Rick and Morty season 4, episode 2 recap: The Old Man and the Seat

While Rick hunts down the man who used his personal toilet, Morty and Jerry have to shut down an app developed by aliens for a sinister purpose on Rick and Morty.

As the family sits down to breakfast, Rick introduces his new alien intern Glootie (Taika Waititi). He is pleasant and happy to help, but all he really wants to do is develop an app, despite having the instruction “do not develop an app with me” written on his forehead. The rest of the family is smart enough to not to do this, but Jerry is eager and enthusiastic to get involved on Rick and Morty.

Morty knows that something terrible is going to happen now, so he sets out with Jerry to shut the app down. It’s called Loverfinderrz and it matches people up with their soulmates – except everyone has about a million potential soulmates and the app keeps switching it up. For some reason, probably just natural human gullibility and herd mentality, people begin to blindly follow the app’s matches.

Glootie can’t take the app down because he’s just an intern, so he takes them to the mothership and ends up holding them at gunpoint. The Monogatron Leader (Sam Neill) explains that love’s value is defined by its perceived scarcity and that humans are highly trained to seek it out, but have no idea how to maintain it. Earth will be distracted by an app that tells them where to find love – which is actually as abundant as water – while the Monogatrons steal Earth’s water – which is actually not so abundant.

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Morty and Jerry escape while the Monogatron Leader puts work aside to connect with his wife (Kathleen Turner). They get captured again, but Glootie eventually lets them go. When he and Jerry use the app, neither of them has a soulmate. Morty and Jerry escape while Glootie shuts down the app. But first, Morty wants to say something: “Dad, I started today disgusted and embarrassed to be your son and then later I thought we were going to die because you’re a loser.” That’s it.

Beth spent all this time trying to keep Summer from ruining her life by pursuing all her different soulmates on Rick and Morty. In the end, everyone stops using it once they have to pay for it. Screw that! Beth secretly used the app and got matched with Ted Dansen, but she’s happy to stay with Jerry.

Meanwhile, Rick has a secret pooping place on a pristine and peaceful world. Its greatness is unparalleled and it’s maybe the one thing he has that’s really his. But there has been an intruder and Rick goes to extreme lengths to track this interloper down.

He reverse analyzes the stranger’s poop to find out he ate a sandwich, then he tracks the sandwich to the diner it was bought at, then he threatens a mob boss (a fly who runs a frog food restaurant as a front for his drug and gun-running business), then he tracks down the delivery drone who ran off to join the robot wars, and then he literally walks into a war zone to find out who pooped in his toilet.

Note: Rick’s presence on the battlefield won the revolution for the robots against the lizard people. This might be a throwaway joke, but something like that has the potential to be a major plot point later on.

Anyway, Rick tracks the sandwich back to an office worker named Tony (Jeffrey Wright). Rick intends to kill him but maybe has second thoughts when Tony says that life has been hollow since his wife died and doesn’t mind joining her. “Using your toilet was nice though,” he says. Rick portals away and comes back with another version of Tony whose wife is alive and who still defiled Rick’s toilet. A dead wife is no excuse.

“You shit on my toilet because you don’t know your place, and your place is nothing,” lectures Rick. “So the next time to stumble on a toilet that feels too good for your ass, trust me, it is.” He leaves without killing him but leaves him a weird fart bomb.

Rick catches Tony using his toilet again because, despite Rick’s threats, he felt as if Rick had given him permission to live – something he says Rick might need to hear himself. This is all a bid for control against a universe that takes what it wants, explains Tony. “It took my wife. It clearly took something from you.”

I should probably mention that Rick made himself giant and at this point takes his pants down and sits on Tony who is still sitting on the toilet. Tony arrives in heaven and is greeted by his wife and God. Heaven is weirdly just a field of toilets and the freedom to poop wherever you want forever.

Except it turns out that Tony is in a simulation pod on Rick and Morty, and when he starts freaking out and almost strangles himself with his tubes, Rick turns up to free him. Tony is just one of many beings that Rick is keeping prisoner in simulations of their own making. If Tony’s heaven is toilets, that’s on him. Rick lets him go again and tells him never to come back. Tony thinks they’re going to be friends.

Rick sets some kind of toilet trap for Tony and then shows up at his work with a box of sugar-free chocolates and vegan fiber chili. Only Tony is dead. He quit his job and started living life to the fullest, but crashed into a tree while space skiing down Mt. Space Everest. Rick goes to the funeral and gives Tony’s dad a clone kit and a billion dollars, then goes back to sit on his own toilet trap – which is only just a bunch of Rick holograms taunting him.

“Have fun with your stupid toilet that you get to use all by yourself now. Enjoy using it all by yourself while you sit there and think about how no one wants to be around you and how you ruin it for yourself because you’re a huge piece of shit…on his throne of loneliness.” Yeah, that’s pretty on the nose.

Post credits, Jerry drinks a mysterious liquid he finds in the fridge. It gives him a vision of being a water delivery man who gets simple satisfaction from his job. This delivery is number one out of nine hundred, then the vision ends. Jerry is desperate to make more deliveries and begins chugging the liquid.

What did you think of this episode of Rick and Morty? Be sure to tell us in the comment section below!