‘Rick and Morty’ Really Took Two Years for That ‘Squid Game’ Joke?

If there are two takeaways from tonight’s Rick and Morty, it’s that Summer Smith has never seen Total Recall and that the Rick and Morty writers waited way too long to watch Squid Game.

Fashionably late spoilers for Rick and Morty fans who haven’t yet watched tonight’s episode, "Wet Kuat Amortican Summer," which marked the second time the show has drawn from the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic for its high-concept rigamarole. The seventh episode of the impressively consistent seventh season showed Summer and Morty accidentally fused into a Kuato-type abomination, only to find that there is an entire community of Kuatos in the Rick and Morty universe — as well as a capable Kuato trafficking industry. The ordeal strengthened Summer and Morty’s sibling bond (once Summer finally opened her mind) as they narrowly saved Morty from slavery to an eccentric Kuato buyer who lounges around in a masquerade mask with other hedonists who are obsessed with the number 69.

Yes, 2021 Twitter’s favorite Squid Game scene to clown on scored a parody during the post-credits of this week’s Rick and Morty, marking the 69,000th time someone pointed out how awkward the English dialogue was on Squid Game by mocking the show's attempt at raunchy comedy. The Rick and Morty writers waited 26 months after the survival thriller series smashed its way into the zeitgeist to add their own 69 jokes to the pile — they couldn’t have put it off another 43?

Look, I get it, the 69 scenes in Squid Games were so clunky and immersion-breaking that anyone with a platform for parody will naturally want to take a crack at it. Also, full seasons of Rick and Morty need to be written well in advance to give time for the show’s animators and voice actors to do their jobs, so by the time Squid Games debuted on Netflix in September 2021, Season Six of Rick and Morty may have already been written. This year's slate of episodes could have been the first time Rick and Morty writers had a chance to get their Squid Game jokes out of their system, which would explain why they're so late to the 69 party. 

However, what makes the post-credits scene inexplicable and enraging is that, not only did Rick and Morty waste its first Squid Game parody on a joke that’s been played out since Rick C-137 and Morty Prime were still trapped on the collapsing Citadel of Ricks, but if the writers really wanted to make yet-another-69-joke about the Korean superhit two years after everyone else took their shots, they should have pushed this episode back one spot in the running order. In the entire Rick and Morty catalog, “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” was episode #68.