Rick Sanchez

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Background

Powers & Abilities

Rick Sanchez appears to be one of the universe’s greatest scientists! There is seemingly nothing that he couldn’t build. Although sometimes his creations will have major flaws since he didn’t always think things through beforehand.

He keeps a functional laboratory in the Smiths’ garage, where he works on his inventions and technologies. He very regularly travels to other dimensions using his portal gun or travels to different parts of the universe using his flying space van. He regularly keeps robots, clones, incredible devices, formulas, etc. in the laboratory for (too) easy access.

From many years of adventuring through space and dimensions he is a very adept armed and unarmed combatant, marksman, pilot, etc..

From his days in a (likely interdimensional) rock band he can sing, dance and play various instruments, including the guitar and the keyboard. His skill was sufficient to prevent an alien invasion of Earth who just wanted to hear some good music.

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Rick is also the only character in the show that quite regularly breaks the fourth wall out to the viewership. As such is aware at least at times that he is but a cartoon character himself. He also proved very adept at realizing when he was literally stuck inside a dream or when subject to hallucinations or illusions.

Rick has many enemies throughout the universe. Many of them are attempting to track him down using telepathic means.

As it happens, his 14-years old grandson Morty has his complete opposite brainwaves. They cancel each other out totally. As such, Rick (and Morty) are practically untraceable by telepathic means as long as they stay in the vicinity of each other. This is one of the reasons why Morty always accompanies Rick on his adventures.

History

This is the history of Rick Sanchez of Earth C-137. Before Rick moved into the house of his daughter Beth and her family (the husband Jerry and two children, Morty and Summer), he had been gone for 14 years. He keeps a laboratory in their garage.

When in his 20s Rick had been part of a rock band named the Flesh Curtains. His bandmates were Birdperson (of the Birdworld) and Squanchy (a cat-person of the planet Squanch). As such, it would appear as if Rick has been recklessly adventuring for the last 40 years or so.

He has been married and had at least one child, Beth. His unnamed wife is no longer part of his life, but Rick seemingly checked in on his growing family in secret now and then.

Morty and Summer Smith, his grandchildren, often accompany him on his insane adventures. While very amusing, interesting and funny, these are too numerous to detail here, but I suggest reading these  for an overview.

Nowadays, Rick is wanted by the galactic authorities for a huge number of crimes. These include:

• Assault.
• Bioterrorism.
• Breaking and entering (i.e. burglary).
• Cable piracy.
• Child abuse.
• Driving under influence.
• Felony murder.
• Genocide.
• Human cloning.
• Illegal arms dealing.
• Impersonation.
• Kidnapping and false imprisonment.
• Murder.
• Slavery.
• Smuggling.
• Terrorism.
• Time bending.
• Torture/cruelty to animals.
• Vandalism/arson.
• Treason/rebellion.

This naturally puts anyone close to him in danger. After numerous adventures, at the end of season 2, he turned himself in (to uncharacteristically save the Smith family) to the Galactic Federation, and was therewith sent to one of their maximum security prisons.

Description

Rick is tall, skinny and lanky and around 60 years of age (80 years according to some sources). He has a grey complexion and grey-blue hair with a bald spot. His brows have grown together and he is somewhat wrinkled.

He always wears a white lab coat along a light-blue shirt and brown pants, as well as a dark brown belt with a yellow buckle and black shoes. He often walks around with puke dripping while he burps alcoholic vapors, and this often interrupts his rambling speech.

Personality

Rick has a very pessimistic worldview. He regularly engages in insane rantings and habitually tells lies. He may change his mind at any time, is very easily bored and often drinks or takes drugs to numb himself and dull the pain (and he has the hardest working liver in the galaxy!). He has himself pointed out that alcoholism is the great monster.

It has been theorized that the pain is due to his extreme genius intellect and the traumatizing after-effects his many adventures have had on him. He does try to not deal with horrible events by not thinking at all about them.

He is clearly harboring deep emotional pain and sorrow, and has been shown to be dejected, heartbroken and alone where important romantic relationships are concerned (such as with his ex-wife and Unity).

He very often irresponsibly visits other dimensions (along Morty, and lately also Summer). He harvests various rare resources from there, which sometimes requires killing aliens. Indeed, this is characteristic as he can be extremely brutal when betrayed or when those close to him are in danger.

