Since their debut, the Mister Meeseeks have become fan-favorite side characters in Rick and Morty, though while they are entertaining in a truly chaotic and existential kind of way, there is a flaw in the logic of their existence in regards to what actually classifies one of their assigned tasks as ‘complete’.
A Mister Meeseeks is an otherworldly life form that can be summoned by pressing the button on a Meeseeks Box. Once the Mister Meeseeks pop into existence upon someone’s request, they can be assigned one task that they have no choice but to carry out. Once they have completed the task, they then gleefully cease to exist. However, should a task be impossible to complete or take them longer than a day to finish, the Meeseeks will linger in the horrific anguish of continued existence. Mister Meeseeks aren’t supposed to be alive for longer than a few hours, and if they are they start losing their minds as evidenced when Rick & Morty's oldest Mr. Meeseeks took on a terrifying final form.
In the Rick and Morty #23 story titled “Summer Job” by Kyle Starks, CJ Cannon, and Marc Ellerby, Summer is working at a retail store and is stuck closing after enduring a busy day with messy customers. The store is an absolute wreck by the time her boss leaves and she is the one who has to stay late and clean it up. However, Summer has access to a Meeseeks Box, so instead of folding clothes and sweeping floors herself, she summons and assigns a number of Mister Meeseeks with her employee duties. After the store is clean, all the Meeseeks disappear except for one who believes he had folded all of the clothes as was his assigned task, yet he continued to exist. Not understanding why, this Meeseeks runs around the building in a panic, destroying all of the hard work he and his other Meeseeks completed. However, once he discovered that the reason he wasn’t disappearing was because he had a sock stuck to his arm, the Mister Meeseeks quickly folded the single sock and promptly vanished.
The problem with this story is that Mister Meeseeks actually wasn’t done folding all the clothes since he wrecked the store again, so technically he would need to fold all of those clothes as well as the sock before he could disappear. This calls into question the nature of what it means for a Meeseeks to complete a task, and what entity is responsible for deciding when a task has been completed. In this issue, Mister Meeseeks thinks he’s done folding but he’s not as there was still one sock left. However, when he believed himself to be ready to disappear after folding that sock, his task wasn’t actually complete because there were still clothes that needed folding, yet he vanished regardless. This combined with the fact that Mr. Meeseeks can be smarter than Rick means that the helpful creature has more going on than people would assume.
This dilemma ties into the debut of Mister Meeseeks in the Rick and Morty series when they are tasked with helping Jerry’s golf game. By the end of the episode, Jerry succeeded and most of the Meeseeks disappeared except for one ‘stickler Meeseeks’ who needed to see Jerry’s short game too. So, it seems as though the Meeseeks are in charge of deciding when their tasks are complete, at least on a semi-subconscious level. While the true nature of the Mister Meeseeks’ life cycles are a bit of a mystery, one thing that’s clear is that there is a definite logical flaw with how they operate, one that was accidentally exposed by Rick and Morty itself.
