Everyone wants a cool grandpa, right? There’s usually no consequence or catch in having one, so consider yourself lucky if you do… unless your cool grandpa is named Rick Sanchez. He’s half of what makes Rick and Morty well, Rick and Morty, and his presence in the show is what defines it. However, Rick’s not always a person you want to be around.
Just ask Morty, as he’s usually taken Rick’s greatest and heaviest hits and has learned a lot from their misadventures together. There’s really no shortage of bad and cruel things Rick does to Morty. That being said, it’s all in the spirit of entertainment and hilarity, and Rick usually makes amends. Still, that doesn’t completely make Morty’s scars disappear and here are ten of those scars he got from Rick. You don’t need an I.Q. of 200 to know these are bad.
CASUAL ABUSE
A few minutes into the very first episode of the show and you’ll quickly surmise that Rick’s not exactly a nice person. He can pretty much do anything he wants and that sort of gives him a free pass to treat everyone poorly, with Morty being no exception. Rick will usually bring Morty along on one of his errands, usually treating him like expendable garbage along the way.
Be it verbal, physical, or psychological abuse, Rick has made Morty quite a callous young teenage boy —something which most people shouldn’t really be proud of. In fact, even the showrunners made Morty’s being an expendable sidekick a running joke when they introduced the Council of Ricks.
LIED TO MORTY MANY TIMES
In addition to treating Morty like a tool, Rick almost always keeps Morty in the dark and uninformed. As evidenced in the show’s first episode, it doesn’t take that long before Rick lies to Morty about his goals. The series makes it clear that Rick is a narcissistic, crafty, and self-centered mad scientist, so that’s a given.
Rick’s so much of a compulsive liar that he even lies to Morty that he doesn’t care about him, which does mean he has a good side. Still, Rick’s familial attachment with Morty won’t stop him from carefully manipulating his own grandson and his family just to get another taste of the phased-out Mulan Szechuan chicken nugget sauce.
CHILD ENDANGERMENT
Let’s not forget the most obvious transgression Rick has done to Morty: taking him on life-threatening extradimensional escapades. Doing that to an adult would be alright (sort of), but we still have to remember that Morty is but a fragile 14-year-old who’s barely hit the start of puberty.
Rick has taken Morty to worlds where The Purge was a real thing, a Mad Max-esque planet, a high-security intergalactic airport and many other places where your typical 14-year-old child wouldn’t survive. Jerry, Morty’s father, might come off as a wimpy buzzkill at times, but he does have a point when he gets angry at Rick for endangering his son.
ACCIDENTALLY BROKE MORTY’S LEG
Speaking of child endangerment and physical abuse, one of the worst things that have ever happened to Morty was getting both his legs broken in a gruesome manner thanks to Rick’s carelessness. This happened when the two of them were searching for Rick’s prized illegal seeds in the pilot episode of the show.
Rick gave Morty some anti-gravity shoes so he could walk down a cliff quickly but forgot to tell Morty to turn the shoes on. Both Morty’s legs ended up looking like bent straws while he squealed in agony and unfathomable pain. Rick fixed it, so Morty forgave him, simple as that.
MADE MORTY SHOVE A GIANT SEED IN HIS ANUS
Oh geez, Morty really got the brunt of Rick’s sick mentality in the pilot episode, didn’t he? This also happened soon after Rick accidentally made Morty break his legs. Apparently, Rick’s goal in that particular alien planet was to get some valuable giant seeds as big as whole avocados.
Unfortunately, transporting those seeds was illegal, so Rick had Morty smuggle the giant seeds through his anal cavity. The hilarious and cruel part was that Morty didn’t even need to do that. Both of them could have just gone home, charged Rick’s drained portal gun, went back to collect the seeds again, and then portal back home, possibly saving Morty from an early onset of incontinence.
CAUSED MORTY’S PARENTS’ DIVORCE
Rick might not have been a great father to Beth but he sure knows what’s best for her, and Jerry is not that. As such, when Rick came back into Beth’s life, he quickly devised a plan to get rid of Jerry and become the man of the house.
Apparently, Rick has been carrying out this elaborate scheme as far back as the first season of the show. It only came to a boiling point in the episode “Rickshank Redemption.” This led to Beth and Jerry getting a divorce and Rick getting what he wants for the family, regardless of how that divorce affected his grandsons. Jerry won in the end, though.
MADE MORTY KILL PEOPLE
Technically, it was aliens which Rick made Morty kill, but they’re people nevertheless with their own hopes and dreams and families. In fact, Morty got indoctrinated into being a murderer quite early on — in, you guessed it, the pilot episode.
The two of them got discovered in an intergalactic port and were being chased by alien bureaucrats when Rick asked Morty to shoot them. Morty obliged and made his first kill, which really should have given him nightmares since he even saw one of them bleed to death.
RUINED MORTY’S DATE WITH JESSICA
Puberty is hard, but it’s next to impossible to fulfill elegantly when both of your parents are dysfunctional. Such is Morty’s case, so he had no one else to turn to but Rick. Hence, he asked Rick to make his crush Jessica attracted to him for prom in the episode “Rick Potion.”
Rick delivered and made Jessica infatuated with Morty — so infatuated that it caused both Jessica and the whole town to fall head over heels with Morty, essentially ruining his date. When Rick tried to fix the problem, he ended up creating a worldwide apocalypse that forfeited their original dimension. The message here is that puberty can cause an apocalypse, so treat it with care.
TRAUMATIZED MORTY FOREVER
That Cronenberg apocalypse was one of the worst mistakes Rick ever did but as we know, he always finds out a solution. This particular solution involved both him and Morty squatting in another dimension instead of fixing their own. For that to happen, though, the two of them had to first bury the new dimension’s original Rick and Morty, both of whom died graphically in a lab explosion.
This was the point of no return for Morty and one of the darkest things he ever did. He had to bury his own body and basically steal their lives, letting only Summer know that they’re not the original Rick and Morty of that dimension. After this episode, Morty was never the same naive boy again.
MORTY’S MIND BLOWERS
As if the Cronenberg apocalypse and dimension theft weren’t twisted enough, there’s also the fact that Rick also could have erased those traumatic memories from Morty using his Morty’s Mind Blowers device. It’s a machine he made to erase and store Morty’s memories, most of which involved Rick’s blunders.
Heck, even having a machine like that is just plain savage. Rick basically made that machine partly so that Morty won’t remember any mistake his uber-smart grandfather made or embarrassing things he did. All of this so Rick can indulge in his narcissistic tendencies. Oh well, at least he hasn’t killed Morty. Yet.
