Anna Daniels
We don’t know much about Rick’s former love life, but we did meet one particular ex-girlfriend back on season 2. On the episode “Auto Erotic Assimilation,” Rick and his grandkids respond to a distress beacon coming from a spaceship that has been taken over by a parasitic hive mind slowly infecting the entire crew. As it turns out, that hive mind is an old flame (or is it flames?) of Rick’s, the collective intelligence Unity.
Unity takes Rick, Morty, and Summer back to a planet she thoroughly assimilated by injecting her consciousness into every available sentient mind living upon it. As Rick and Unity start to rekindle their romance, it becomes pretty clear that they didn’t have the healthiest relationship. Unity really has her act together before, uh, reuniting with Rick. She’s assimilated an entire planet, after all, and she has ambitions to bring the rest of the universe into the fold. It speaks to the depth of Rick’s toxic influence that he’s able to knock her so far off course. Within hours of their reunion, he has her cooking up party drugs and populating stadiums with redheads to live out high-concept, X-rated fantasies.
As soon as Unity realizes how badly Rick has derailed her life, she abandons the planet, leaving Rick a series of breakup notes. He doesn’t take it well. The final scene of this episode is one of Rick and Morty’s darkest. To the music of Chaos Chaos, a despondent Rick prepares a death laser in his garage. After confirming the beam’s lethality on a test subject, he places his head underneath the barrel, but he can’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger. It’s the closest we see Rick come to serious self-harm, and it’s pretty jarring — and all over a girl(s).
Breakups are certainly tough, but there’s one more thing that happened to Rick that was even worse than Unity’s abandonment.
Written by: Looper
