‘Rick and Morty’ Fans Worry That the Next Episode Will Be A Return to This Bad Habit

In this Sunday’s new episode of Rick and Morty, are we finally going to figure out whether hooking up with a clone of yourself is incest, masturbation or simply “forgetting the ice cream”?

Over the last season and a half of Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon, Scott Marder and their writers have heeded their fandom’s advice and steered clear of a certain topic that past iterations of the creative team found irresistibly funny to the disgust of their audience. Ever since the second episode of Rick and Morty Season One featured a dream version of Summer Smith propositioning her brother and grandfather with a threesome, jokes about incest, depictions of incest, threats of incest and debatable instances of incest have been a staple of the series, as well as its most constant target for criticism.

Following an especially incestual Season Six, Rick and Morty has been mercifully abstinent from inter-family sexuality, but after Adult Swim released the cold open for this Sunday’s new episode, “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button,” some fans worried that the Beths are sipping that Venusian wine again:

Clearly, “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button” is going to be an episode exploring the relationship between Earth Beth and Space Beth and the complicated dynamics of staying friends with either your own clone or the original version of yourself. Considering that the last such Rick and Morty episode to, uh, “develop” the chemistry between the Beths was Season Six’s extra-horny “Bethic Twinstinct,” in which the doppelgangers spent the entire 22-minute run-time banging each other’s brains out, fans have reason to fear that the new season may be falling back into old habits.

In many threads discussing the cold open on the Rick and Morty subreddit, fans reacted to the sneak peek of “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button” with both alarm and arousal. “I hope its not another stupid incest episode,” one such fan commented.

“I hope its another stupid incest episode,” several other fans dissented.

Even though the Beths’ interaction in the cold open doesn’t appear to be sexual, the reminder of their intense personal history still sparked the high-IQ members of the Rick and Morty fandom to restart their ethical debate about the relationship. “Sex with your clone isn’t incest,” one scholar argued.

“Considering that twins have the same DNA (cause they are a split from the same primordial cell), and clones are basically that with some delay, it’s clearly incest,” another disagreed.

Hopefully, the general public here in the real world never has to consider such issues, but the mere sight of Beth and Space Beth sharing a moment alone together is enough to have Rick and Morty fans grappling with the complexities of family, desire, clone personhood and their own personal urges.

Said one fan simply, “Hell yeah, a lesbian episode.”