We learn a lot about the Smith family matriarch in the ninth episode of season three of Rick and Morty, “The ABCs of Beth,” which takes us on a first-ever Rick and Beth adventure while Morty and Summer spend the weekend with Jerry. Likewise, Beth learns a lot about herself in a breakthrough that’s been nearly three seasons in the making.
The episode kicks off with Rick, Summer, and Beth listening to a local news report about the scheduled execution of a child murderer, the father of her childhood friend Tommy. She reveals that only years of therapy have allowed her to come to terms with Tommy’s murder, and that as a child she had convinced herself that he had gotten lost in a make-believe world, the stupidly-named “magical realm of Froopyland,” as Rick suspiciously pokes his head around the corner.
“Was it my best work, I don’t know. But does it deserve to be shit on creatively?” Rick asks Beth, and after sending Summer and Morty off to Jerry’s apartment in hilarious bubbles that don’t contain air. “Yeah, I agree with your look of horrified realization, you can be very inconsiderate sometimes,” he fires at his daughter, in her dawning horror of learning that Froopyland was indeed a was a real (or, “real”) place that Rick constructed to keep her occupied as a child, and that Tommy really did get lost there.
And that’s how Rick and Beth end up going on a mission to rescue Tommy, on the off chance he somehow survived starvation for two decades and change. Of course, Tommy (voiced by Thomas Middleditch) did indeed survive, managing to populate Froopyland with creatures from his own half-Froopy, half-human DNA, which he uses for both sexual and, um, cannibalistic purposes.
But the real reveal of the episode is that Tommy didn’t just get lost in Froopyland, but was pushed into a honey swamp by a young Beth, who as it turns out is more like her father than she ever imagined. Froopyland wasn’t just a byproduct of Rick’s bad parenting (although, it was partly that too), but a way of keeping his terrifying daughter occupied so neighborhood children and pets didn’t go missing. The reveal triggers an existential crisis for Beth, who tries to do the right thing by bringing Tommy home, only to eventually fall back on her father’s lazy science ways by simply cloning a new Tommy to exonerate his father for the murder.
After all is said and done, Beth is forced to come to terms with herself, her father, and the fact that he’s not actually the great person she’s put on a pedestal all these years — and even worse, she is just like him. As such, Rick offers Beth the “out” she’s always wanted with zero consequences, by offering to clone her as well (as opposed to say, building a robotic drone), so she could go off and finally find herself while the clone performed her home and work duties. In the end, Beth says she’s made a choice, but when the family gathers around the dinner table at the end of the episode, we don’t know if it’s the real Beth or clone Beth. Given Harmon and company’s insistence for fans to not read too deeply into things, I suspect we never will.
Meanwhile, in a long overdue Jerry-centric side-plot, Jerry has started dating — err, “soul bonded” with a seriously intense alien Priestess from Krutabulon named Keara, who has telekinetic powers, three boobs, and an “avocado-shaped” head. Naturally, Jerry gets in over his head and nearly gets his children killed by using them as an excuse to get out of the relationship. Classic Jerry.
Next week is the finale! Where did this season go?!
Random notes:
* Love the meta nod to fans who endlessly speculate and theorize about whether or not time travel is involved in the Rick and Morty universe when Rick jumps into a portal to get pizza from another dimension: “By the way, that wasn’t time travel, there were just a couple of pizzas on the counter, I grabbed them.”
* Part of me wants to know how Rick got his arm back by the end of the episode, but the answer is of course probably just that he built a gadget in like three seconds to regrow it, because that’s how this show works.
* Did everyone catch the lyrics to the “heartfelt” song playing over the montage as Rick and Beth cloned a new Tommy involving doo doo and butts and fathers and daughters? So absurdly perfect.
* Rick and Morty knows that you (and by “you” … *cough, cough*) really like watching The Bachelor. “It’ll love and provide for the kids, do your job, and consume broadcast reality TV on the same allegedly ironic level as you.”
* The answering machine messages in this week’s post-credits scene were gold, as it’s revealed that of course Rick eventually came to Jerry’s rescue, and then had sex with Keara in the process.
