Rick and Morty Season 3 episode eight, “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” isn’t meant to be as consequential as other episodes. The stakes are set early. “We’ll be doing this instead of Interdimensional Cable,” Rick says, referencing anthology episodes of micro-shorts, improvised rants and surreal gags that appeared in the previous two seasons. The shorts, selections from alternate dimensional channel-flipping, have been replaced by memories cut from Morty’s mind: the titular “Mind Blowers” that broke Morty. Or, as Morty soon discovers, memories Rick would rather his grandson didn’t retain.
Many of the shorts in “Morty’s Mind Blowers” are about the horrible outcomes from some of Rick and Morty’s adventures. Morty drives a guidance counselor to suicide and gets an alien religious zealot condemned to a literal hell. Other memories erased from Morty’s mind are painful reminders of just how his family is broken, including his mother’s snap decision to save Summer. And, of course, many are memories erased because they reflect poorly on Rick. Rick even erases Morty’s memory of winning at checkers.
But despite the dizzying number of memories we see in “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” the Rick and Morty Season 3 writing team came up with way more that didn’t make the cut. After “Morty’s Mind Blowers” aired, Rick and Morty writers shared on Twitter some of their over 100 pitches that didn’t make it into the episode.
We pitched about a hundred mind blowers, then had to narrow it down and vote, then we still wrote more. https://t.co/6gZBSOSuMx
— Rick and Morty (@RickandMorty) September 18, 2017
A whiteboard in the Rick and Morty ’s writer’s room is stuffed with concepts like “dueling UFOs,” “New York Planet,” “Come Alive Spray,” and the simultaneously explicable and cryptic description, “William Hurt or Jeff Bridges.”
Writer Dan Guterman pitched “a memory Morty has of being an old man and helping his granddaughter do her homework” and the far more enigmatic “Cake Stairs,” which is best left to the individual imagination. Guterman also shared this pitch from email inbox:
“rick and morty in parakeet costumes & shock collars, playing violin to vivaldi’s four seasons (winter) in front of a theater full of parakeet aliens. They both look traumatized as fuck.” [sic]
Writer James Siciliano pitched a memory Morty had of being “turned into a living painting” and auctioned off, while Mike McMahan pitched Rick falling in love with a fire truck. And many mind blowers got beyond the pitch to the scripting stage:
The point of sharing all these unused Morty Mind Blowers is to suggest that we shouldn’t read too much into the actual content of any specific memory, since the screenwriting focus was less about delivering a coherent narrative and more concerned with fun experiments with their lead characters.
Because without the hodge-podge, miscellany framing of “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” I’d be awfully tempted to theorize that the episode might be a stealth origin story for the Evil Morty we last saw winning the Citadel election in “The Ricklantis Mixup.” A Morty absorbing the full scope of Rick’s betrayal — selectively editing his entire subjective reality around piddling stuff like mispronouncing “take it for granted” — sure seems like a good reason to orchestrate a pro-Morty revolution. And if you’re looking for evidence that this isn’t the main Dimension C-137 Rick or Morty, how about the memory of Rick appearing at Morty’s 13th birthday party, even though Rick didn’t return to the Smith family home until Morty was 14? Or the fact that the Rick and Morty of “Morty’s Mind Blowers” have had to abandon two realities, thanks to the shadowy, squirrel-led New World Order?
But no, this is probably one of those “don’t think about it” situations. “Morty’s Mind Blowers” is a flight of imagination first. Though it covers similar emotional ground as other episodes — Rick abuses Morty, the emptiness fueling Rick’s dependency on Morty is exposed, Rick reaffirms his callousness or allows Morty a sliver of dignity and growth — there’s the sense that we shouldn’t take any of the actual episode events, the Morty Mind Blowers, all that literally. Otherwise, “Morty’s Mind Blowers” would be more ruinous to their relationship than most adventures, were they to remember it.
