Welcome back everyone, pour one out for the Choco Taco. This will be my Rick and Morty season 6 episode 4 Easter Egg article, there were a whole bunch of Easter eggs and references, so we will be breaking it all down. Also, as always careful for spoilers from episode 4 if you haven’t watched it yet. We’ll just start from the beginning of the episode and work our way through the scene by scene, talking about Easter eggs, references, and WTF moments as we go along.
Episode 4 is all about Day Family vs Night Family. So Rick brings the device called Somnambulator, which creates a Night Personality of you that can do things while you are sleeping and the things that you don’t want to do. A fight starts between the two families just because Rick doesn’t want to rinse his dishes.
In this episode, there were a lot of movie references. Like Avengers Infinity War, Horror movies, and “Day” movies. We also got a lot of Easter Eggs in Rick’s room.
Here are all the Rick And Morty Season 6 Episode 4 Easter Eggs:
Night Family
Starting with the episode title “Night Family,” which is just a reference to the unconscious versions of themselves that took over because of the Somnambulator that did things that they didn’t want to do. But the whole joke here is that it’s the same people like it’s the same family, it’s just their unconscious minds who are in control when they’re in that state.
So like everything that they do in that state is things that the regular versions wanted to do subconsciously but just never actually did. Jerry’s the clue for this because the night version of Jerry is almost the exact same as the day version like there’s no difference. There equally as lame.
The Summer Night person makes it seem like there may have been some other secret villain controlling Summer’s body, but the joke here is that deep down inside, Summer really does want to take over the planet eventually and take over the family in general. So that tip is to keep an eye on her in the future like Rick is probably going to keep a closer watch on her in the future. But there have been previous episodes where they’ve shown her being like this, where she really enjoys being the ruler of a people.
But the real joke here is the joke about Rick not wanting to do the dishes. Like night Summers is the first one that snaps because the dishes are so bad, and she just wants Rick to help out a little bit. And the rest of the episode is basically showing how far he will go to avoid doing the dishes. Even at the end of the episode, when the Night family is willing to come to a compromise, Rick is unwilling to do so. He’d rather live like a slave than do the dishes.
Horror Episode
The episode has done, is sort of like a horror episode like it’s a parody of horror movies like this. The actress who plays Summer said that it was her favorite episode because she loves these kinds of horror movies, and it was a big Summer episode.
Pretty much throughout the entire episode, they use all kinds of horror movie tropes like the way that they light the episode, the way it takes place mostly at night, they use a bunch of jumps scares like horror movies, they use all the creepy music you hear in horror movies. Even the end of the episode is done is sort of like a parody of horror movie endings like a very downer dystopian type of ending.
One of the other big changes in this episode is that they start with a special little text title, I don’t think that they’ve ever done this in Rick and Morty before. It is taken from a real poem that T.S Eliot actually wrote, even though it sounds kind of strange, it is a real poem.
It says, “When you’re all alone in the middle of the night, and you wake in a sweat in a hell of a fright. When you’re all alone in the middle of the bed, and you wake as someone hits you on the head. You’ve had cream of a nightmare dream, and you’ve got the Hoo-Ha’s”. Jerry also makes a Hoo-Ha’s reference later, meaning that he also read T.S Eliot like he’s got a little bit of culture in him.
Somnambulator
They said that the whole idea of the Somnambulator, the term Somnambulator literally means to sleepwalk, and that’s kind of what the Night family does in the episode, they’re like the sleepwalking version of the family. Rick and Morty use it to get crazy abs, Beth learns it to play the trumpet, Summer learns Spanish, and the whole bit with Jerry just being super lame, only using it to be his own pen pal. But I think what they’re trying to say here is that Jerry is his own best friend, which also does work in their favor later because Night Jerry winds up helping them.
Rick specifically calls the night people their unconscious self, but the way I thought about it is that basically like everything that the night people wanted were the subconscious desires of the waking family. So like everything that the Night family does is things that the regular family wanted to do but never actually did.
Choco Tacos And “Day” Movies
They said it the whole bit with the calendar because there are a couple of big-time jumps in the episode like it’s been almost a couple of weeks that they’ve been using it the first time, then later, a bunch more time goes by.
Then at the end of the episode, there’s another big-time Jump which they pay off with the Choco Tacos. This is somehow like the worst possible thing that could have happened to them, like that’s the thing that they’re all pissed off about, “how could they get rid of Choco Tacos”. That’s actually taken from real life, like in real life, they stop selling Choco Tacos.
When Morty comes in to show them his abs, they play it for a big joke like he’s getting ready to whip his junk out. Because he says “Ah look what I got here”, as l he unzips the bag. But they don’t show you the bag till they zoom out, like wait a minute, what is he unzipping here what’s going on?
The joke about the movies is they’re making Beth burn all the movies with the word “Day” in the title. Like Independence Day, Groundhog Day, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and that’s why she saves the Talladega Nights movie because it has “Night” in the title.
Rick And Morty’s Podcast
Morty and Rick started a podcast called Fabsolutely Abbulous, which is just a joke about all the ridiculous podcasts that people start and then quit. Like they only have the podcast for like a really short period before the Night family takes over, and that’s the end of the podcast. Apparently, it turned into a super big deal though, in the short time that they had it running.
