‘Rick and Morty’: Is Beth as Bad of a Parent as Rick?

Even when the Smith family is basking in the relaxation of spring break, Rick and Morty still can’t help dropping some major bombs. Rick and Morty Season 4 Episode 9 “Childrick of Mort” starts with the gang going on a well-earned vacation before it devolves into Rick dealing with his new batch of possibly bastard children. But as bizarre as this episode is, there’s a note of hard truth buried beneath all of those alien babies. Despite all of her admonishing, Beth may be just as terrible a parent as the father who abandoned her.

When Beth (Sarah Chalke) first learns that her father may have impregnated a planet, it’s easy to see where her sympathies lie. She immediately berates Rick (Justin Roiland) for trying to abandon his new kids and all but forces her own family to uproot their lives to face her father’s mistake. Beth, as she says multiple times, will not allow her father to leave these children made of rock the same way he left her years ago.

Thanks to Beth’s yelling and speeches, Rick develops a way to save his many geysers of alien children from death. That’s about where their kindness ends. Neither Rick nor Beth make any efforts to try and learn what these “I am” creatures want to do with their lives or their capabilities. They don’t even take a moment to learn the string of numbers and letters that serve as these creatures’ names. Instead Rick and Beth quickly funnel them into a series of professions, forcing them to be bullied, spanked, and beaten all in the pursuit of creating a new society.

Beth may start this adventure wanting to save and protect these people, but in no time at all she reduces them to being little more than pawns. The planet Gaia’s children aren’t children to her. They’re toys that she can use to play society with her father. We’ve seen that same sort of callousness toward humanity countless times from Rick, whether he’s using a purely disposable Morty to mask his brainwaves or carelessly grabbing his son-in-law from the wrong dimension to take back home. In both cases though they may claim to care about these people (with the exception of Jerry), their actions say differently.

But the real parallels between these two bad parents appear when Summer (Spencer Grammer) and Morty (Roiland) go on their own adventure. Shortly after learning about Rick’s new rock children Beth brushes off her own kids, telling them to go camp with Jerry (Chris Parnell). On the surface there’s nothing wrong with that demand. Beth is doing something dangerous so it only makes sense that her kids would be safer and happier in the care of their other parent. But aside from Rick, no one in this show has more contempt for Jerry than his wife. Beth’s smart enough to know that unleashing her children with her loser of a husband in the middle of a random planet is basically a death wish. And yet she doesn’t blink as they walk away.

Summer and Morty prove how misguided that trust in Jerry is within seconds. After getting lost in the wilderness, they find an abounded spaceship and attempt to fly it using the only things they care about: drugs and video games. As Rick and Morty‘s director Kyounghee Lim explained in Adult Swim’s sneak peek behind this episode, that juxtaposition is intentional. We’re supposed to cringe at Beth and Jerry’s abandonment of their biological children right as they’re both trying desperately to prove they’re great parents.

“You know, the acorn doesn’t fall that far from the tree,” series co-creator Dan Harmon added.

At the end of the episode it’s next to impossible to look at either Rick or Beth as upstanding parents. Together they started a civil war, murdered this species’ real father thanks to an assist from the kids, ditched two teenagers they’re biologically related to, and much like in “Pormortyus” destroyed much of a planet in the process. After causing all of that devastation, Beth hardly does more than cringe. It’s worth wondering maybe this brilliant, complicated, and sharp women took her father’s clone deal in Season 3 after all.

New episodes of Rick and Morty premiere on Adult Swim Sundays at 11:30/10:30c p.m.

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