Rick & Morty Season 4, Episode 8 Is Full Of Simpsons, South Park & TMNT Easter Eggs

Warning: SPOILERS for Rick and Morty, season 4, episode 8, “The Vat of Acid Episode”.

Rick and Morty season 4, episode 8, “The Vat of Acid Episode” paid tribute to a number of other animated series, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, and South Park. The episode also offered a tip of the hat to a few live-action movies and the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

It is not uncommon for a Rick and Morty episode to be packed full of Easter eggs; the first new episode after Rick and Morty returned from its mid-season 4 hiatus, “Never Ricking Morty,” was filled with numerous nods to older Rick and Morty episodes and teased several suggestions of what may come in the future. “The Vat of Acid Episode” is notable, however, in that it largely focuses on references to other animated series for adults that helped pave the way for Rick and Morty, though it also offers up allusions to some live-action movies, like The Prestige.

“The Vat of Acid Episode” continues the season 4 trend of playing with the standard Rick and Morty formula, with Morty calling out Rick’s need to endlessly complicate things for the sake of proving how clever he is. The episode also offered up one of the longest joke set-ups in the show’s history and what may be its darkest bit of comedy ever. Here’s a rundown of every reference in Rick and Morty season 4, episode 8.

Futurama

The main plot of Rick and Morty season 4, episode 8, “The Vat of Acid Episode” sees Morty challenging Rick to invent a device that will allow him to return to a previous pre-chosen moment in time, like a save point in a video game. This comes after an argument where Morty criticizes Rick’s plans and ideas as being needlessly complicated and asks why Rick never acts on any of Morty’s ideas for an invention. Rick insists that he doesn’t do hackwork like time travel (despite having a box in his lab labeled “Time Travel Stuff“) and that Morty’s idea isn’t original, noting “I saw it on Futurama!”

Rick’s complaint is a reference to “Meanwhile,” the final episode of Futurama. The episode saw Professor Farnsworth invent a device he called the Time Button, which caused the universe to jump backward 10 seconds in time whenever the button was pressed. Fry stole the device intending it to use it to make the moment he proposed to Leela last longer, only to wind up caught in a time loop after he thought he’d been stood up and jumped off a skyscraper, only to see Leela and realize he’d jumped back in time so much his watch was over half an hour fast and he was early for the dinner where he’d planned to propose. This set up what is widely believed to be one of the best and most romantic series finales of all time.

Dungeons and Dragons

Rick and Morty made numerous nods to Dungeon and Dragons in earlier episodes. In fact, there’s two comic book crossovers involving Rick and Morty playing Dungeons and Dragons and a Rick and Morty themed starter set for D&D 5th Edition. An idol resembling the statue on the cover of the first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook can be seen on a shelf in Rick’s lab, along with a rather impressive looking morning star. Sadly, we have no idea what manner of enhancements the weapon may have, though knowing Rick’s distrust of magic it’s probably just a masterwork morning star.

Phantasm

Before Rick goes to work on building Morty a save-point generator, he briefly works with a spherical device with a protruding blade. This deadly device resembles the Sentinel Spheres from the Phantasm movies. Also known as “Brain Suckers” or more simply as Sentinels or Spheres, the Sentinel Spheres are the weapon of choice of the sinister Tall Man and they have appeared in every single Phantasm movie to date.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Following the first commercial break, Rick pretends to admit defeat in building the save game device and morosely kills Morty with a blast of his ray gun. This sets up the reveal that Rick did build the device and got it to work; he just wanted Morty to know that before he ran off and started playing around with it. As Rick is setting up this prank, a metal canister with distinctive grooves on the ends can be seen on the floor of the lab, next to a circuit board propped up against Rick’s workbench. Fans of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will recognize this canister as the same style of mutagen container which held the radioactive ooze that transformed four ordinary turtles into lean, green fighting machines. The canister is also an indirect reference to Marvel Comics’ Daredevil, as Matt Murdock was blinded after being hit in the face by the same leaky canister.

The Simpsons

Morty makes use of the save game device to try all sorts of things he’d ordinarily never do and undo the effects after he does them. This includes pushing an old man in a wheelchair out of his chair and into traffic before going back to his last save point and helping the old man in earnest. As Morty does this, a distinctive window with an orange and green diamond pattern can be seen in the background. Fans of The Simpsons will recognize this as the exterior of Homer’s favorite bar and Bart’s favorite place to crank-call, Moe’s Tavern. The building also has the same coloration and the same color door as Moe’s, though the porthole window in the door is rectangular rather than round.

South Park

Most of the second half of “The Vat of Acid Episode” is taken up by a largely silent sequence where we see Morty approach a girl and hold the door open for her at a coffee shop. This leads to the two sharing a drink together and a whirlwind romance where the two fall in love, become a couple, meet each others’ families, have a fight and reconcile after Morty gets plane tickets for the two to take a trip together. Sadly, the trip ends tragically, with the plane crashing high in the mountains in the dead of winter and the few survivors resorting to cannibalism to survive, before Morty undertakes a dangerous solo journey to recover his save-point device and go back in time to stop the disaster from ever happening.

Two of the other survivors are seen wearing the distinctive hats of Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski from South Park. Fittingly, as he dies several times over the course of the episode, Morty wears an orange hooded parka resembling the one worn Kenny McCormick during this sequence. Perhaps most disturbingly, the man the survivors eat wears a red jacket resembling the one worn by South Park‘s Eric Cartman. The ultimate resolution of this sequence may be the darkest punchline in Rick and Morty history and must be seen to be believed.

About The Author

Matt Morrison
(1835 Articles Published)

Matt Morrison has been writing about comics since before the word
“blogging” was coined. He got his start writing for the
legendary DC Comics digital fanzine Fanzing,
before receiving his own column, The Mount. Since then he has gone on
to write for over a dozen websites, including 411
Mania, Comics
Nexus and The Cult of Nobody. He holds both an MS in Information
Science from the University of North Texas and a BFA from the
University of Texas at Arlington. Known as a font of comic book
history trivia, he has delivered lectures on the history of American
Comic Books, Japanese Manga, Doctor Who, and Cosplay at over a dozen conventions
and served as an Expert In-Residence for a course on Graphic Novels
for Librarians at the University of North Texas. In addition to his
work for Screen Rant, Matt is currently the Editor In Chief of
Kabooooom.com and writes reviews for No
Flying, No Tights – a graphic literature and anime review site
aimed at teachers and librarians. He also maintains a personal blog –
My Geeky Geeky Ways –
which hosts his extensive episode guide for the television series
making up The Arrowverse as well as his
comedic Let’s Play videos. What little spare time he has is
devoted towards acting, role-playing, movie-riffing and sarcasm. You
can follow his adventures on Twitter, @GeekyGeekyWays.

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