From a werewolf-themed Easter episode to a masturbation-themed Independence Day episode,Rick and Morty’s holiday specials aren’t your average festive celebrations. Usually, when a sitcom builds an episode around a familiar holiday, it’s a heartwarming affair to get audiences into the spirit of that holiday. The original British version ofThe Officeused a feel-good two-part Christmas special as its series finale. ButRick and Mortyhas gone in a different direction with its holiday episodes.Rick and Mortyis known for going too farwith its dark humor, so it’s unsurprising that its holiday episodes are decidedly unsentimental.
Rick and Mortycelebrated the Fourth of July with a story about Morty’s giant mutant sperm running amok across the country. It celebrated Christmas with a story about a deathly ill homeless man’s diseases attacking a shrunken Morty in the ruins of a tiny theme park. Some ofRick and Morty’s best episodesrevolve around a holiday.
7Rickdependence Spray
Season 5, Episode 4
Season 5’s“Rickdependence Spray” is one ofRick and Morty’s most hated episodes. I personally don’t think it’s that bad. It’s not strong enough to rank among the show’s best installments — and it is pretty gross — but it’s perfectly in line with Morty’s character to use a horse breeding program as a masturbation machine, and it’s perfectly in line withRick and Morty’s humor to have him face devastating consequences for it. When Rick tries to turn what he thinks is horse semen into a weapon, he accidentally creates an army of giant Morty sperm.
It’s a great mix of grossout comedy and gonzo sci-fi. But it’s still the show’s weakest holiday episode, because the conclusion of its story relies on the shock value of incest. “Rickdependence Spray” doesn’t deserve the amount of hate it gets, but it doesn’t deserve the level of praise that the other holiday episodes do, either.
6Rick & Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular
Season 5, Episode 6
The episodes about Rick’s feud with the President tend to be pretty underwhelming, because that relationship is very one-note, and it hasn’t had any significant developments since it was introduced. But having said that, season 5’s “Rick & Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular” is one of the finest episodes built around that feud.
It’s a fun satire of the long-standing annual Thanksgiving tradition of the President issuing a pardon to a turkey, so it won’t be turned into a meal and can live out its days on a farm. Rick, in true Rick fashion, turns himself into a turkey in an attempt to trick the President into absolving him of his many crimes. It’s a hilarious caper, and the episode has a lot of fun continually raising the stakes and complicating this silly little quest.
5Bethic Twinstinct
Season 6, Episode 3
Beth takes the concept of self-love to a whole new level in the season 6 episode “Bethic Twinstinct.” WhenSpace Bethcomes to the Smith household for Thanksgiving, she casually flirts with Beth over a bottle of Venusian wine. Eventually, that flirtation morphs into a full-blown love affair; they even create their own “San Junipero”-style love nest in a virtual reality. It was a great way to tell an unconventional love story through science fiction, but it was also a great way to highlight Beth’s narcissism.
This episode has the iconic moment when Jerry, overwhelmed by the news of his wife’s affair, curls up into a pillbug shell. The B-plot has a lot of laughs, too, as Rick, Morty, and Summer distract themselves from the awkwardness surrounding the affair by playing alien video games. “Bethic Twinstinct” isn’t an all-time classic, but it’s a solid episode.
4Ricktional Mortpoon’s Rickmas Mortcation
Season 6, Episode 10
In the season 6 finale, “Ricktional Mortpoon’s Rickmas Mortcation,”Rick gives Morty a lightsaberfor Christmas. After playing with it for a couple of minutes, Morty drops the lightsaber blade-down, and it sinks into the floor and starts careening toward the Earth’s core. This is a simple premise, but it asks a very valid question that mostStar Warsfans never even thought to ask: what happens if you drop a lightsaber? The episode gets a lot of comedic mileage out of that what-if scenario, and the general concept of Morty being armed with a lightsaber.
But the most notable thing about this episode is its twist. Midway through the search for the dropped lightsaber, Morty is shocked and angry to learn that Rick has removed himself from the family to focus all his time and energy on tracking down Rick Prime. The Rick who gave Morty a lightsaber (and was generally being a lot kinder to him) was just a robotic replacement.
3The Last Temptation Of Jerry
Season 8, Episode 4
Rick and Mortytackled a holiday it had never touched on before, Easter, in the season 8 episode “The Last Temptation of Jerry.” Jerry is disappointed to find that he’s the only one in the family who still cares about Easter. As he drives to the store to get some egg dye, he accidentally runs over the Easter Bunny. Upon returning home, Jerry starts exhibiting strange animalistic behavior and bizarre physical enhancements, and it quickly becomes clear that he’s transforming into the Easter Bunny.
I wasn’t expectingRick and Morty’s Easter episode to be a parody of werewolf movies, but I thought it was an ingenious conceit. It plays all the werewolf tropes totally straight, from the grotesque body horror to the tragedy of being trapped inside a monstrous facade, but swapping out terrifying werewolf imagery for goofy bunny imagery made the whole thing delightfully ridiculous. It’s a hilarious play on a classic horror subgenre.
2Rattlestar Ricklactica
Season 4, Episode 5
Rick and Mortybroke its time travel rulein season 4’s “Rattlestar Ricklactica.” Since time travel is an easy way to get out of a narrative jam and it creates all kinds of logical problems,Rick and Morty’s writers steadfastly avoided it as a plot device for three-and-a-half seasons. But they brought time travel into the show for a snake-basedTerminatorparody in “Rattlestar Ricklactica.” What starts off with the deceptively simplistic setup of Morty finding a snake floating in space becomes a brilliantly complex exploration of all the confounding paradoxes of time travel stories.
The episode’s holiday elements are confined to the B-plot, as a neutrally buoyant Jerry tries to hang the Christmas lights. After losing one of his shoes, he soars into the sky and has to figure out a way to get home. This whole storyline is hilarious, and it forces Jerry to use his smarts to make up for a really stupid mistake.
1Anatomy Park
Season 1, Episode 3
Rick and Morty’s first holiday episode is still its best. In season 1’s “Anatomy Park,” while Jerry is trying to wrap his head around his parents being in a throuple with a younger man when they visit for Christmas, Rick is busy trying to salvage a miniature amusement park he built inside a homeless man. Due to the man’s worsening medical condition, the tiny anatomy-themed park inside him is being destroyed by angry germs and diseases, so Rick shrinks Morty down and sends him in there.
While the episode doesn’t do much to get audiences into the holiday spirit, it is a masterclass in mixing curious sci-fi with laugh-out-loud comedy. The storyline is a fascinating blend ofJurassic ParkandFantastic Voyage, and it gets plenty of slapstick laughs out of personified illnesses wreaking havoc on the human body. This is one of the early episodes that showed viewers how wonderfully uniqueRick and Mortywould be.
