10 Best Rick And Morty Theories About What Happens In Season 8

Adult Swim recently dropped a teaser trailer for Rick and Morty season 8 that showed Rick auditioning various different aliens as possible replacements for Jerry (as a likely reference to the recent recasting of Rick and Morty themselves). It’s a fun trailer, with a great premise, but it doesn’t reveal too much about what will actually happen in Rick and Morty’s next season. How will Rick move on from his grueling ordeal with Rick Prime? Are Rick and Morty still in the fear hole? Will Churry the churro finally come back to exact his vengeance?

10 Rick And Morty Season 8 Won't Go Heavy On Lore

When the show started out, Rick and Morty’s writers had no interest in expanding their lore or exploring their characters’ backstories. They wanted to focus on telling standalone stories without building out long-running arcs. But when they teased Rick’s origin story and the audience latched onto it, they reluctantly changed their stance on lore. Season 7 was the most lore-heavy installment of the series to date. Rick finally defeated his arch-nemesis and Evil Morty became more powerful than ever.

After all the lore stuff in season 7, season 8 might see Rick and Morty go back to its roots with more standalone adventures that aren’t tied into any larger plotlines. Season 7 concluded the show’s biggest overarching storyline. Season 8 needs to go back to just spending time with these characters while it builds toward the next one.

9 Rick Will Move On From Killing Rick Prime

In season 7, episode 5, “Unmortricken,” Rick and Morty wrapped up one of its longest-running storylines in truly harrowing fashion. After obsessively searching for Rick Prime for several seasons, Rick finally managed to track him down, trap him in a room, and beat him to death. And, just like in other bleak revenge stories like The Last of Us Part II, he found that revenge didn’t fix anything. He still feels terrible; now, he just has a brutal murder weighing on his conscience.

Typical for Rick, he stuffed those feelings deep down and drank himself into a stupor. But in season 8, surely those feelings will resurface and Rick will have to deal with them. The overarching story of Rick and Morty season 8 could revolve around Rick trying to move on from the Rick Prime ordeal.

8 Mr. Poopybutthole Will Become A Villain

Mr. Poopybutthole has had one of the wildest and most unexpected character arcs in Rick and Morty. He was introduced as a figment of the Smiths’ imagination who turned out to be a long-time family friend. Then, he became the show’s resident fourth-wall breaker, often popping up in the post-credits scenes of Rick and Morty’s season finales to comment on all the big twists. Then, he took a dark turn when his wife left him.

The continuation of Mr. Poopybutthole’s arc in Rick and Morty season 8 will have to be just as unpredictable as everything that came before it. Throughout the series, Mr. Poopybutthole has gotten darker and darker. The natural next step might be for the character to become a full-blown villain, which would present an interesting conflict for his good friend Rick.

7 Summer Will Get A Bigger Role In Season 8

The last few seasons of Rick and Morty seem to have been subtly setting up Summer to take on a bigger role in the show’s future. When Rick told Summer she reminds him of Diane, it set up the possibility of more parallels being drawn between the two characters. When Rick admitted that he has respect for her after Night Summer led the Night Family’s mutiny, he highlighted the big difference between his relationship with Summer and his relationship with Morty.

Rick and Morty seems to be setting Summer up for a larger role in future plotlines. In season 8, there could be more focus on her relationship with Rick (in stark contrast to his much less respectful dynamic with Morty). So far, Summer has been one of the series’ best and most underutilized characters. Maybe that’ll change when season 8 comes around.

6 Rick And Morty Season 8 Will Reveal Why Rick Doesn't Do Time Travel

Since the beginning of Rick and Morty, Rick has avoided time travel as a rule and stubbornly refused to create a time machine. This started out as a meta gag about not indulging in the most overused sci-fi trope, and a reference to the fact that Rick and Morty originated as a parody of Back to the Future. But season 8 could reveal that there’s actually a deeper personal reason for Rick’s aversion to time travel.

Maybe Rick did experiment with time travel at some point in the past, when he was younger and even more reckless. Maybe he messed with the space-time continuum and it had disastrous consequences that caused him to swear off time travel for good. Evil Morty’s destruction of the Central Finite Curve might bring the ramifications of that mistake back to haunt Rick in season 8.

