Okay but you know what? Rick fucking abandoned his daughter. Again.
And no, I’m not talking about the season 2 finale. I’m talking about Rick Potion #9.
Where he left Beth, Summer and Jerry in a goddamn Cronenberg wasteland to fend for themselves. Even though he should have known that they didn’t get transformed, because they are related to Morty.
He could’ve looked for a dimension where the whole family didn’t exist, and taken all of them there. But no. He only took Morty with him.
You know what that makes me think? That the Beth from that dimension isn’t even Rick’s Beth. That Rick’s Beth, the one from his original dimension, has been dead for a long time.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that Rick has done this a bunch of times already. Hopping from dimension to dimension, always fleeing from the Galactic Federation, hanging out with different versions of his family but always abandoning them when things get rough.
I mean hell, the whole series starts out with him wanting to create a “fresh start”.
Because to Rick, people - even his own family members - are replaceable.
Because he’s already lost the real versions of the people he loves, and he’s been replacing them, again and again. Because he still craves those connections, but at the same time, he’s afraid of them. So he’s made himself numb, he’s not allowing himself to open up anymore. He goes to live with Beth and her family, because it’s the only thing he can do, really, but he’s still shutting himself off from them, ready to leave at any time.
So what changed? Why did Rick sacrifice himself?
I think that the current versions of Beth, Morty and Summer are actually the ones that Rick has spent the most time with up to this point (not counting Jerry bc he might have been replaced in Mortynight Run; also Rick clearly doesn’t care about Jerry). He spent 6 months alone with Summer and Morty after they froze time. And he’s apparently worried enough about his attachment to them, that he created a whole freaking presentation about how he doesn’t care about them.
Rick’s whole character arc in Season 2 has been about him opening up to others, and getting hurt as a result. It happened with Unity, it happened with Birdperson, and in the end, it’s been happening all along with his family. He got too attached, he opened himself up, and now he realizes that he can’t go on like this, that he can’t abandon them again and start over.
