While the “Morty’s Mind Blowers” episode of Rick and Morty was a fun look at the many adventures of the two multiverse-travelers, without the pressure of consequences as each one was presented to fans in the past-tense, it carried some pretty dark implications–ones that were completely hidden in that initial episode.
In Rick and Morty season 3 episode 8 titled “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” Rick and Morty enter a hidden area within Rick’s lab that contained a number of memories that Rick erased from Morty’s mind. Some of the memories were taken from Morty by his own request, while others were erased against his will. Yearning to learn the truth and restore the foundation of his own mind, Morty starts to implant the memories back into his brain and, in doing so, takes viewers on a journey of unseen adventures in a slideshow-like anthology.
While Rick and Morty have only explored the erased memories of their past adventures in a single episode of the series, one Rick and Morty comic reveals that they’ve actually gone through the events of “Morty’s Mind Blowers” many times. In Rick and Morty #50–written by Kyle Starks, Tini Howard, Sarah Graley, Marc Ellerby, and Josh Trujillo with art by Marc Ellerby, Andrew MacLean, Jarrett Williams, Sarah Graley, and Benjamin Dewey—Morty stumbles upon Rick’s secret lair within the basement where all of the contained memories that had been removed from their minds are held once again. After going through a number of them in similar fashion as the original episode, Morty asks Rick a serious question regarding the ‘mind-blowing’ process, a question which Rick completely blows off.
Morty basically asks if erasing his memories is good for his brain, and then goes on to ponder whether Rick’s mind-eraser is broken because Morty realizes that he is somehow always drawn to the location of his erased memories. Morty wonders if, subconsciously, his mind is trying to repair itself from the fractured state Rick leaves it in after stealing his memories and placing them in colorful tubes that can be inserted and played back later. This is an incredibly dark but essentially accurate point that Morty is making—a point that was completely hidden in the initial Rick and Morty episode. When his memories are erased, his mind is left in a state of disarray–longing to be repaired again. Of course, the moment Morty ponders these poignant thoughts, Rick wipes his mind once more, only adding to the subconscious terrors of Morty’s fractured psyche.
The fact that Rick and Morty have experienced “Morty’s Mind Blowers” a number of times also explains why Rick has so many redundancies in place to ensure their minds can be reset in case of any mishaps involving the mind-wiping device. In the season 3 episode, Rick and Morty wipe each other’s minds, but Rick had already tasked Summer with repairing them should something like that happen. In this comic, after episode of Rick and Morty kept completely hidden.
