Rick and Morty is a series all about the relentless, inventive possibilities of science fiction. Sometimes, like in the dense multi-dimensional narrative of Rick and Morty Season 2 episode “A Rickle in Time,” this means rigorous plotting and concise, science-ish explanations. Other times it means weird alien shit. When it comes to the latter, it’s hard to beat an alien species that—when they’re not working mundane clerk jobs—willingly explode into goo and cannibalize each other. That would be the Gobble Blag Blugs (they’re still unnamed on Rick and Morty) who first appeared in the Rick and Morty couch gag intro to The Simpsons preceding Rick and Morty Season 2. What the hell is the life-cycle for these odd, cannibalizing creatures?

Rick and Morty Simpsons Couch Gag

Making two other appearances in Rick and Morty Season 2 episode “Mortynight Run” and Rick and Morty Season 2 episode “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate,” this is all we know about the Gobble Blag Blugs:

The Gobble Blag Blugs of Rick and Morty

• They’re widespread across the Galactic Federation, but tend to work crappier jobs than the dominant Gromflomites. We’ve seen homeless Gobble Blag Blugs (or perhaps human preconceptions simply make it appear that way).

• They explode, seemingly at random (perhaps when they get irritated?), but also on purpose.
• They drink each other’s goo after explosion.

• Some are very tiny.
• Exploding is part of their popular sports culture. There is a way to skillfully explode.

Do these facts cohere in some way? Or are the Rick and Morty writers just as uncertain about the Gobble Blag Blugs as us?

While it’s hard to imagine what life form could encompass both mediocre day-jobs at chain copy shops and a tendency toward spontaneous explosion, there might be a few things we can guess about this strangest of Rick and Morty species.

Is DNA getting passed around in that goo? It seems probable that any creature that would evolve—or be engineered with—spontaneous body explosion probably has reproduction in mind. It’s possible that the Rick and Morty Gobble Blag Blugs are absorbing DNA, perhaps even information, including memories.

Rick and Morty and Planarian

A famous experiment once claimed to find that chopping up one planarian worm and feeding it to another also passed on memories, demonstrating the possibility of chemical memory transfer. While the planarian experiment has taken on a folkloric aura, newer experiments have managed chemically transferred memories across the species barrier (okay… just rats to mice, but still). Could Gobble Blag Blugs be drinking each other’s information, like planarian worms absorbing each other’s memories?

Since the entire Gobble Blag Blug society is ordered around exploding there are two possibilities: either exploding doesn’t hurt them, or they value individual lives in a way entirely alien to the human race (except for maybe Rick and entomologists). If it’s the former, then suddenly the Rick and Morty Season 2 Gobble Blag Blugs have a simple explanation: they’re mostly undifferentiated cells that can easily glom back together. The Gobble Blag Blugs could even be bacterial colony, like Portuguese Man O’ War with eyes and Doc Brown’s haircut.

Exploding Aliens and Society

But what if exploding is death and they do it anyway? Maybe the Gobble Blag Blugs prefer death once they reach a certain age, like a biological, species-wide Logan’s Run. Perhaps they all work counter jobs in Rick and Morty because the unpredictability of their deaths prevents them from following long term goals or finding stable employment (they’d be a tempting species for businesses to discriminate against).

Whatever truth, the nature of the Gobble Blag Blugs life cycle is both comedy and tragedy, leaving room for biological and moral speculation of a bewildering scope.

In an essay highlighting the terrifying reproductive cannibalism of the Micromalthus debilis beetle (“…inserts his head into her genital aperture and devours…”) Stephen Jay Gould writes, “The best illustrations of adaptation by evolution are the ones that strike our intuition as peculiar or bizarre. Science is not ‘organized common sense’; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.” The Gobble Blag Blug’s would suggest that the best science fiction can disorganize our common sense and retool our intuition in the same way.