2001: A Space Odyssey famously ends on the haunting image of a star child orbiting earth, and Rick and Morty’s most recent surreal outing uses its bizarre plot to set up a perfect homage to this iconic shot. Since the Adult Swim hit’s inception, Rick and Morty has been parodying the tropes and conventions of both big and small screen sci-fi. The series wears its influences on its sleeve and has always poked good-natured fun at sci-fi stories, as well as devoting entire episodes to spoofing specific works from the genre.
As early as the show’s third episode, Rick and Morty mixed Jurassic Park with Fantastic Voyage for a gory, silly story of a theme park gone wrong that takes place inside an unfortunate test subject’s body. Since those early days, the show has spoofed Zardoz, Mad Max, and Prometheus in one of Rick & Morty’s most underrated outings. Season 5 is no slouch in this department, with the fourth episode already featuring a classic 2001: A Space Odyssey parody.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a meditatively paced sci-fi story that sees a group of astronauts struggles to keep their mission afloat when their onboard computer HAL-9000 goes haywire and turns homicidal. That summary makes the movie sound like an intense, space-set horror, but for the most part (and particularly in its closing act), 2001: A Space Odyssey lives up to its title and is a truly psychedelic head trip that combines stunning imagery with thought-provoking philosophical inquiry. So, of course, Rick and Morty's season 5 turned the movie’s famously enigmatic closing image of a giant, glowing fetus orbiting the earth into a stinger about a Giant Incest Baby eating an astronaut.
The freewheeling plot of “Rickdependence Spray” (season 5, episode 4) seems destined to go nowhere for much of the outing’s runtime. The self-consciously sophomoric humor of this episode, which centers around Morty’s sentient sperm trying to take over the world and an Expendables-esque task force trying to fight them off action-movie-style — with the help of the underground Horse Cannibals, the CHUDS — feels like a direct response to last week’s poignant, emotionally involved outing “A Rickconveient Mort.” However, the Kubrick in-joke in the episode’s stinger proves there was a point to all this juvenile mayhem, even if spoofing the famous sci-fi movie is not as touching an ending as Morty’s moving love story with Planetina. The image of the Giant Incest Baby floating up alongside an astronaut is lifted directly from 2001: A Space Odyssey’s haunting closing moments, wherein the movie’s protagonist transforms into the Star Child (a huge glowing fetus) and is last seen orbiting the earth.
Like his later horror outing The Shining, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an infamously dense and difficult-to-decipher text that has been the subject of myriad diverging interpretations over the decades since its release. However, one thing that can be said for certain is that the last seconds of “Rickdependence Spray” is intended to be an homage to the movie’s last image, albeit with the Rick and Morty season 5 episode setting up the scene by having the astronaut discuss how much he feels guilty about abandoning his family, foreshadowing the sudden appearance of a Giant Incest Baby just as he notes there are no reminders of his children in the vast emptiness of space. It is a classic Rick & Morty sci-fi spoof, and a solid homage to Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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