Comic-Con@Home: ‘Rick and Morty’ panel gets existential about decoys & dental hygiene

Season 5 of Adult Swim's Rick and Morty isn’t over yet, but that hasn’t stopped co-creator Dan Harmon and some of the cast from talking about Mr. Nimbus, giant sperm monsters, and alien squid assassins who happen to be decoys (or are they?).

Harmon was joined by showrunner Scott Marder as well as Chris Parnell (voice of Jerry), Sarah Chalke (voice of Beth), Spencer Grammer (voice of Summer). The group talked about the show’s fifth season and had a little friendly competition about what characters are most likely to do certain things. At the end of the panel, Rick and Morty (both voiced by Justin Roiland) even showed up, and had a nice little argument about digging holes.

Check out the Rick and Morty panel here.

The panel, moderated by Brandon Johnson, touched on several happenings so far in Season 5. On the topic of the decoys in the episode, “Mortyplicity,” Harmon explained how he got the idea about someone wanting to have decoy families (who didn’t know they were decoys) around.

“That was always an idea that was bouncing around,” he said. “Once you get beyond [the questions of] am I going to be able to eat or pay rent, you start worrying about whether you can keep what you have. My biggest nightmare is home invasion, and what would be better than knowing that someone could invade you but they’d be home invading a fake family.”

Confused? Don’t worry, Harmon went on to compare the idea of having a decoy family to shoes and cars.

“Your shoes are supposed to protect your feet from the pavement, but now we get really into shoes and we get mad if we get stuff on our shoes, which is kind of weird,” he said. “And also the way we value our cars, but a car is like a shoe for your whole body — it should just be covered in crap and dented, and every dent in your car should be like, ‘Oh, that would’ve been me.’”

Cars are shoes and decoys are both cars and shoes and an effective method of home security. It all, somewhat surprisingly, makes sense (we think?).

But back to the panel. The virtual event ended with the panelists deciding which characters were most likely to do a certain action. Who would be most likely to send something back at a restaurant? Jerry (or maybe Rick, it was a tie). Who’s most likely to show up on 90-Day Fiancée? Summer, of course. Most likely to floss? Beth beat out Jerry, but only by one vote.

Will we see these hypothetical situations made canon someday on the show? Who knows. Rick and Morty is a show where anything (anything) can happen, and we’ve got at least 52 more episodes in the series to go, since they’ve already turned in 18 of the 70-episode deal Harmon broke back in 2018.

New episodes of Rick and Morty premiere Sundays at 11 p.m. ET / PT only on Adult Swim. Seasons 1-4 of the show are also streaming on HBO Max.

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