Every Rick & Morty Christmas Episode Explained

Although there are three festive Rick & Morty episodes across the show’s five seasons, none of them quite fit the normal Christmas special format. Since the series began in 2013, Rick & Morty has never been an average animated sitcom, nor has the show been content with playing into television conventions when it could warp audience expectations beyond recognition. The anarchic animated comedy has been subverting sci-fi television cliches and family sitcom tropes alike for five seasons now, offering darkly comic spins on familiar conventions.

As such, few viewers were surprised when Rick & Morty’s season 5 Thanksgiving episode was a high-octane action movie parody that satirized everything from for-profit healthcare to permanent war. Similarly, the few Christmas episodes that Rick & Morty have starred in are darker than most show’s Halloween outings. Whether they are violent, surreally silly, or just barely related to Christmas, all of Rick & Morty’s Yuletide outings have shifted the definition of the phrase “holiday special” to include more absurdity than even South Park and American Dad offered before the Adult Swim hit.

Rick & Morty’s first Christmas episode arrived as early as the show’s third outing way back in 2013’s season 1. Like “Meseeks and Destroy,” this season 1 outing featured some juvenile gross-out humor that likely wouldn’t have made it to air in Rick & Morty‘s later seasons. However, it was also an inventive and fast-paced adventure that proved the show’s early, still-rough potential. The second Christmas episode would not arrive until 2019, during season 4. Even stranger than the first Christmas outing, this second festive episode featured a timeline-twisting knotty plot that fortunately did not get in the way of a lot of laughs. Finally, the next episode was the oddest festive Rick & Morty outing of all, a meta episode that aired in May but still found time for a sweet vignette set at Christmas and even featured a cameo by Jesus in its closing scenes.

‘Anatomy Park’ (Season 1, Episode 3)

The season 1 outing ‘Anatomy Park’ sees Rick & Morty parody Fantastic Voyage and Jurassic Park simultaneously as the show sent Morty inside the body of a vagrant, wherein Rick had set a microscopic theme park. The episode is as gross and silly as it sounds and has much of the show’s cruder early-season humor, feeling like a South Park episode as much as a Rick & Morty outing. However, while gross jokes about Morty’s short-lived love interest and her unfortunate anatomy show that the series has grown a lot since its early outings, there is a lot to love in ‘Anatomy Park.’ Jerry’s uncomfortable family reunion might be the most cringeworthy comedy the show has pulled off to date, while Morty’s attempts to escape the titular theme park is as gory and funny as the best Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segments.

‘Rattlestar Ricklactica’ (Season 4, Episode 5)

Rick & Morty season 4 episode 5’s ‘Rattlestar Ricklactica’ saw the series return to Yuletide settings for another bizarre adventure, this one centering around Morty’s attempts to make up for accidentally killing a space snake. This being Rick & Morty, things soon spiral out of his control and the episode eventually devolves into a time-traveling adventure that just about remembers its Christmas setting in time for the ending. Ironically, although a lot of Rick & Morty’s most critically-beloved later outings are more thoughtful and poignant character studies, ‘Rattlestar Ricklactica’ succeeds precisely because the episode offers nothing in the way of nuance, added depth, or insight into the show’s cast.

Instead, the supremely silly sight of Rick & Morty’s Langoliers-inspired Time Cops laying  a beatdown on a prehistoric snake as it discovers tools makes this season 4 outing a critical favorite. As implied by the absurdity of the above image, ‘Rattlestar Ricklactica’ uses its festive setting to tell the sort of bizarre, freewheeling story that Rick & Morty’s earlier seasons typically indulged in. In a season that included more introspective episodes like ‘The Old Man and The Seat’ (season 4, episode 2) and ‘The Vat of Acid Episode,’ (season 4, episode 8), Rick & Morty wisely opted to use the show’s Christmas episode as an opportunity to reset and revisit some supremely silly earlier characters in a plot that is entirely unnecessary, but all the funnier for its silliness.

‘Never Ricking Morty’ (Season 4, Episode 6)

Although ‘Never Ricking Morty’ arrived in May 2020 (and even featured one of television’s earliest COVID references in Rick & Morty’s prescient satirical gag), the episode does have a few connections to Christmas throughout its runtime. One early scene sees a minor character reminisce about a(n imagined) Christmas with Rick, and the last scene sees Jesus himself arrive on Rick & Morty. It is all in service of a meta-plot about trying to crash the story engine of the series, but the presence of Jesus as a literal Deus Ex Machina means that this season 4 outing just about qualifies as a Christmas episode for the show. After all, most sitcoms have dozens of festive episodes and never feature a cameo from the man who is the reason for the season (for example, The Simpsons’ 20 Christmas episodes include a grand total of 0 appearances for Jesus, outside of Bart standing in for him).

Will Rick & Morty Make Another Christmas Episode?

The question of whether Rick & Morty’s writers will ever revisit Christmas is a tough one to predict, given the show’s unusual approach to holiday specials. As proven by the decision to air a Thanksgiving special during July, Rick & Morty is unafraid of viewers being annoyed by the ill-fitting airdates of its episodes and is therefore unlikely to avoid Christmas solely due to the time of year that the show returns to the air. However, Rick & Morty is also growing more self-serious and serialized in its storytelling, judging by the explosive season 5 finale. Thus, the comparatively light-hearted japes of its existing Christmas episodes could be ill-suited to its now darker tone. As such, it is tough to guess whether Rick & Morty will hire another Christmas special or not. Odds are that the show will only revisit the holiday if the writers of Rick & Morty have an original take on the television institution that is the Christmas episode. However, given how much the show’s creators like to mess with television convention and delve into the theme of family, another Rick & Morty Christmas episode seems like an inevitability.

About The Author

Cathal Gunning
(1434 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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