Rick and Morty just rewrote Christianity’s canonical Easter explanation for which came first: the Jesus or the eggs.
Ever since Season One, Dan Harmon and the Rick and Morty writers have made it clear that a sci-fi comedy centered around a genius nihilist simply cannot be a safe space for the faithful. In the very pilot of Rick and Morty, Rick’s famous off-hand remark to his granddaughter, “There is no God, Summer. Gotta rip that Band-Aid off now, you’ll thank me later,” established the show’s atheistic approach to cosmic questions about the nature of existence. Although Rick and Morty spent most of its run sporting a dismissive indifference toward organized religion, the last few seasons have seen the show take a more aggressive approach to satirizing certain sensitive belief systems.
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Then, in tonight’s new Easter-themed Rick and Morty episode, “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” the series waged an all-out attack on the holiday that makes Fox News’ War on Christmas look like a snowball fight.
In “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” Rick and Morty’s nebbish-y non-patriarch attempts to get his family into the Easter spirit, despite the fact that none of them (Jerry included) are practicing Christians or even know the exact date of Easter Sunday. Then, in a Tim Allen-esque twist of fate, Jerry accidentally turns a real-life Easter Bunny into roadkill, thus contracting a mutagenic disease that slowly turns him into a lumbering, lustful lagomorph who threatens to collapse Earth’s society by turning everyone terminally horny.
Meanwhile, Rick and Morty go on a Dan Brown-style hunt to find the mythological origins of the mutational plague, during which they encounter a race of cross-gun-wielding aliens who are also in search of the tools to stop the Easter Bunny scourge. The leader of these long-haired, bearded and prudish weirdos reveals that his race once sent a scout to Earth in to save our species from the intergalactic threat, only for us to crucify the alien. Thus, Christianity was born.
Seriously, within the canon of the Rick and Morty universe, the largest religion in human civilization spawned from a sex-hating alien who came to Earth to kill the Easter Bunny, only to be publicly executed on his species’ logo. Then, at the end of the episode, the Smith-Sanchez family spends the next six months ritually destroying the iconography of every other major religious holiday, including the hallowed Christmas, thus severing themselves from the last cultural ties to Christianity.
While Christian watchdog groups have long raged against adult animated comedies and their sinful storylines, this might be the furthest that any series has ever gone to mock, disrespect and dismantle Christian dogma on basic cable. Through “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” Rick and Morty turned the very foundations of Christianity into a fornication joke — even the blasphemous Family Guy never went so deep with their derision for the faith.
Presumably, “The Last Temptation of Jerry” will break the Rick and Morty record for most FCC complaints spawned from a single episode, but I doubt the writers are very concerned about the backlash from conservative Christians — the Rick and Morty team has seen what makes them cheer.
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