I’m not even trying to keep track anymore.
I had forgotten Paul Fleishman. But on refreshing my memory: if he was similar enough to Jerry for Beth to want to marry him, that should have happened in at least several universes. So perhaps there’s a Citadel of Pauls somewhere. Or more likely a franchise business run solely by Pauls.
Yeah, I’m content to be a regular Rick & Morty fan, and not a Master-Of-All-Episodes fan. I felt the same way about The Venture Bros.: loved the show to distraction but was willing to fail to recall all the details of the show’s mythology.
Who was Space Beth burying? Did I miss a thing?
She was burying another Space Beth.
Nice intertwining of two separate plotlines in this episode. Die Hard as a universal cultural construct has shades of Douglas Adams to it, and I swear the idea of everyone being disparate parts of a global overmind has been done in some classic sci-fi short story but I’m drawing a blank on what it is.
“Walkie-talkie Die Hard, motherfucker!”
“Better to die in Roy than to serve in Hell!”
Not sure if this is the one you were thinking of but the universal Overmind was the conclusion of Clarke’s Childhood’s End, what the Overlords were developing humans to become part of, unable to do it themselves.
Not sure if the various hive mind premises count?
Not at all a classic sci-fi short story, but: at one point in the Charlie Kaufman-penned 1999 movie Being John Malkovich, EVERYONE (presumably in the universe) is John Malkovich.
A similar idea occurred in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “The Mind and the Matter” (written by Serling and starring Shelley Berman). Everyone is Berman at one point.
It’s not clear whether there are connections between the minds of the characters in either the movie or the TV show. And of course neither of these have the “video game characters” element; still, there are parallels.
Malkovich? Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich.
To Marry Medusa, by Theodore Sturgeon, perhaps? It concerns an attempt by a hive mind to conquer Earth. It’s frustrated in this endeavor by the fact that humans aren’t, themselves, a hivemind, which the alien has never encountered before.
It ends when the alien finds a way to force humans into becoming a hive mind, and the resultant gestalt entity is so powerful it obliterates the alien.
There must be many such stories? There was one where this guy finds that his consciousness can be distributed into two, and then an increasing number, of bodies. Then there is the Lem story about the robot soldiers who get smarter the more of them are networked together. Asimov, too, had a story about a hive mind attempting to conquer the Earth. But surely you are not forgetting about Rick’s occasional fling, Unity?
While everyone in those “ten things you didn’t catch” videos pointed out that the end credit scene is parodying Die Hard III…no one pointed out that the “I hate everybody” version is the dumb TV version of the scene…so as they say, “Who is that supposed to offend.”
Walkie-talkie Die Hard, Mister Falcon!
There was one I remember about an alien entity that was forced to distribute its consciousness into multiple non-sentient organisms and established a meeting point to one day coalesce. The kicker at the end of the story was thousands of lemmings rushing headlong to their watery deaths at their now geologically inconvenient underwater rendezvous.
That’s the same line that stuck with me.
Indeed.
And for the plot element ‘one person is split into more than one, and to be made whole, all the parts must Do Something at the same time’ from this episode, I’m reminded of the season one Original Star Trek episode written by Richard Matheson: “The Enemy Within.” To get Kirk back as Kirk, both Kirks (the aggressive one and the meek one, and/or Shatner and his stand-in) must go through the transporter at the same time.
I’m not saying the Rick & Morty writer consciously made use of this Matheson conceit–but who’d be surprised if an unconscious influence occurred?
You can always tell what’s a conscious reference in Rick and Morty because Rick will point out how lame they are for referencing it.
You’re right, but it’s marginally possible that this episode was so loaded with references that they had to prune them back.
“Let’s Be Frank” by Brian Aldiss
That is the one I meant. I remember how the character’s attempts to completely take over the Earth, and then Venus, are stymied.
I still got it!