‘Rick and Morty’ Season 5’s Ending Explained

It turns out Rick and Morty’s monthlong break was worth the wait. This past Sunday marked the premieres of “Forgetting Sarick Mortshall” and “Rickmurai Jack”, the final episodes in Rick and Morty Season 5. If you’ve been clamoring for backstory, oh boy, does this finale deliver on backstory.

For years Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s comedy has been plagued by the same questions. What is President Morty’s plan? How did the Citadel come to be? What is Rick’s tragic backstory? How did Beth C-137 die? All of those pressing questions were answered in a behemoth of a two-parter. Here’s everything you need to know about that truly bonkers finale.

What’s the Central Finite Curve?

To understand what President Morty wanted all along, we need to break down the Central Finite Curve. As anyone who’s seen the show knows, Rick and Morty exists in a multiverse. At any given time there are endless versions of reality, meaning that there are also endless versions of Rick and Morty. The Central Finite Curve can best be described as a portion of the multiverse where most if not all Ricks in the multiverse live. Basically, the Ricks of the Citadel identified the realities where the Ricks were the smartest person in their respective universes and walled off these infinite realities from the rest of the multiverse.

If it’s ever annoyed you that there are an infinite amount of possibilities in this show yet the same grandfather and grandson keep appearing, this explains it. There are an infinite number of realities where Rick isn’t a borderline god. There are also infinite universes where he’s dead or never even existed. The Citadel Ricks simply grabbed the realities where Rick was the smartest person in the universe, aka the universes that benefited him the most, and linked them together in an inescapable chain of limited multiverses. That’s why Rick and Morty never use the portal gun to go to a universe where Rick is just an average guy. The Citadel has made that impossible.

But, as is always the case when it comes to Rick, there’s a nefarious edge to the Central Finite Curve. As Rick has explained before, Morty’s brainwaves counteract his own, making Mortys the perfect camouflage for Ricks. Instead of letting nature run its course, in several universes Ricks manipulated and drugged Beths and Jerrys so that they’d get together. In some ways the Central Finite Curve and the Citadel have become Morty farms. You know how Rick went full controlling sociopath in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion”? That was just a glimpse into what he’s already done.

What Was President Morty’s Master Plan?

Whether you call him Eyepatch Morty, President Morty, or Evil Morty, he wants the same thing: freedom. At some point President Morty learned about the Central Finite Curve and realized that this infrastructure was keeping him permanently bound to Rick. In “Rickmurai Jack”, President Morty cornered C-137 Rick and asked him to deactivate the Central Finite Curve. When Rick refused, he took more drastic actions.

Using the brain scans he had already gathered from Rick in Season 1’s “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind”, President Morty went to the Citadel’s Dimensional Drive, the mechanism that keeps the Citadel bound to the Central Finite Curve. That’s when things got bloody. President Morty unleashed mass chaos on the Citadel, causing hundreds to thousands of Ricks and Mortys to die. Those deaths triggered Operation Phoenix, the cloning protocol used in case a Rick or Morty dies. But when these cloned Ricks and Mortys emerged in their test tubes, they were blended into a bloody mush. President Morty used all of that blood to overload the Dimensional Drive and break away from the Central Finite Curve.

So what does this mean for the future? The Citadel is once again in ruins, though now it’s decimated more than it ever was in Season 1. As far as we know the only people who managed to escape President Morty’s wrath were Rick C-137, his Morty, and a handful of enslaved mole people Mortys. But more importantly, our Rick and Morty are no longer confined to universes where Rick is the smartest person in the universe. This opens up a whole new layer to the idea that literally anything can happen.

Was Evil Morty Ever Really Evil?

Maybe not. Obviously, killing people is bad and President Morty killed countless Ricks and Mortys and tortured both to achieve his plan. But Ricks had been farming and controlling Mortys for years. It has always been a joke in the show that Rick treats his grandson as disposable. As violent and ruthless as President Morty’s plan was, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t on some level inevitable after the years Rick has spent mistreating his grandson. At his core, President Morty hates Rick and wants to escape from him. It’s that need paired with the insanely toxic web his grandfather constructed that led to the Citadel’s annihilation.

Where Is Evil Morty Now?

In the final moments of “Rickmurai Jack”, President Morty broke through the Central Finite Curve. He then got out of his spaceship and used the portal gun to fire a gold portal. We have no idea where President Morty is or where he’s going. But it’s implied that he’s finally free.

What Happened to Rick C-137?

Let’s backtrack a bit. While President Morty explained his plan, our Morty needed to catch up. He grabbed Rick’s brain scans, and that’s how we came to learn a metric ton of backstory at a breakneck speed.

We’ve known for a while that the Rick known as Rick C-137 isn’t actually from the same dimension as his Morty. C-137 was this Rick’s original dimension, and we now know he’s completely changed dimensions at least twice. One day when he was with his daughter Beth and his wife Diane, another Rick appeared and dropped a bomb, killing them almost instantly. This loss completely destroyed Rick C-137. It turns out that the “totally fabricated” backstory that appeared in “The Rickshank Rickdemption” wasn’t that fabricated after all.

Rick spent years hellbent on revenge, traveling through the multiverse and killing alternate versions of himself all in search of the Rick who ruined his life. Eventually his path of destruction caused a group of Ricks to come together and try to stop him. They became the Council of Ricks and C-137 became known as the “Rickest Rick.” But this partnership against the Rickest Rick failed. The Council of Ricks eventually submitted to Rick C-137, unable to defeat him. Together they formed the Citadel of Ricks. After the Citadel was completed, Rick crashed his ship into a version of Beth’s house, thereby starting the events of the series.

Was Rick C-137 Involved in the Creation of the Citadel of Ricks?

If we watched that whiplash-inducing montage correctly, yes. Rick C-137 seemingly led the creation of the Citadel of Ricks. Maybe he did it to create a Morty farm so he’d have some sort of control over his life. Maybe the whole thing was really the Council of Ricks’ idea and C-137 numbly went along for the ride. Who knows? But it’s clear that the Rickest Rick played a vital part in forming the organization that he hates.

Did Rick C-137 Ever Find the Rick Who Killed His Beth?

As far as we know, no he did not. He’s still out there, which means we have another Big Bad to worry about.

So Did Beth and Diane Really Die?

They certainly did. “Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort” mentioned that Beth dies in several realities, but we now know for a fact that our Rick’s Beth was murdered by a version of himself. Bottom line? C-137’s Beth and Diane have been dead for a long time.

Are Rick and Morty Both from Dimension C-137?

No. It’s long been assumed that our Morty is also from C-137, the dimension that Rick and Morty accidentally Cronenberged in “Rick Potion #9.” That was never the case. Our Rick is from C-137, which saw Beth die as a child. Morty is from the unknown Cronenberg dimension. And the rest of the show exists in yet another dimension with an unknown name.

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