Rick and Morty Episode 43: Mortyplicity

Rick and Morty’s family is sitting down to breakfast when a squad of alien-looking attackers bursts in and kills them all. The scene immediately shifts to reveal that this first household was only a **decoy family**, and Rick’s real family is elsewhere.

Rick receives an alert about the decoy’s destruction and gathers the family to investigate, only for that group too to be exposed as another decoy and wiped out by a different Smith family. From there, the episode spirals into a chain reaction: multiple Rick-and-family decoys across the country discover each other, assume the others must be false, and begin hunting one another down in a violent escalating conflict.

As the chaos spreads, it becomes clear that the decoys are not all identical anymore. Some of them have made their own decoys, and those new copies have grown stranger, cruder, and more improvised as the process continues. The episode follows several of these branching groups as they try to survive, eliminate rivals, or hide out in increasingly bizarre shelters and communities built by other decoys.

At one point, a decoy family is captured by malformed scarecrow-like figures that try to strip them of their skin, but they are rescued by wooden decoys. The rescuers lead them to a hidden bunker full of other decoys, only for that refuge to be attacked and overrun as the self-destructive cycle continues. One Rick eventually decides to lure all remaining decoys to a single location by broadcasting his presence, hoping to wipe them out in one final trap.

That plan nearly succeeds: the decoys converge for a final massacre, leaving only one surviving family of decoys. But just as they seem to have outlasted everyone else, a minor man who appeared earlier in the episode — the one obsessed with being hunted — arrives and kills them too. Afterward, the real Smith family, who have been off on an adventure with Space Beth, learn about the destruction of the decoys.

In a post-credits scene, one wooden Jerry decoy survives by abandoning the others and drifting away on the water, only to be attacked by beavers.