Like they joke about having Nancy Pelosi as one of the guests on it, like that’s how big their podcast is getting. This also pays off later in the episode when they actually show you them podcasting with a bunch of quick references to each other. And it’s meant to be a joke about the way the podcast hosts talk to each other on podcasts. They had them do that funny commercial break because they’re sponsored by the Boxer Lobster company, which is a fake business.
He also makes the Chewbacca Star Wars joke and the Wubba lubba dub dub joke. Also joking about selling out, like the whole joke is that Rick and Morty do all kinds of AD placements like there are all kinds of assets they post on their YouTube channel. So in real life, Rick and Morty sell out all the time, but Rick is always complaining in episodes about how he doesn’t want to sell out.
Ricks Room
We get to go back into Rick’s room, for I think, the third time in the series, we haven’t actually been in here that many times. He’s got a very elaborate rooster crow device that he’s using as an alarm clock. This device hatches and grows a rooster to maturity where it gives off his rooster cry to wake him up, then it destroys it, cleaning the mess and repeating it the next day.
So it’s just a joke about all the weird lengths that Rick will go to, to do things that he could normally do much easier if he made some compromises. Like the whole episode is a joke about how Rick never wants to compromise because like his rooster device here actually has a digital alarm clock on it and already kind of makes a sound, like he doesn’t actually need it to create a rooster to do what he wants it to do.
Zoom and enhance all over his walls, he’s got a bunch of Easter eggs and references for previous Seasons. There’s a picture of Aberdolph Linkler this is a Nigerian from the M Night episode, then there is Dr. Xenon Bloom from the Anatomy Park episode, there’s a Meseeks, and there are plans for his original spaceship made from common household items. Over on the left, there seems kind of like one of the Cronenberg people from Cronenberg World.
He’s also got schematics for his classic laser gun that we saw in Meseeks and destroy. Their schematics for a Meseeks box, and there are plans for a couple of other devices in a fuel cell. You also notice that he’s got a giant box of old-school floppy discs on the ground like the old-school 3×5 discs that you would have had if you had a PC back in the 90s or early 2000s.
You also notice when he comes into the kitchen and notices, there are no dishes, he gets pissed off, he uses the word Cock because he just used one in his alarm clock.
Avengers Infinity War References
They have that whole joke with a side quest in the forbidden zone, which I think is meant to be a parody of the 80s sci-fi movie “Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”. They also use it to make a Marmaduke joke, Marmaduke is a cartoon character.
And it’s meant to be a parody of a bunch of different things, like a giant Avengers Infinity War type of scene where Thor goes to make Stormbreaker on the Dwarven Homeworld, and Rick goes to make a version of dinner plates that can’t be destroyed. Like the vibranium or adamantium version of plates. They even have an over-the-top joke about how they’re 110 percent indestructible and even bother to stamp it into the place themselves.
Simulation Or Dream
There are a couple of details like this in the episode where it kind of makes me think that it points out the episode is taking place either in a simulation or inside someone’s head, because why would Rick stamp a plate 110 indestructible? If he’s all about being accurate, technically, a hundred percent would be the most indestructible you could possibly get.
And like at the end of the episode with a car chase, they have the Adderall truck, the over-the-top car crash, with the gasoline Factory, the dynamite Factory, and the dry Leaf storage facility. And when they’re finally driving away, like they’ve escaped and they’re trying to make it to the airport, the road sign just says ‘An Airport’, like it’s super vague, and that’s usually something you would see if it were a dream or if it were happening in some fake reality.
You could always theorize that this episode featured a family that wasn’t like the main family. There have been theories like that in the past just based on the way that they look or the things that they do. Like, “oh this could be about an alternate version of the family from a different reality”. Or it could just be that the events of the episode didn’t actually happen, and that’s why some of the references were so vague.
Like, what’s the backstory with Rick and this other guy making him the dinner plates that are indestructible? Like they had this whole backstory he claims that he owes him his life, what is that story? They’ll probably never pay that off either.
Simpsons And Mountain Dew
When Summer makes the Terry Gilliam reference, talking about the sleep deprivation suit that Rick makes for her, specifically, it’s a Time Bandits reference. In that movie, the characters all wear like really similarly weird-looking outfits. Also love the joke about the Mountain Dew in the DayQuil, that he says that kids in southern Europe call Doquill. That sounds so crazy that it could actually be a thing. You would be surprised at the crazy stuff the kids will do to try and have a good time.
Also, this might be a bit of a Simpsons joke. Like Simpsons make a joke about Mountain Dew being gross, it’s one of my favorite Simpsons jokes ever. That Simpsons scene is taken from the New York City episode, which was pulled because this was taking place at the World Trade Center. They pulled the episode from Syndication after 9 11.
Then when summer reacts to the Night family, they have this big horror movie Easter egg with the way she reacts. Like the camera movement zooming in on her here. They actually use this on The Simpsons too, you could say The Simpsons did it before. But really, in both cases, they’re meant to be parodies of classic horror movies with reaction shots.
