The Morty Scene That Went Too Far In Rick And Morty

In "Rick and Morty," there really isn't such a thing as "too far." At any given point in the series, Rick Sanchez and his family are liable to perform some of the most heinous acts imaginable. They have committed murder, sold weapons to professional assassins, and even once irreversibly transformed everyone on their planet into grotesque, Cronenbergian monsters. At this point, there are almost no surprises.

However, it doesn't necessarily take a surprise to make an emotional impact on the viewer. Though the show revels in detached death and destruction on a regular basis, the death of a single character can still have an effect as long as it is given the right context in the story. With that in mind, there is one Morty scene that went a bit too far given how sudden, brutal, and generally dark a character's death was. Granted, it was supposed to be all those things, but that didn't make it any less shocking.

Season 2 Episode 9, "Look Who's Purging Now" is already grim to begin with. In it, Rick and Morty become stranded on a planet of humanoid cat-people on the night of their society's "purge night," an event similar to the one in the popular "Purge" movies, which Morty thinks is horrifying. The two are helped along by a kindly old lighthouse keeper, who lets them use his lighthouse as a vantage point to send a distress signal back to Summer on Earth ... on the condition that Morty listens to him read his screenplay.

Afterward, even though he asks for Morty's honest opinion, the man gets offended when Morty criticizes it for using a flashback at the beginning of the story. He demands that Rick remove the distress beacon, and a distressed Morty loses control. He pushes the man down the entire length of the lighthouse's staircase and mocks the broken corpse lying at the bottom.

The nihilist that he is, Rick doesn't care too much that Morty committed murder. However, he is a bit surprised. Morty is historically a goody-goody, and the fact that he would act so unhinged towards an innocent, albeit insecure person is extremely out of character. Because it is so out of character for Morty, especially this early in the series, the moment seems much darker in contrast to other deaths and is pretty uncomfortable to watch the first time around.