Episode 10 (2021)
In “Rickmurai Jack,” a reunion between Rick and Morty leads them to the citadel for an enlightening conversation with President Morty. As it turns out, Rick and Morty had already encountered the new President all the way back in season one, but they won’t be forgetting him again. The duo needs to escape the citadel; however, tampered portal guns and the truth about Rick’s past will create roadblocks for survival.
The Rickest Rick of them all was destined to have a dark origin, and “Rickmurai Jack” neatly explains why Rick returned to Beth in a bloody montage of tunnel-visioned revenge. Not only does the explanation of Rick’s past shine light on his indifferent tendencies to those around him, but the montage opens up the story by revealing there’s a larger goal the scientist is hell bent on accomplishing. “Rickmurai Jack” could be considered dark based upon body count alone, but as the episode ends with the heroes stranded in space, the more unsettling thought might be that the so-called villain has a reasonable perspective about the toxicity of Rick’s actions.
6
“Analyze Piss”
Season 6, Episode 8 (2022)
An endless parade of villains Rick deems unworthy allows Jerry to become the hero in one of the most underrated episodes of Rick and Morty, “Analyze Piss.” Rick can’t be bothered to fight when a new villain, the Pissmaster (Will Forte), shows up at the Smith house, but an insult toward Summer (Spencer Grammer) causes Jerry to become famous defending his daughter’s honor. Although Rick becomes annoyed at Jerry’s celebrity status, he discovers the sad outcome for the Pissmaster, whose humiliation was more than he could bear.
Episodes of Rick and Morty can abruptly switch tones, as was the case with “Analyze Piss,” when Rick finds the dead body of Pissmaster and an accompanying suicide note. Rick’s journey has been different from Pissmaster’s, but the end result, the loneliness and isolation, the estrangement from his daughter, hits frightenly close to home. Rick is able to rehabilitate the reputation of Pissmaster by doing good deeds, but it’s still easier to be heroic as someone else than commit the same energy as himself.
5
“Unmortricken”
Season 7, Episode 5 (2023)
Rick’s continued hunt for Rick Prime reaches its conclusion with help from an unexpected ally in the season seven episode “Unmortricken.” After Evil Morty’s hidden sanctuary is compromised by mysterious power fluctuations, he portals to a space station where Rick and Morty are killing endless decoys of Rick Prime. Evil Morty and Rick form a shaky alliance to locate Rick Prime, but when Rick is able to enact the revenge he’s obsessed over, the feeling of victory is disappointingly empty.
“Unmortricken” starts strong with a quick backstory of how Evil Morty came to be, and seeing him and Rick work together is a compelling intellectual sparring match. The faceoff against Rick Prime generally lives up to expectations for everyone but Rick, who, after beating his restrained arch nemesis to death with his bare hands while Rick Prime laughs, is left a man without a mission. Covered in his enemy’s blood, Rick is left shell-shocked, numb to the concept of how his life moves forward without a quest to give him purpose. Focusing on revenge kept Rick’s mind busy, but it also didn’t allow him to grieve the death of his wife, and he now finds that hate was a more welcome preoccupation than the misery of loss.
4
“Auto Erotic Assimilation”
Season 2, Episode 3 (2015)
Rick answers a distress call with Morty and Summer in hopes of plundering some loot, but instead finds his ex in “Auto Erotica Assimilation.” The galaxy seems like a small place when Rick runs into Unity (Christina Hendricks), a hive-mind consciousness that has spread over an entire planet, replacing the inhabitants’ will with her own. Rick and Unity’s bizarre attraction to one another blinds them from the reasons they broke up, and while the two go down a destructive path of sex and drugs, Morty and Summer are left to watch the fallout of their actions.
Rick and Unity care for one another, but the gravitational pull between them is destructive to everyone and everything around them. Morty and Summer’s safety takes a backseat to his indulgence of Unity’s presence, and her carefully constructed assimilated community begins to tear at the seams. When Unity finds the strength to leave their intoxicating but dangerous tryst, Rick’s heartache leads him to almost take his own life in his garage work station. Rick had fought god-like creatures, but in a moment of grief and self-pity, there was no greater threat to Rick than himself.
3
“Rick Potion No. 9”
Season 1, Episode 6 (2014)
A typical sci-fi premise sets up one of the darkest moments in the series with the episode “Rick Potion No. 9.” Morty asks Rick for a love potion to make Jessica fall for him, but when a flu strain causes the amorous effects to mutate and spread, Morty is popular in the worst way. Rick’s attempts to contain the outbreak horribly backfire, leading the genius to solve the problem with an unexpectedly bleak approach.
Spoilers ahead, but Rick decides that the once-human “Cronenbergs” are too far gone to help, so he takes Morty to a world where they just recently died for a fresh start. The image of Morty burying his own dead body and numbly taking his place among a family he doesn’t belong to is an abrupt shift in tone. It was important to have an episode where Rick doesn’t fix what’s broken, demonstrating there are possibly disastrous repercussions to their fun adventures. For Morty, he’s left with looking in the face of his own mortality, and the suspicion that Rick would have left him behind had he mutated as well.
2
“That’s Amorte”
Season 7, Episode 4 (2023)
The Smith family learns not to ask how Rick prepares family dinners in the extremely dark episode “That’s Amorte.” Everyone looks forward to when Rick makes dinner, because his spaghetti is one of the best dishes anyone, including Rick, has ever tasted. When Morty stumbles on the source of the spaghetti, he becomes disgusted with Rick for feeding it to them, and disgusted with himself for still loving the taste.
The cannibalistic premise is a prime example of why Rick and Morty is one of the darkest animated shows, and the story unwinds in ways that somehow go darker as each scene tests Morty’s sense of right and wrong. The climax in which Rick plays the life story of a terminal man is genuinely touching and a moving counterpoint to the episode’s nihilistic tendencies. However, solving one problem means little in a universe with infinite possibilities, and the primary lesson learned for Morty is not to ask Rick questions he wouldn’t want to know the answers to.
1
“Ricklantis Mixup”
Season 3, Episode 7 (2017)
Rick and Morty go on a fun adventure in the city of Atlantis while viewers are taken for a tour of the citadel in one of Rick and Morty’s best episodes, “Ricklantis Mixup.” A city populated by various versions of Rick and Mortys is on the precipice of change when a Morty becomes a dark horse favorite in an election for citadel president. Elsewhere, the Ricks and Mortys who call the citadel home struggle to break free from an oppressive social struggle of their own creation.
Some episodes have a dark moment, but “Ricklantis Mixup” is a multi-layered wafer cookie of bleak social commentary. It’s difficult to pick what leaves the strongest impression—perhaps it’s the corrupt Morty police officer who betrays his own with a trail of bodies as evidence of his world-weary cynicism. Or maybe it’s the factory worker Rick who tries to revolt, only to be strapped to a device that will milk his one moment of happiness so it can be sold as a snack for others to savor vicariously. Even with Evil Morty taking the reins of power, it’s hard to imagine (at least at this time) how he could make anything worse.
Rick and Morty
- Release Date
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December 2, 2013
- Network
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Adult Swim
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Justin Roiland
Rick Sanchez / Morty Smith
