‘Rick and Morty’ Just Referenced An Infamous, Real-Life Rampage
On the newest episode of Rick and Morty, Summer narrowly prevented her brother from becoming a folk hero for reactionary weirdos.
Tonight marked Rick and Morty’s return to television after an 18-month hiatus that left some of the more extreme fans of the series feeling a bit disgruntled, and we can only thank God that none of them had access to an operational bulldozer during this ample stretch of free time. Spoilers ahead for anyone who missed the Rick and Morty Season Eight premiere “Summer of All Fears,” which brought the show roaring back into the zeitgeist with a banger episode full of destruction, desecration and a Death Race car repurposed to focus disillusionment with authority toward public infrastructure.
In “Summer of All Fears,” a simulated life of incarceration and military service turns Morty into a jaded, shell-shocked gearhead who builds an amphibious tank on the Smith family’s front lawn with one goal — overthrow his authority figure and take out a power plant in a suicide mission. Thankfully for everyone involved, Morty stops just short of destroying the nuclear facility, just like Marvin Heemeyer miraculously failed to ignite 30,000 gallons of propane during what was later coined the “Killdozer” incident in 2004.
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There may just be a Killdozer enthusiast in the Rick and Morty writers’ room, and the only reason it isn’t a certainty is because it’s been a full season since Adult Swim fired Justin Roiland.
In “The Summer of All Fears,” Morty returns from the 17-simulated-year punishment Rick imposed on his grandkids for the crime of taking his phone charger with a criminal record and five Purple Hearts, which Morty says you can swap for a cup of coffee if you’ve got a nickel on you. Morty uses the mechanical skills from his hard life to help Rick build a Death Racer, and the pair turn a jeep into an unstoppable tank before Morty double-crosses Rick and steals the death machine for himself.
After crushing a few cars and destroying a couple lawns, Morty drives the Death Racer to the nearest nuclear power plant with the intention of setting off a chain reaction that will knock out power to the entirety of North America, thus eliminating the need for chargers once and for all. In the news coverage of the carnage, Morty can be heard screaming, “Come in the wolf’s house and piss in his bed, you’re going to get bit! That’s just the nature of the wolf! That’s just the nature of the woooolf!”
As anyone who was on the internet in the mid-aughts will remember, Granby, Colorado suffered a suspiciously similar armored vehicular rampage to the one Morty just aborted two decades ago. Following bitter, extended feuds with his local government and a nearby concrete plant, an automobile repair shop owner named Marvin John Heemeyer spent two years modifying a bulldozer into a near-unstoppable death machine before unleashing it on June 4, 2004.
Heemeyer drove his “Killdozer,” as it would later be called, through 13 buildings, causing $7 million in damage before taking his own life, and he barely failed in his attempt to cause a massive explosion at a propane storage yard, which could have killed 12 police officers and taken out a nearby senior citizen complex.
In the decades since Heemeyer’s vehicular frenzy, the “Killdozer” has become a symbol for far-right, anti-government nationalists and extremist militia groups. And, if Summer hadn’t stopped Morty from completing his suicide mission, perhaps Morty would have been such a martyr for the right-wing nutjobs of the Rick and Morty universe.
Rick should thank his lucky stars that his sidekick didn’t turn his current dimension into one of the many where fascism is the default.
