Rick And Morty Turned A Community Episode Into Its Most Shockingly Heartfelt Story

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 5 seconds ago

Rick and Morty is one of those shows that even if you’ve never seen a single episode, you’ve seen the memes: Pickle Rick, “20 minute adventure, quick in and out,” “What is my purpose?” It’s a show packed with jokes that range from the absurd to the multilayered, which makes sense since it shares a creator, Dan Harmon, with the equally acclaimed comedy Community.

Harmon explained in an interview with The Independent that Season 4’s “The Old Man and the Seat” was originally a plot for Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) about shy pooping. True to the spirit of the absurd sci-fi series, the original concept ended up attached to a take on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, featuring one of the cartoon’s most heartfelt and emotional endings to date. 

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Shy Pooper

The Season 4 Rick and Morty episode starts with the reappearance of the butter-passing robot at breakfast, when Rick (voiced by Justin Roiland back then) announces he has to go. Summer (Spencer Grammer) explains to everyone that her grandfather’s a shy pooper, and she’s right. Rick uses his portal gun and works his way to a toilet overlooking a cliff on a picturesque alien world with no other humanoids for hundreds of miles, if not even further. Once he’s done, Rick notices a broken branch, which sets off a manhunt for whoever intruded on his poop sanctuary. 

Turns out that an alien named Tony (Jeffrey Wright) found the isolated toilet and started using it, since he’s also a shy pooper. Rick responds in his usual way, by building a giant robotic Rick mech to sit on Tony when he uses the toilet and then putting Tony in a vat of red goo that shows him his ideal version of Heaven (complete with his dead wife). Tony’s shocked, wondering why Rick can build a virtual Heaven but isn’t able to share a toilet? 

The question hits Rick like a ton of bricks and succinctly sums up the smartest man in existence. Soon after, Tony dies in a skiing accident from “living his life to the fullest” and Rick goes to use the toilet, revealing he rigged a series of holograms and a speech about how Tony is sitting there, all alone, because no one wants to be around him. It’s not subtle; it’s clearly Rick coming to terms with his own sense of loneliness and how Tony, against all odds, seemed like he legitimately wanted to be his friend. Rick sitting on his toilet, all alone, taunted by his own prank, hits even harder after his loneliness and lack of connection became a major part of the last two seasons. 

Rick And Morty Manages To Be Both Very Stupid And Very Smart

“The Old Man and the Seat” wrings the most emotion possible out of a storyline about pooping, but then there’s the other half of the episode. Jerry (Chris Parnell) agrees to develop an app for Rick’s assistant, Glootie (Taika Waititi, no, seriously), which turns out to be a dating app designed to distract the humans while aliens steal Earth’s resources. This is explained by the Monogtron Leader (Sam Neil, and yes, Rick and Morty has surprising stars drop by for cameos) and his Queen (Kathleen Turner, see the prior parentheses), until it all goes crashing down with the addition of a pay wall. 

Normally, the thought of a simple pay wall turning a wildly successful app into an instant disaster would be the highlight of an episode, but “The Old Man and the Seat” is all about Rick coming face-to-face with his own loneliness. The B-plot doesn’t matter, even if it has some good moments, notably Summer’s soul mate constantly changing, though it does raise the question of how a shy pooping storyline would have been handled on Community. Dan Harmon could never quite get it to work, but by leaning into Rick’s self-induced loneliness, he managed to turn shy pooping into an episode that was true to the character and revealed new depths to his narcissistic nihilism. Rick and Morty isn’t Shakespeare, but it gets close.