Top 10 Most Evil Rick Moments In Rick and Morty

For Rick, morality is a pretty subjective term – and by subjective, we mean it’s for suckers. In the second episode of Season 2, Rick takes Morty with him for a little business transaction. More specifically, he sells a dangerous weapon to hyper-enthusiastic assassin Krombopulos Michael. And just what did he want the money for? To fund research? To aid in a quest to overthrow the tyranny of the intergalactic government? Nope, just to get tokens for his favorite interstellar videogame arcade, “Blitz and Chitz.” A hilarious bit of nihilism, sure, but also pretty twisted when you think about it.

Grandfather of the year Rick is not. Though it may not seem quite as shocking as some of the other entries on this list, emotional abuse is vile. While Rick has repeatedly been shown to love his family, he doesn’t hesitate to dole out insults and bust their self-esteem on a regular basis. Those kinds of mixed messages can mess a person up. The trauma of having such an explosively volatile father has already driven his daughter, Beth, into a state of high-functioning alcoholism with a heavy side of abandonment issues. And Morty is the living, breathing face of anxiety. Summer has some spine, but it’s stuff like this that chips away at a person’s psyche.

Speaking of damaged family members, there is perhaps no one more put-upon than Jerry. Okay, he’s an incompetent airhead with delusions of grandeur, but he’s mostly harmless. Throughout the series, Rick picks on his daughter’s husband, making it clear that he doesn’t just dislike him… he HATES him. Of course, Beth and Jerry got together when Rick was AWOL from Beth’s life, but Rick doesn’t see it that way. A constant struggle for Jerry is unemployment, and part of this problem is his lack of confidence. But self-esteem is hard to build up when you have your father-in-law, whom your spouse defends at all costs, always degrading you in front of your kids.

It’s safe to say that Rick isn’t great with one-on-one relationships. So, when it comes to one-on-a-million relationships, things get rickety-wrecked, son. After encountering an old flame, a hive-mind entity named Unity, Rick and the lady of many faces seem to rekindle the spark. However, since they’d last met, Unity has matured and is trying to responsibly govern those she conquered. But one afternoon with Rick nearly undoes it all. Realizing his bad influence before it’s too late, Unity takes off, but is shaken from the experience. Rick is too, for that matter, as the aftermath brings Rick to his lowest point in the series.

For series regulars, it came as no surprise that Rick would dabble at playing God. In an attempt to make a morally impartial super-leader, he combined the genes of Honest Abe Lincoln, and – ahem – Adolf Hitler. The result is Abradolf Lincler, a mixed-up clone who is … just a mess really. Always at odds with his conflicting ideologies - like Frankenstein’s monster - he seeks answers from his creator. Rick, however, does not see him for the confused individual he is, but as a failed experiment and essentially un-dumped garbage. After Lincler tracks him down and tries to redeem himself, Rick still abandons him entirely on an alien planet.

Rick sorta had it coming when he decided to get his kicks watching a planet perform The Purge (yeah, just like in the movie). Well, sucks to be him because he gets stuck there. Morty, who’s stuck with him, is justifiably horrified. Rick’s solution: do a little purging themselves. Morty must have some pent-up anger to get out, right? Instead of trying to protect his grandson, he has Summer send them some super-suits so that they can become more efficient in fighting back/killing. Before long, Morty snaps and goes on a rampage. You know, we’re thinking that there’s some therapist who’s going to bank big helping Morty unpack this emotional baggage one day.

Waking Morty up in the middle of the night, Rick convinces him to go on a no-questions-asked crazy adventure. Rick is after some seedpods, and wants Morty to help carry them. But after Morty breaks his legs – which Rick takes his time to remedy – they’re forced to go through customs run by the Intergalactic Federation. Since the seeds are illegal, he tells Morty he’s got to shove those things up his butt, waaaay up there, essentially turning his grandson into a drug mule. Oh, and on the way home, he has Morty straight up murder a Gromflomite. Geez, Rick.

Renewable energy is a great thing. However, Rick’s idea for perpetual energy was to create a mini-universe, and have the creatures that live there carry out a mindless task in perpetuity in order to create this energy. When he tries to defend his system, saying how his mini-verse people get something out of it, Morty rightfully points out that it is still slavery. Worse, when he goes inside to find out why his car battery (the thing the mini-verse is powering) isn’t working, he strong-arms the creatures back into subservience, and smashes another tiny-verse – destroying not one but TWO new universes in the process. Dark, Rick, dark.

Despite what it might look on this list, Rick is a complicated character with a complicated past. But since we’ve come to know the mad scientist, it’s become clear that three things especially piss him off: Jerry, The Council of Ricks, and the Galactic Federation. After being arrested, it seems that all three have HIM out of their hair … until it’s revealed that getting arrested was part of Rick’s plan to take them all down in one fell swoop. If Jerry had another light on in the attic, perhaps he’d realize that he’s lucky to just be getting off with a divorce - the other two factions got it a bit bloodier.

Rick’s greatest assets, which are his abilities to rationalize and adapt, are also his greatest flaws, making him overly blasé and ultimately unfeeling. When a love potion he makes for Morty piggybacks on a flu virus, the crazy genes he mixed together infect the entire human race – and the results are ugly. But rather than work tirelessly to find a cure, save his daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law, he abandons them and the entire planet to a disgusting fate. Bringing only Morty, Rick finds a new planet in a parallel timeline, and makes it clear that people, even loved ones, are largely interchangeable and insignificant to him.