The latest episode of Rick and Morty’s seventh season, “That’s Amorte,” exemplified what the show does at its best: take a premise that is, on its face, inane or bizarre or hilarious (or all of the above), and turn it into something heartbreaking.
In this case, the show explored ethical consumption through the lens of spaghetti made out of the intestines of people who have killed themselves. (It makes somewhat more sense within the episode—keyword “somewhat.”) When Rick reveals that the delicious spaghetti he’s been feeding the family every Sunday night actually comes from a universe that farms victims of suicide for food, Morty becomes an impassioned critic of the practice—with the tepid support of his resigned, spaghetti-loving family.
The central conceit is perfectly nonsensical, a creative platform for the gross-out sci-fi humor that is Rick and Morty’s bread and butter. But, like with fan-favorite picks “The Vat of Acid Episode” and “A Rickconvenient Mort,” “That’s Amorte” ends on an emotional note. Rick and Morty successfully turn the ravenous spaghetti-eaters off of the enterprise by forcing them to watch a montage of moments from the life of the person whose body they’re about to consume. Set to a cover of Oasis’ “Live Forever,” it’s a sequence defined by its beautiful, relatable mundanity: a man’s life reduced to scenes painful and familiar.
From that empathetic beat, however, comes a Rick twist: It is the “complexity of life” that offends our meat-eating sensibilities, not the death. And so, in blissful ignorance, we eat. Including the Salisbury steak that Rick is now preparing for dinner, the gruesome origin of which the family insists they don’t want to know.
When reading fans’ reactions to the episode, what struck me more than the universal praise for it—many consider it to be Season 7’s peak thus far—was how just as many viewers were celebrating one of its quickest, easiest-to-miss gags. So we jumped at the chance to speak with showrunner Scott Marder and co-creator Dan Harmon about why the moment was so consequential within the Rick and Morty universe.
In the episode, Summer asks for someone to pass the parmesan while at dinner. But she doesn’t say “parmesan;” she pronounces it “par-mee-see-an.”
For fans, this baffling line reading sounded an exciting alarm. “Parmeeseean” is a callback to Season 6, whose premiere was the lore-heavy, action-packed, dimension-hopping adventure that fans crave. After their dimension becomes infected with a deceptively cute parasite, Rick relocates the family to what’s known as the Parmesan Dimension. The family’s original parallel dimension selves have all strangely died, so they slide right back into their places; the Parmesan Dimension is no different from their old one, Rick says, except here, they say “parmeeseean.”
Throwing in a line that’s simply funny to the casual ear but loaded for hardcore fans—our first reference to this tantalizing, game-changing plot point—was “such easy, low-hanging fruit” for the writers to include, Marder tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “They were eating so much spaghetti that we’re like, well, parmesan is certainly going to be available for this product.”
It was a perfect time to make this callback—and one that fans were, yes, hungry for, after Season 7’s episodic start—but it’s also indicative of Marder and the writing team’s overall intention with the show’s lore. “Anytime we can remind the audience that we’re looking at the show as a whole, and not forgetting about all that continuity, really goes a long way. We’re certainly intentionally trying to sprinkle all we can, when we can these days. So I love that people have taken note of that.”
Rick and Morty’s increased level of worldbuilding has attracted fans, who fixated on Summer’s “parmeeseean” line reading as if it were itself a huge story reveal. Marder is well aware of the fandom’s thirst for these kinds of lore drops and major plot developments, something he picked up on back during Season 5’s run.
“We always had an endgame of this big, blockbuster, canonical episode [for Season 5],” he said. “But we could feel the fans freaking out as the season went on, because we weren’t setting the table for it clearly—they thought maybe we were looking to abandon it completely, and we never were.”
Season 5 aired after the writers were already wrapping Season 6, meaning Season 7 is the first time they’re able to take that reaction into account. “My takeaway from that season was just that I want to remind them that we’re never taking our eye off the ball” on the storyline, Marder continued. “So if I can give you a wink or a nod that’s keeping you abreast of a thing that’s going on in the background with Rick Prime, or Evil Morty, or all that sort of stuff [...] that makes me happy.”
As Rick and Morty’s co-creator, Harmon has also come to appreciate that his comedy-first, very wacky baby has grown into a sci-fi mega-hit where this kind of storytelling is not only desired, but expected. “I assume back then [when the show first started], I would have been 10 times more allergic to that idea than I am now,” he said. “As we get closer to the end of our 70-episode order, it gets a lot easier for me to accept that the audience on some level does need this very canonical story.”
Still, that Rick is now at the center of a multi-dimensional hunt for the evil, parallel version of himself that killed his entire family isn’t exactly where Harmon imagined his character to be. “I would have thought he would just be Inspector Gadget till the end of time,” Harmon said, “just [having] one-off adventures, and you grow to love him by watching a thousand episodes. But we’re not gonna have him catch the one-armed man and have the one-armed man grow an arm back, and the fugitives start teaching fugitive class at a college while the guy that was hunting him gives them a thumbs up from the back of the room.”
To which Marder and I said: OK, but maybe you should, because that sounds pretty cool.
Even if that’s not happening any time soon, Marder promises that there’s more twists and major moments in the cards soon. “[In] the back-half of the season, we’ll touch upon all the things that we’ve been setting up and really follow through on a lot of expectations,” he teased. “It’s got some cool surprises.”
The teaser for Episode 5, which airs Nov. 12, promises an installment that is full of “huge spoilers”—something the fans are buzzing with excitement about. To go from “parmeeseean” to, say, a major showdown between Rick and his nemesis would be the best kind of whiplash. Or, better yet: Perhaps there’s still a chance for that one-armed man to appear?