Conspiracy
On a train traveling through space, a bearded man boards the dining car. The conductor with the red deformed nose says “Tickets please” and takes the ticket. The man sits down at the bar. The other man sits next to him and asks the bartender for a drink for his “colleague”, it is assumed that they are both on the train to kill Rick Sanchez. He suggests to the first man that they exchange stories and begins his own.
In the story, the second man sits on a throne of skulls and orders his minions to lower a prisoner into a vat of acid. Rick enters. The man asks Rick how Rick found him; Rick answers his questions with farts. The man orders his minions to attack Rick, who quickly defeats his attackers. The man at the bar says “I *will* fight you now!” Uncharacteristically, Rick looks scared and runs away.
On the train, the second man now asks the first man why he is going to kill Rick; the first man replies, annoyed that he doesn’t know any Rick Sanchez. As the others begin to tell their own stories about Rick, the first man leaves the dining car. In the next car, the man meets a circle of storytellers, regaling each other with heartwarming tales of Rick’s good deeds. Goomby, one of the narrators, tells the story of how Rick saved “Space Christmas”. The group laughs appreciatively, then aggressively demands that the man tell his own “Christmas Rick” story. The first man angrily refuses and threatens them with his gun so he can leave the car.
As they enter the next car, they run into a blonde in a low-cut top who threatens to shoot her if she comes across Rick’s vignette. Explaining that she doesn’t know how she got there, she begins a cut-scene in which she boards a train car (a conductor appears from behind the train and takes her ticket) and meets an older woman who asks her why she was dating Rick Sanchez. . The older woman launches into her own cut-out story about when Rick met her family, which is interrupted by a warning shot from the man’s gun. He admonishes the blonde to begin the vignette; she protests that she wasn’t trying. The man begins to monologue about the train, which amplifies and connects the stories. When the woman is distracted by her own cleavage, the man realizes what’s going on and the two reveal themselves to be Rick and Morty in disguise.
Rick explains that they are stuck in a literal story device, an anthology. The conductor enters. Rick points the gun and tells him to stop the train, but the conductor turns out to be a strong fighter. After skillfully using Morty as a human shield, Rick instead shoots out the window of the train, sucking the conductor half out of the window.
The conductor is suddenly in the archway. He downloads a helmet attached to a game (that he just lost) called “Tickets Please”. He returns to his family but doesn’t believe anything is real. Moments later, the upper half of his body is bloody torn off and he pirouettes towards the ceiling of the arcade, blood splattering everywhere. The scene cuts back to the front of the train, where the window Rick shot cuts the pirouetting conductor in half.
Rick plugs the hole in the window, but so much air is gone that the train puts on “emergency continuity” like oxygen masks that fall down. Rick takes a breath, then takes the large tank connected to the masks that say “Continuity”. The train police burst in, threaten Rick and Morty to record a story about Rick, and end up shooting the tank, which explodes.
Cut to a police training class that uses the final scene as an educational tool. But Rick and Morty are suddenly among the students. He captivates the students and teachers, and Rick finds a diagram labeled “Anthology” in the teacher’s desk, showing a circle with eight segments (Dan Harmon’s “story circle”).
The train rumbles, signaling a break and a musical number with Rick and Birdperson. Through the continuing narration of the pirouetting conductor in the archway, the story winds back to Rick and Morty wearing spacesuits and walking on the hull of the train. After putting the conductor out of his misery, Rick and Morty have to break the “theme seal” by having Morty tell an unrelated story. Morty eventually succeeds as he tells the story of Summer and Beth fighting the scorpions with their time beams. The two make it to the engine compartment of the train before Rick runs out of air, only to confront the Story Lord (“like Matrix space Frasier”).
Story Lord captures and ties them up and reveals his plan: to strip Rick and Morty of their story potential to power the anthology train. After a series of cut stories, modulated by the Story Lord’s control panel (which affects things like “story energy” and “broad appeal”), Rick and Morty find themselves in the final story that Story Lord views through a rune portal: the pair must face the armies of the Meeseeks, the Citadel Guards, male Gazorpians and Evil Morty. Rick defeats the Story Lord’s plans by telling Morty about Jesus Christ, his personal savior. The control panel runs out of power and the train stops.
While Rick and Morty are surrounded by Veggie-Tales-like cartoon characters, Story Lord jumps into the narrative through a portal to yell at them. Jesus Christ descends from the heavens and brings everyone to their knees, and Rick and Morty use the distraction to jump back through the portal and trap the Story Lord in the narrative. But when he tries to restart the train, the controls fall apart, fake.
Cut to Rick and Morty in the Smith’s living room looking at a glowing model train going in a circle. Morty bought it from Rick at the Citadel. Rick expresses great happiness that Morty was spending money and engaging in capitalism. In the train narrative, the Story Lord talks to Jesus Christ, who decides to escape by summoning magical blood. In the living room, the train short-circuits and derails.
Rick is angry that the train is broken. When Morty suggests that he could return the broken train, Rick gets even angrier and tells Morty to buy another one instead, reminding him that “nobody buys there with this fucking virus!”
The post-credits scene is an advertisement for Story Train.