These tendencies are homicidal and sociopathic, and he is known to have a large disregard for life in general (he almost once neutrino-bombed the entire world just to start everything over!). He has also often killed when not necessary at all, and has been shown to enjoy it excessively.

Some qualities yet

Still, despite these homocidal tendencies, Rick is at times shocked, startled or annoyed at unnecessary or unexpected loss of life. He considers that foolish or unreasonable.

He showed care for innocent bystanders getting in the way between the police and an escaping alien, or when Unity destroyed an entire city, before Rick was told that the population has already been evacuated (probably mainly because he thought that Morty and Summer were there).

Rick has on occasion been shown to do unexpected and great heroism.

Rick has very jaded and quite anarchistic personal views and is completely anti-totalitarian, anti-authoritarian and hates bureaucracy. Police and other law-enforcement groups are considered mindless robots. He puts no value in standard education (he hates schools) and instead believes that adventuring is the best teacher, which is one of the reasons he takes Morty away from school for adventuring instead.

Family

While Rick clearly genuinely cares for his grandson Morty, he is also very dominating and possessive of him. Rick handles him almost like a slave. Morty joins Rick in practically all adventures, very few of which can be considered positive experiences.

Rick has protected Morty many times, or brought vengeance for an wrong of some sort on behalf of Morty, but also other times shown complete neglect for Morty leaving him in lethal situations. His greatest act may have been when he was willing to sacrifice himself to save Morty’s life, and another time he was shown to bear very fond memories of Morty as he was growing up.

All in all, Rick and Morty have a very strong, but complex bond. It would be better if not for Rick’s many faults: alcoholism, cynicism, lack of morality, and not really caring for other family members.

As to those, Rick has a healthy, pretty normal relationship with his daughter Beth, and likes her cooking among other things. On the other hand, Rick cares very little for his son-in-law Jerry and takes all opportunities to insult him. This affects Beth of course, but even then has offered to help him at times or even comfort him.

Rick is on quite good terms with his grand-daughter Summer, even as he often shows her the same lack of respect as Morty. Recently, Summer has also started to join in his adventures. His relationship with his own parents appears to have been very problematic.

Friends

Rick has a few friends, none of which are from Earth. He once created a combined clone of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, named Abradolf Lincler, in an attempt to gain a morally neutral superleader. He instead turned out to be a lamentable, weird, aggressive loser, but that wishes to gain his father’s (i.e. Rick’s) approval and love.

From his rock band days he is great friends with Birdperson (a bird-person from Birdworld) and Squanch (a cat-person from Squanch), and they are all into drugs and alcohol. Their current status is unknown.

He used to date an alien, Unity, capable of possessing whole populations. But they are very bad influences on each other, and Unity appears to now date another possessing alien, Beta 7 (like the Borg).

Having been a regular arms dealer (selling stuff he himself creates), Rick is good friends with Crombopulos Michael the alien assassin, at least until the latter’s apparent death. Rick also knows Revolio Clockberg Junior aka. Gearhead, or so he thought, until he was betrayed by him.

He used to adventure earlier with Mr. Poopybutthole, an alien of an unknown species. This being is a good friend of Rick’s, although he is now incapacitated after nearly having been shot to death by Beth.

Absurdly, Rick artificially created a microscopic universe to power his flying space van, and a civilization of this Engine World sees him as their creator and almost as their ‘God’. Rick no doubt also knows more aliens in unlikely places.

Council of Ricks

Lastly, there is the Transdimensional  Council of Ricks. It consists of many Rick Sanchez from various parallel universes banded together in an attempt to combat their many enemies in the multiverse. Rick wants nothing to do with these authoritarians and thinks all of them to be losers (with their own versions of Morty).

As a consequence Rick has a lot of enemies in the multiverse including law-enforcement agencies and, for example, the Zigerians who want the secret of synthesizing concentrated dark matter, a specialty of Rick’s (no, it’s not cesium, plutonic quarks and water, that will only get you killed in an explosion!).

