Why Jessica From Rick And Morty Season 5 Episode 1 Has Fans Scratching Their Heads

"Rick and Morty" has always taken a two-pronged approach to continuity. On the one hand, you've got situations like what happened to Birdperson – long-running story arcs that keep getting more complex as time goes on. Then there are the plotlines that get chucked in a ditch, doused with gasoline, and burned to nothingness while the writers walk, unaffected and slightly buzzed, into the night. Sometimes, a story just has to get relegated to another universe while our heroes bury their own bodies under a flower bed. The fact that no part of that last sentence was a metaphor really helps to solidify the point.

And with the show's Season 5 premiere, "Mort Dinner Rick Andre," came a new complication: Jessica, Morty's longtime love interest and frequent wrench in his adolescent gears, is pulled into a Narnia dimension where time moves differently. Captured by zealots and trapped in a crystal, she experiences eons of history while frozen in place, shifting her perspective and allowing her the ability to perceive time as a finite and terrible instance. Or, as she so eloquently puts it, "**** off, I'm a time god."

Is this a permanent change for the "Rick and Morty" multiverse? A one-time gag that we'll ignore later on? A cutting piece of meta-commentary on the nature of characters used as human carrots being held in front of protagonists as a promised but unattainable reward?

Hard to say. Reddit really made a meal out of it, though.

Fans took to Reddit's /r/rickandmorty forum with a glut of questions about Jessica's apparent new normal. "What's next for Jessica the Time God?" "Is this the last tango in C-137 for Morty and Jessica?"

Some viewers saw the character's development as a sign of things to come. "I think it's fairly obvious that Jessica is going to appear more and more often in the future," u/ElectricalCategory51 wrote. "She was only a story prop; now she's an interesting character (instead of a cliché) ... Also, the writers took the time to make sure Rick, Jerry, and Beth all met her. I think that's a rather large clue." Others pointed out that this could be a phase that she's going through – "I guess I expected Morty or Rick to mind blow Jessica," stated u/itsberty, bringing up Rick's penchant for wiping people's memories any time they get uppity.

Mostly, people seemed excited by Jessica's newfound sense of self-awareness, as compared to earlier seasons where she was just The Cute Girl. User u/loafpleb wrote that "Jessica actually acknowledging that she's been less of a character and more of an object of Morty's affections was pretty neat. Hope to see where her character is going in the future."

Meanwhile, Beth and Jerry experienced their own character development, but nobody seemed as excited to celebrate that for some reason.