How Rick And Morty Could End According To Series Co-Creator Dan Harmon

Honestly, it's anyone's guess as to when "Rick and Morty" decides to call it curtains. The animated series first debuted on Adult Swim in 2013 and quickly became a bonafide hit. By the time Season 3 wrapped up in 2017, Adult Swim knew they had an absolute classic on their hands and commissioned a whopping 70 additional episodes. For now, fans of the iconic space-traveling family have nothing to worry about as only a handful of those 70 episodes have aired, meaning there's tons of "Rick and Morty" to expect over the coming years. Despite that, all things must come to an end, right? 

During a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Dan Harmon was asked what a potential ending for the series would look like. Seeing as "Rick and Morty" is largely uninterested in serialized storytelling these days and tends to just go in its own chaotic, improv-like direction, it's interesting to hear Harmon bring up a genuinely intriguing endpoint for the series. "It would maybe just be Morty turning 15 and finding a girlfriend that actually makes him want to be an independent person, so everything is kind of destroyed because Morty just wants to be a teenager now and start to grow up," Harmon said. 

Seeing as Morty has perpetually been 14 for the last decade, it would be pretty hilarious that the act of him turning older would wrap up the storied series. "Yeah, maybe Morty's 15th birthday would be the catastrophic sinking of that Titanic," Harmon added. 

While it would take a fortune teller to know just exactly how Dan Harmon will wrap up the series, it's intriguing how Harmon, who is known to dissect tropes, wants to break away from the idea of the "forever teenager." The benefit of animated sitcoms is that the characters don't necessarily age unless the creatives allow them to. 

For the last two decades, Stewie Griffin from "Family Guy" has been one year old and since 1989, Bart Simpson of "The Simpsons" has remained in limbo as a ten-year-old delinquent. This isn't a bug or oversight for these shows — it's a feature, which allows creatives to continue to tell the stories they want to tell without having to subscribe to logic or real-life consequences. With "Rick and Morty," the teenage sidekick has been fourteen since 2013, and it would be interesting to see how the character's personality would change as a fifteen-year-old. 

But back in 2021, showrunner Scott Marder made it clear: age doesn't matter. "Age all that stuff comes up [in the writer's room] all the time because sometimes people are like 'Oh it can be such and such's birthday,' and we're like 'We don't do them on this show,'" Marder told Monsters and Critics (via ComicBook.com). Marder added that birthday episodes are off the table, unlike Christmas episodes, which show the passage of time, because it's "kind of fun in cartoons to keep everyone the same age as it is..."

But if Harmon gets his way, age could become a key factor in how "Rick and Morty" ends. 

It's no secret that "Rick and Morty" has peaked in popularity. As it continues to grow as a multimedia franchise, Dan Harmon has big plans for the series. During his chat with THR, the co-creator candidly brought up the idea of bringing Rick and Morty's adventures to the silver screen, saying, "My philosophy would be to just take a 'Rick and Morty' adventure, and spend a bunch of extra money on it and make it 90 minutes long." 

For now, however, all efforts are focused on the episodes that Adult Swim commissioned years ago. Will "Rick and Morty" end after those 70 episodes are delivered (likely around Season 10)? In true Harmon fashion: maybe, maybe not. While speaking with The Wrap in 2021, Harmon described the show as "infinite," teasing a future that never ends. "And I think that might be the cause of some frustration on the fans' part, because my original commitment to just, I think a good TV show is one that lasts 1000 episodes," Harmon teased, implying that there's about... some 900 more episodes to go.

That's not a crazy number when one considers that "The Simpsons" has released north of 750 episodes over the last four decades. Unsurprisingly, in a 2023 feature for The Hollywood Reporter, Harmon expressed interest in having his series run for decades, just like "The Simpsons."