Rick And Morty Season 7’s Latest Episode Takes Inspiration One Of The Darkest Sci-Fi Stories Of All Time

“That’s Amorte” starts off with the Smith family enjoying some delicious spaghetti, made with mysterious ingredients. Morty starts to ask questions, only to immediately discover that, yes, the spaghetti comes from people. The episode wrings quite a bit of comedy out of Morty’s discovery, as this reveal is pretty much the worst-case scenario, and it’s casually dropped as early as the cold open. Rick’s methods for the spaghetti aren’t quite as evil as they sound, though: There’s a distant alien planet full of humanoid people, except when one of those people kills themselves it releases a chemical in their bodies that turns their insides into spaghetti.

Morty’s disturbed by this, and so begins a horrific chain of experiments where he and Rick try to make the production of this spaghetti more morally defensible. First they think to only eat spaghetti from willing participants, like criminals on death row or terminally-ill patients who wish to make use of their body after their death. Morty’s able to live with this, until he discovers that the greedy government of this planet has started pressuring its citizens to kill themselves in order to sell more spaghetti. There’s a whole suicide-industrial complex established now, all thanks to Morty.

They go through a couple potential solutions, all of them horrible, eventually trying out clones. So begins a quick “Never Let Me Go” parody, name-checked by Rick, where we see two clones in love having a dark existential crisis over how their only purpose in life is to have their bodies harvested. Except in the darkly cynical world of “Rick and Morty,” they aren’t even dying for the sake of saving any other lives; they’re just going through all this so the Smith family can have a tasty meal.