Warning: The following contains spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 5, Episode 4, "Rickdependence Spray," which aired Sunday on Adult Swim.
2001: A Space Odyssey made its theatrical release 53 years ago and has been homaged, mimicked and lampooned for much of the last half century. One of its most seminal scenes depicts the Star Child, appearing in the final moments of the two and a half hour movie, hovering over Earth, eyes wide with intellect. The most recent episode of Rick and Morty added its own entry into this vast archive in an imaginatively twisted way.
The sexual drama surrounding this season has been at an all time high, but this installment is safely stated as NSFW. Rick and Morty Season 5, Episode 4, "Rickdependence Spray," opens with Morty impatiently urging his mother to finish up at work so they can catch the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe flick. While she changes out of her scrubs, Morty notices a contraption designed to extract horse semen from his mother's patients and decides then and there that there is some value to his mother's vocation after all.
After a week of using the machine to unburden his loins of their reproductive material, he notices Rick struggling with the sloshing barrel of supposed stallion giddy-up. As his grandfather attaches the Trojan horse sperm to super science conductors, Morty actively sabotages Rick's experimentation by not divulging his donation of genetic pleasure product to the sample in question. Though Rick has a long and fertile history of his practical research going awry all by itself, Morty's lack of candor is the catalyst in this case. This leads to an explosion with climatic consequences.
Monstrous, murderous, titanic sperm are born from the barrel, evolving quickly into an extinction level event that must be thwarted using the resources of the United States government. In an attempt to herd the sperm away from their destructive agenda, they deploy a giant egg, collected from Morty's sister Summer, and trust the biological imperative of the savage swarm to lead them to their own destruction at the hands of American military weaponry. Ultimately, the plan fails and one special swimmer makes its way into the center of Summer's egg just moments before being launched into space. During the post-credits scene, an astronaut toils at repairing his shuttle and laments the abandonment of his family before he is set upon by a colossal infant, who is finding its way through the infinite void and killing wayward space travelers.
Stanley Kubrick's quiet and sleek space opera detailed the origins and destiny of mankind with iconic imagery and haunting melancholy. A series of monoliths serve as markers that influence Homo sapiens, and their ancestors, triggering evolutionary leaps. "Rickdependence Spray" mirrors this theme, though clearly in an absurdist manner, as Morty's sperm become sentient, then hyper intelligent. Whereas Kubrick's vision eventually leads a human man to Jupiter to uncover the secrets of the cosmos, Rick and Morty creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon make it a point throughout the episode to highlight the ignored contributions of women to the panoply of human achievement.
Though there have been many differing opinions concerning what 2001: A Space Odyssey was trying to achieve and even what it meant on a fundamentally thematic level, Kubrick himself makes some things clear in a rare interview about the film. He maintained throughout his life that the work should remain subjective so that the truth of its meaning was personal to the individual experiencing it. However, he did expound upon what was intended, as far as who the Star Child was and what he represented.
Kubrick described the Star Child as a "super being," the apotheosis of mankind's potential, created by beings composed entirely of energy and intelligence. In Kubrick's future, mankind stretched out towards the stars and left behind some of its baser instincts. In contrast, Rick and Morty highlights how far present day's humans are from any such utopia, as they've become enslaved to those same failed predilections. Society's collective misogyny, deceit, shame and priority of gratification over intellectual rigor have led humanity to a very different place, and to a celestial progeny more befitting its ancient past than its imagined, idyllic potential futures.
Rick and Morty stars the voices of Justin Roiland, Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer and Sarah Chalke. New episodes air Sundays at 11 p.m. ET on Adult Swim.