The Newest ‘Rick and Morty’ Episode Flashes A Middle-Finger at Pop-Culture Prudes

Tonight’s new episode of Rick and Morty, “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” isn’t safe for the sex-negative.

One of the most irritating and inescapable conversations on social media is over the role that sexuality should play in TV, movies and music as more and more younger audiences push back against depictions of sex and nudity in pop culture with puritanical fervor. Many members of Generation Z have, so far, proven themselves to be about as averse to sex in media as Will H. Hays, a trend that’s prompted a constant deluge of think-pieces and opinion polls and caused the film industry to scale back on the steaminess.

In tonight’s episode of Rick and Morty, the show’s writers drew a direct line from the Christian roots of anti-sex sentiment in American culture to the contemporary eye-coverers who call for fewer nude scenes on Twitter every time HBO drops a new series. According to a new piece of Rick and Morty canon, the very foundation of Christianity rests in a race of alien prudes who sent Jesus to Earth to stop the Easter Bunny from making us all fuck like rabbits.

In “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” the butt of the Smith-Sanchez family’s jokes is infected with a mutagenic disease that turns him into a horrific, powerful Easter Bunny capable of manipulating other people’s sex drives to the point where society devolves into one giant pixelated orgy. During their search for a way to reverse Jerry’s transformation, Rick and Morty encounter a race of Christ Troopers who have been fighting against the planet-destroying Easter Bunnies for thousands of years, and whose taste in TV, movies and music align with many of today’s twenty-somethings TV-watchers.

“My species does not like sex,” Christ Trooper General Reinhardt Kincaid explains to Rick and Morty. “We think it’s gross.”

“I don’t like seeing it in movies or TV!” another Trooper adds.

A third then chimes in, “It upsets me when when they reference it in pop songs!”

Soon thereafter, mutant Jerry murders the entire squadron of Christ Troopers and leaves their general torn in two, because people who squirm at artistic expressions of sexuality somehow aren’t nearly as turned off by extreme violence and gore. 

This is far from the first time that Rick and Morty has introduced the audience to an alien race who is uncomfortable with nudity and sexuality. Season One’s “M. Night Shay-Aliens!” featured Zigerian scammers who can’t bring themselves to gaze upon another’s genitals, but the Christ Troopers feel like a much more pointed satire of prudish sensibilities in modern culture, especially considering that they are, canonically, the progenitors of the Puritan Movement that first established squeamishness in American culture hundreds of years ago.

Given the show’s indulgent and demented depictions of intergalactic intercourse over the last eight seasons, it seems unlikely that any such prudes are still watching Rick and Morty in 2025, but, if they are, I’m sure that we’ll soon see a viral Twitter thread about how it’s immoral for Dan Harmon to make them watch a man give his motorcycle a rim job.