All ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 4 Episode Titles, Release Dates Revealed

On Tuesday, Adult Swim revealed the titles of all five new Rick and Morty episodes coming next month. Season 4 of the smash-hit cartoon premieres on Sunday, May 3, and now fans have a couple of weeks to mull over the episode titles and guess what may be coming. According to Adult Swim, this “is almost as fun as watching episodes.”

Rick and Morty Season 4, Episode 6 airs at last next month, after a hiatus that lasted nearly half a year. The series took a midseason break back in December, leaving fans with no clue about when it might return. Now, it looks like it will be here just in time for quarantine, with a new episode every Sunday in May. As usual, the episode-naming convention leaves a lot of room for speculation.

The episode titles for the rest of Season 4 are: “Never Ricking Morty,” “Promortyus,” “The Vat of Acid Episode,” “Childrick of Morty” and “Star Mort Rickturn of The Jerri.” In Adult Swim’s announcement, each title was accompanied by an air date, confirming that once the show comes back, there will be no more breaks until the end of the season.

Rick and Morty has been doing parody episode titles since Season 1, shoe-horning in the main characters’ names in some impressive stretches of English phonetics. However, the show does not do strict parodies of the titles it borrows from, so this only gives fans a vague hint about what the episode might be about.

If anything, we may be able to infer some of the tropes and concepts the show will play with rather than the story arcs themselves. For example, Season 1 has an episode titled “Lawnmower Dog,” where the B plot features the family dog gradually becoming a genius. However, it does not really follow the template of Lawnmower Man, and in fact the main thrust of the episode is actually a parody of Inception.

On the other hand, back in December there was an episode titled “Rattlestar Ricklactica,” which had very little to do with Battlestar Galactica, but instead loosely poked fun at The Terminator and other time travel stories. The “rattle” in the title referred to the sentient snakes in the episode, which no fan theorist could have been expected to guess ahead of time.

With this in mind, there is really no guessing what the back half of Rick and Morty Season 4 has in store for us, but that’s part of the reason why the show is so beloved. Still, here are the episode titles for Rick and Morty Season 4, and some guesses about what they might mean.

‘Never Ricking Morty’

The midseason premiere episode title “Never Ricking Morty” was revealed on Monday, just a bit ahead of the rest of the season. Over on Reddit, some fans proposed it might be a play on The Neverending Story, but knowing Rick and Morty, that only hints at a loose connection with the movie.

‘Promortyus’

It seems pretty safe to say that “Promortyus” is a play on Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s controversial 2012 prequel to his seminal movie Alien. Knowing the Rick and Morty writers’ room, it also seems safe to say that they will not pull any punches if they decide to mock Scott’s work.

Series co-creator Dan Harmon joked about Prometheus back in 2013, on his podcast Harmontown. “C’mon, I’m an Alien fan,” he said at the time, “you called it an Alien prequel, you f—ers! …It’s an hour and a half of you watching guys discover a puddle of black goo.”

‘The Vat of Acid Episode’

Season 6, Episode 8 eschews the usual word-jumble naming convention for a pretty straightforward description: “The Vat of Acid Episode.” The midseason trailer teased a bit about this vat of acid already, so it sounds like it will play a pretty big part in the episode. We saw the duo preparing to climb out Rick’s spaceship when Rick said: “If anything goes wrong — which it won’t — jump into the same vat of acid I jump into.”

“Okay. Wait, what?!” Morty responded. A few quick cuts later, we saw Rick dragging Morty down into a vat of glowing green acid with him. It looks like this episode is set in some kind of dystopian urban environment, but it’s hard to untangle any other details in the action-packed trailer.

‘Childrick of Mort’

Fans seemed to agree that the title “Childrick of Mort” was a reference to the sci-fi thriller Children of Men, with just a few alternately suggesting it was Children of the Corn. Children of Men is a 1992 novel by P.D. James that was made into a movie starring Clive Owen in 2006. It is about a future where human civilization is on the brink of collapse due to rampant infertility and under-population. Rick and Morty could pick up this premise easily from the cold open of Season 3, Episode 4, “Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender.”

‘Star Mort Rickturn of The Jerri’

Finally, the Season 4 finale, “Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri” is a pretty clear reference to Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of The Jedi. On social media, fans speculated that this would likely include the scene in the trailer where Summer had a lightsaber duel with her old friend Tammy. Many figured that this must mean it would be a continuity-heavy episode, though you never can tell with Rick and Morty.

Expectations

Titles aside, fans have some expectations for the remainder of Rick and Morty Season 4. Many anticipate at least one clip show-style episode, along the lines of “Interdimensional Cable” or “Morty’s Mindblowers.” Some guessed that this would be either “Promortyus” or “The Vat of Acid Episode,” but the trailer does not give many hints.

Season Arc

Meanwhile, fans also hope for — or even expect — an episode to advance the “Evil Morty” plot line left off in Season 3, Episode 7, “The Ricklantis Mixup.” The story has continued in brief glimpses since Season 1, and has been the basis of countless fan theories and speculation. However, it would not be totally out of the question for the creators to let it lie for this season, perhaps coming back to it later.

Finally, we can probably expect Season 4 to conclude with some kind of tectonic shift in the Smith/Sanchez family dynamic. Season 3 was all about Beth and Jerry’s divorce, culminating in Beth reconciling with Jerry and standing up to Rick at last. Season 4 has repeatedly reminded us of this power struggle, so it seems safe to say that it will come back around at some point in the big finale.

Rick and Morty Season 4 will air on Sundays at 11:30 p.m. ET beginning on May 3, on Adult Swim.