Rick and Morty Episode 78: Ricker than Fiction

Rick, Morty, and Jerry are watching the latest **Maximum Velocitree** movie when Rick and Morty become furious at how bad it is, especially the reliance on comic-relief characters and weak villains. They go to the Warner Bros. studio lot to complain directly to the franchise’s director, **James Gunn**, but he brushes off their criticism.

Back at home, Rick steals the script for the next installment and builds a machine called the **Movie-lizer**, which can generate a movie from a script and let him edit it as it plays. Rick starts rewriting the story to make it better, changing major plot beats in the process. When he enters a command to “make us care,” Rick and Morty are suddenly sucked into the machine and pulled inside the movie itself.

Inside the film, they are immediately attacked by the **Robotrees** and realize they need Jerry’s help to get out. Jerry, who is outside at the machine, explains that they cannot escape until the movie reaches a proper ending, but the story is now broken because it lacks a villain and a third act. Rick tries to solve the problem by bringing the villain back with lightning, but only succeeds in creating a zombie version, which he has to kill after it bites Morty.

After Morty is bitten, the Movie-lizer registers him as becoming the next villain, since the film needs one to keep moving. Rick and Morty are forced to continue through the story in increasingly absurd ways while Jerry keeps typing at the machine to help shape a workable ending. Their goal becomes less about fixing the movie and more about surviving long enough to complete it and escape.

As the movie’s ending finally takes shape, the conflict resolves through the rewritten story, and Rick and Morty eventually make it back out of the Movie-lizer. In the post-credits scene, Jerry tries to use the machine for his own fantasy sequel, but Summer interrupts by inserting her own outrageous script into it instead.