Top 10 Most Dangerous Rick Sanchez Inventions

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but the context is well-worth exploring, because in this episode, things get real messy, real fast. When Rick and his grandson Morty find themselves in need of washer fluid, they visit a planet where the inhabitants seemingly lead a peaceful, old-timey existence - except the one night a year when they purge. Morty is horrified by the concept, but when a few bad decisions force him to participate well… we see just how efficiently lethal Rick’s combat suit can really be. Morty snaps and proceeds to massacre the townspeople with ease thanks to suit’s firepower. Now we know why Tony Stark was so insistent about not letting his Iron Man tech fall into the wrong hands.

Sometimes… it feels like Rick Sanchez has never watched a sci-fi movie. Then again, even if he’d seen all the sci-fi movies produced in each and every reality, we doubt that he’d do anything but scoff at those with a cautionary element to them. Human cloning rarely goes as planned, but that doesn’t stop Rick from creating “Operation Phoenix,” a mysterious experiment involving various clones of himself. When he transfers his consciousness into a much younger body, dubbed “Tiny Rick,” he learns firsthand the unexpected complications of cloning when the clone’s brain begins to take over - nearly causing the change to become permanent. Thankfully, Rick seems to learn his lesson.

Morty has been on many memorable misadventures with his grandfather. Some have been truly horrific and traumatizing, but as it turns out, those that he remembers are just a fraction of what he and Rick have actually been through together. Rick has an entire room full of memories that Morty has asked him to wipe. The thing is… Rick has also removed memories without Morty’s consent. And that’s seriously messed up. It doesn't take a particularly creative mind to think of how dangerous this technology is, or the many, many ways in which it could be abused. As it turns out, this entire situation has blown up multiple times over, but because of the technology, they’ve never learned from it.

Rick and Morty might not learn much from their experience in “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” but we viewers certainly did! Specifically, we find out from one of Morty’s wiped memories that Rick invented a machine to give a person the ability to speak to animals - just like the fictional character, Dr. Dolittle. Unfortunately, as Morty soon discovers after donning the translator, communicating with animals isn’t all wacky hijinks and cute cuddly moments. Instead, Morty uncovers a squirrel conspiracy: these omnipresent little rodents are in fact a covert global government. The squirrels are pulling the strings and they don’t take kindly to Morty listening in. An animal translator might sound innocent enough, but in Morty’s case, it forces him to relocate to another reality yet again.

Like cloning, artificial intelligence is an invention that works of science fiction have already warned us about at length. In the Season 2 episode, “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” Rick charges his spaceship with keeping Summer safe. It takes this task to heart, but like Skynet, it goes a little overboard with how it interprets and executes the instruction that it’s given, responding with extreme lethal force when even the most minor threat approaches. When Summer tries to rein it in, it gets sadistically creative in its methods. We’re just glad that Rick has never given the ship’s AI a loftier instruction like “protect humanity.” Then again… Rick’s Microverse Battery shows that he’s not opposed to toying with fate of entire civilizations.

Much of this episode occurs in various dreams, and for this, we should thankful - especially Snuffles’ dream of world domination for canines. Like with the animal translator from “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” the cognition amplifier seems like a good idea. After all, who hasn’t wished they could better communicate with their animals or that their pet wasn’t just a bit smarter? But considering how we treat animals… it’s perhaps not so farfetched to believe that, with increased cognitive ability, they would turn on us and choose to subjugate humankind. It’s only Snuffles’ ability to see the big picture that saves Earth from such a fate. He chooses to leave this reality rather than enslave it. But this particular invention could have had far bleaker results.

In most works of fiction where time travel exists, it’s regarded as extremely dangerous and heavily regulated. It’s easy to understand why. People messing with time, even in the most seemingly innocuous ways, can have catastrophic results. This particular invention of Rick’s doesn’t enable the user to travel through time, but rather freeze it, allowing the parties involved to go about their business while the rest of the world is immobilized. Even with this limited application, however, one could commit all manner of crime, from theft, to destruction, to any number of fundamentally evil deeds. And with all the time in the world to get away and conceal the evidence, there’d be no stopping those who would misuse this invention.

The very first episode of this series makes a few things clear right off the bat. First, Rick has a serious drinking problem. Second, he is a wildly irresponsible grandfather. Third, he is brilliant. Fourth, he is a danger to himself and all of humanity. Rick alleges that his pitch to give Earth a fresh start was just an attempt to test Morty, but the fact remains that Rick can wipe out all of humanity in the blink of an eye if he so chooses. As we later learned in “The Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender,” Rick has a thing for building neutrino bombs, and while they only have a 60% functionality rate, it’s fallen to Morty to disarm them on multiple occasions.

You know what’s even scarier than Rick being able to single-handedly craft a bomb powerful enough to wipe humanity off the face of the earth? The fact that he’s arrogant enough to carelessly expose the world to concoctions that he comes up with on the fly. When Morty selfishly asks Rick for a love potion, Rick quickly whips one up, not bothering to stop Morty when he realizes that, under certain conditions, it could go wrong. Worse yet, he learns nothing from the experience and proceeds to produce a cure with the same reckless abandon. It proves to be even more destructive. Both the love potion and the failed cure are essentially hyper-effective biological weapons of mass destruction. And together… they doomed the planet.

Compared to some of the other entries on our list, the portal gun actually seems like one of Rick’s safer inventions. After all, it rarely malfunctions and doesn’t have any explicitly violent or world-ending applications. The reason it earns the top spot on our list, however, is that this technology is what allows Rick and Morty to go on all of their adventures. As such, it’s a gateway to all the chaos, carnage, and interdimensional damage that Rick causes on his often-selfish trips. It’s Rick’s most impressive invention, sure, but it’s also brought pain and misery to countless realities. Perhaps worst of all, it’s resulted in Ricks and Mortys from various dimensions interacting, which is arguably to the detriment of all life in all realities.