5 Doofus Jerry Will Finally Appear In The TV Show

Since 2015, Oni Press has been publishing Rick and Morty comics to supplement the TV show. The show hasn’t made many references to the comics, but there have been a couple of crossovers. The Vindicators originated in the comics before becoming the focus of an episode of the TV show. In that spirit, Rick and Morty season 8 could finally bring one of the comics’ best characters — Doofus Jerry — into the TV show.

Doofus Jerry is the nickname given to the version of Jerry from Dimension J19ζ7. In his universe, Doofus Jerry is a successful business tycoon and the king of his own world. Chris Parnell is great at playing Jerry as a loser, but it would be interesting to see what he would do with a more confident and accomplished version of the character.

4 Churry The Churro Will Be Back For Revenge

One of the best episodes of Rick and Morty season 7 was episode 6, “Rickfending Your Mort,” in which Rick and Morty litigate their relationship with the help of an all-seeing alien. The episode reveals that, at some point in the past, Morty asked Rick to make his churro come to life. He and Churry the churro bonded for a while, but eventually, Morty got sick of his needy new friend and asked Rick to turn him back into a churro.

But Rick revealed that was impossible, because to bring Churry to life, he had to make him “functionally immortal.” So, Rick and Morty concocted a scheme to promise to reunite Churry with his people, then just abandon him on a distant planet with some regular churros. Churry vowed to exact revenge, so he could come back for his vengeance in season 8 (and it could be hilariously anticlimactic).

3 Rick And Morty Are Still In The Fear Hole

Season 7 ended with one of Rick and Morty’s all-time best episodes: season 7, episode 10, “Fear No Mort.” Unimpressed by traditional haunted houses, Rick and Morty are directed to a hole in the men’s room of a Denny’s that promises to unleash their deepest, darkest fears. The episode was filled with unpredictable twists and turns; every time Morty thought he’d escaped from the fear hole, it turned out he was still in there.

By the end of the episode, Morty seems to have definitively escaped from the fear hole. But it would be a shocking twist for season 8 to reveal at some point that Rick and Morty are still in the fear hole after all. It would certainly be a wild narrative experiment, but Rick and Morty has always been great at those.

2 Evil Morty Will Recreate The Omega Device

While season 7 definitively closed the book on the Rick Prime saga, it left the door wide open for more Evil Morty stories. The last time Evil Morty was seen, he was scanning the schematics for the Omega Device — the weapon that allowed Rick Prime to erase all variants of a given person from the multiverse — before the original was destroyed. Evil Morty ominously told Rick C-137 and Morty Prime that this would give him the ability to recreate it.

Evil Morty initially decided not to replicate the Omega Device, because he didn’t want to share Rick Prime’s reputation as a threat to the multiverse. But that could easily change. Something could happen that makes Evil Morty want to rid the multiverse of a certain enemy, leading him to recreate the Omega Device and use it.

1 Rick And Morty Season 8 Will Introduce A New Big Bad

Rick and Morty season 8 could bring back Evil Morty or turn someone like Mr. Poopybutthole or Doofus Jerry into the new big bad of the series. Alternatively, it could introduce a brand-new character as the big bad to replace Rick Prime. It would arguably be more effective to make the next big bad a new character rather than reusing a familiar face, because part of what made Rick Prime such a great villain was the mystery surrounding him.

Rick and Morty isn’t the kind of show that needs a big bad; it worked perfectly well as an episodic series before it dug into its mythology and backstory. But having Rick Prime around did give the series a sense of purpose that it now lacks. Rick and Morty season 8 might introduce audiences to a new overarching villain.

Rick and Morty is an adventure/Sci-Fi animated series that follows the intergalactic, inter-dimensional adventures of super-genius Rick Sanchez and his less-than-average grandson Morty Smith. Rick's daughter, Beth, his granddaughter, Summer, and his hated stepson, Jerry, also take center stage more often than not. Hailing from creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, the series blends comedy with science fiction as a way of exploring a wide variety of themes aimed at an adult audience.