The ‘Rick and Morty’ Finale Sort of Brought A Long-Dead Character Back to Sort of Life
Somewhere in an empty patch of the Rick and Morty universe, Rick Prime lost.
Tonight’s Rick and Morty Season 8 finale, “Hot Rick,” brought back the side character whose return fans have been anticipating since he found himself stuck in Jerry’s stupid little head last season. Memory Rick, the young, scraggly, Vietnam-obsessed impression of Rick from Bird/Phoenix Person’s brain is back in the canon, and his attempts to break free out of Jerry’s cog-and-spring-based mind reality nearly struck our Rick with a second family tragedy. However, the return of the hot young recollection Rick (Rickollection?) isn’t nearly as notable to the canon nerds as the other memory that Memory Rick brought back.
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Against all odds, and in defiance of the Omega Device, Rick C-137’s memory of his murdered wife Diane survives, and Memory Diane now has an eternity with Memory Rick to live out the happy ending that the real Rick never will.
In “Hot Rick,” our Rick makes the unthinkable decision to cut out his last remaining memory of his late wife in order to develop a closer relationship with his new fling Bug Anne and to live a more emotionally open life. As Rick explains, Rick Prime's Omega Device, which he used to erase every Diane from existence, also erased the memory of Diane from the minds of her loved ones – except for one single scene featuring her in some vaguely Southwestern setting engaged in some target practice with a pair of revolvers.
By attempting to remove this memory from his brain without fully destroying it, Rick accidentally allows Memory Rick, whom Real Rick extricated from Jerry's brain and placed in a “brain ant farm,” to discover Memory Diane and begin the process of Inception-ing Beth into saving them both from being forgotten. After Memory Rick's plan to sort-of free himself and his memory wife from Rick's constraints nearly kills both Beths, Rick banishes Memory Rick and Memory Diane into an empty pocket of space and then wipes his own memory of the event, thus freeing the two sentient Rickollections to live out their lives together in an idyllic pocket universe.
In the last Rick and Morty season finale, “Fear No Mort,” a version of Diane returned to the show in the form of a fear-induced hallucination after Morty jumped into the Fear Hole, but, seeing as Morty never actually met the real Diane, that version of Rick's late wife had no connection to the real thing, unlike Memory Diane. For the first time in Rick and Morty history, there is a sentient, sort-of-living Diane in the Rick and Morty universe who survived Rick Prime's purge and who carries on the memory of Rick's flesh-and-blood bride.
Of course, as Rick pointed out, Memory Diane is no more a one-to-one clone of Dead Diane than Jerry's cogs-and-springs head-canon is legitimate mechanical engineering. But, considering that this Diane is at least based on the real thing, there exists some hope for a happy ending for some version of Rick and Diane, somewhere in an intentionally forgotten corner of the universe.