Catchphrases

A very verbal person, Rick has a number of supposed catchphrases, including:

• “Wubba-lubba-dub-dub!” (which is supposed to mean “I am in great pain. Please help me.” in Bird-Person’s language).
• “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, biatch!”.
• “And that’s the waaaaay the news goes!”.
• “Hit the sack, Jack!”.
• “Uh-oh, somersault jump!”.
• “AIDS!”.
• “And that’s why I always say, ‘shum-shum-schlippety-dop!'”.
• “Grassssss… tastes bad!”.
• “No jumpin’ in the sewer!”.
• “Burger time!”.
• “Rubber baby bubby bunkers!”.
• “Lick, lick, lick my balls! Ha ha ha, yeah! Say that all the time!”.

Rick is known to be pansexual, and likes Nintendo gaming machines. He also enjoys watching the Ballfondlers transdimensional TV action show.

Quotes

“Morty, take a deep breath – breathe that fresh air, Morty… do you smell that ? That’s the smell of adventure, Morty… that’s the smell of a whole different evolutionary timeline.”

“Morty, do it, hit the button now ! I already told you: they are not your family ! They are clones from an alternate reality possessed by alien spirits from another dimension’s future ! Do you need a pneumatic device or something ? Just hit the button already !”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking… mantises aren’t the opposite of moles. Obviously DNA is a little bit more complicated than that. Do you know what, Morty ? This here is going to do the trick, baby. It’s koala mixed with rattlesnake, chimpanzee, cactus, shark, golden retriever, and just a smidge of dinosaur. Should add up to normal humanity. What, do you want me to show you my math ? I’m sorry, are you the scientist or the kid who wanted to get laid ?” (his mistake mutates everyone on the planet into the Cronenberg species, and so the duo had to move to live in another parallel reality !)

“So, what are you, like the devil ? I don’t know, store comes out of nowhere, the shit is all weird and creepy. Are you the devil ? A demon ? Leprechaun ? Hey, I’m not judging. I just like to shoot straight. I’m a man of science.”

“Citadel of Ricks. It’s the secret headquarters of the (transdimensional) Council of Ricks. As you know, Morty, I have a lot of enemies in the universe that consider my genius a threat: galactic terrorists, a few subgalactic dictators, most of the entire intergalactic government. Wherever you find people with heads up their asses someone wants a piece of your grandpa. A looot of different versions of me in different timelines had the same problem so a few thousand versions of me had the ingenious idea to banding together like a herd of cattle or a school of fish or those people who answer questions on Yahoo Answers. Yeah, most timelines have a Rick and most Ricks have a Morty. This place is a real who is who and who is you and me.”

“A distress beacon… yeah, baby ! The first rule of space travel, kids, is always check up distress beacons. Nine out of ten times it’s a ship full of dead aliens and a bunch of free shit ! One out of ten times it’s a deadly trap, but I’m ready to roll those dice !”

“Thanks, Morty, I’m pretty proud of this bad boy (his flying saucer). Check it out. I put a spatially tesselated void inside a modified temporal field until a planet developed intelligent life. I then introduced that life to the wonders of electricity, which they now generate on a global scale. And you know, some of it goes to power my engine and phone and stuff.”

“I’m sorry, Morty. It’s a bummer. In reality, you’re as dumb as they come. But I needed those seeds real bad and I had to give ’em up just to get your parents off my back. So now we’re gonna have to go get more. And then we’re gonna go on even more adventures after that, Morty. And you’re gonna keep your mouth shut about ’em, Morty. Because the world is full of idiots that don’t understand what’s important. And they’ll tear us apart, Morty. But if you stick with me, I’m gonna accomplish great things, Morty. And you’re gonna be a part of ’em. And together we’re gonna run around, Morty, we’re gonna do all kinds of wonderful things, Morty. Just you and me, Morty. The outside world is our enemy, Morty. We’re the only [belch] friends we’ve got, Morty. It’s just Rick and Morty. Rrrick and Morty and their adventures, Morty. Rick and Morty, forever and forever, a hundred years Rick and Morty, s… things. Me and Rick and Morty runnin’ around and Rick and Morty time. Aaall day long forever. All, a hundred days Rick and Morty forever a hundred times. Over and over Rick and Morty adventures dot com W W W dot Rick and Morty dot com W W W Rick and Morty adventures all hundred years. Every minute Rick and Morty dot com W W W hundred times Rick and Morty dot com.”

By Dr. Peter S. Piispanen.

Source of Character: Rick & Morty-series, Seasons 1-2.

Writeup completed on the 7^th of December, 2016.