The Missing Gadget That Has Rick And Morty Fans Worried About Season 5

"Rick and Morty" fans are a suspicious lot. They have to be, really — one time, one of the show's main characters got plugged into a video game and wound up living an entire life as a carpet salesman with a sports injury. Another time, a whole episode took place inside of a toy train representing narrative structure. These sorts of things happen more often than you'd think on a cartoon about drunken sci-fi adventures.

So it's no surprise that the fifth season of the series was met with a skeptical eye towards possible skullduggery. Plot threads and action sequences are currently being treated like the suspiciously animated hand gestures of a birthday magician trying to distract their audience from the half dozen pigeons that are trying to rip through their jacket lining. "We won't get fooled again," "Rick and Morty" devotees seem to cry as one, in the half-hearted tones of a group of people who absolutely know that they're about to get fooled again.

One suspicious detail about season five has jumped out at fans as a possible sign that things are not as they seem. You might not have noticed yet, but the first stretch of the new season is missing an important piece of "Rick and Morty" technology.

Take a look at the /r/RickAndMorty forum on Reddit and you'll notice a group of like-minded fans convinced that they may have cracked the code to some peculiar goings on in the Adult Swim series. In the hours following the release of the third episode of season five, "A Rickconvenient Truth," eagle-eyed viewers pointed out that we haven't seen a Rick's portal device in action a single time this season. Adding to the weirdness is the fact that, as user tokulord brought up, nobody has referred to Rick by his "C-137" designation. All signs point to shenanigans. "Maybe every episode has taken place in a different reality," tokulord theorized. And hey, stranger things have happened. One time Rick escaped the law by destroying the concept of money. The show is bonkers.

Maybe it's nothing, but the lack of swirling green portals is certainly a departure for the reality-hopping adventures of Rick and Morty. Rick's portal gun has become every bit as iconic as the show's main characters, after all, and it would've been suspect if the first half of a season of "Star Trek" took place without the Enterprise making an appearance, too. For concrete answers, fans will just have to stay tuned through the end of season five, the first half of which is scheduled to wrap up on July 18, 2021.