Conspiracy
Morty is very interested in Jessica but lacks the opportunity to talk to her because he is either too shy or his attempts are stopped by Brad whenever he tries. With the annual flu ball coming up, Morty talks to Jerry about his problem. Jerry compares Morty’s crush on Jessica to his own crush on Beth when he was a teenager. Rick overhears Jerry’s story and reminds him that this love led to Jerry getting Beth pregnant at 17. Rick goes on to warn Morty not to go to Jerry for romantic advice because “his marriage is hanging in the balance”. Insulted, Jerry comments that there is no problem with his marriage. Unconvinced, Rick tells Jerry that he can believe whatever he wants, but it’s pretty obvious that Beth is looking for an excuse to leave him. Morty gets upset and asks Rick not to talk about his parents that way. In response, Rick tells Morty that what people interpret as “love” is just a chemical that causes animals to reproduce, and once that happens, any real passion fades away. After Rick leaves, a depressed Morty goes upstairs to get ready for the dance and a nervous Jerry goes to check on Beth. Thinking about what Rick told him, Morty approaches Rick and asks him for a potion to make Jessica like him. After a brief argument, Rick calls Morty a, “thorn in the ass” and gives Morty a serum based on the genetic makeup of voles, rodents that bond with their species for life. Before he leaves, Morty asks if there’s anything that could go wrong with the serum, and Rick says no. However, once Morty leaves, Rick is quick to add, “unless he has the flu,” but shrugs.
At the dance, Morty uses the serum on Jessica, and aside from her dilated pupils, it looks like a success. When Brad sees Jessica holding Morty, he gets angry and tries to push him away from her. Things get worse when Jessica starts sneezing. The serum, which has bonded to the flu virus and caused the virus to replicate within seconds, is seen becoming airborne and infecting Brad with the serum. Brad quickly apologizes to Morty, but begins making sexual advances on Morty, leading to another fight between Jessica and Brad. Finally, the vagina director leads Brad away while Brad sneezes, causing the flu virus to get into the fruit punch and vents. Soon everyone at the dance is infected with the flu and subsequently with the serum. Morty is praying that everything goes according to plan when Jessica starts aggressively telling Morty to have sex with her on the spot, in front of the whole school. Morty is unsurprisingly humiliated and Jessica’s friend tells her to control herself before making advances on Morty as well. Morty slowly backs away and notices that everyone in the room now has dilated pupils and they are all looking at him lustfully. Realizing what had happened to the horror, Morty let out a weak whimper, “Oh shit!”. Students and teachers swarm around Morty, each violently competing to have Morty for themselves. Morty eventually manages to get away from everyone and makes a break for the exit, where Rick is waiting for him. Rick tells Morty that he realized he messed up and explains how it all happened. Terrified, Morty asks Rick what they are going to do, and Rick tells him that he has already created an antidote using mantis DNA as a base, claiming that they are the “opposite of voles” due to their mating nature. once before the female eats the male.
Rick releases his antidote along with a second, more powerful airborne virus. After releasing the new air serum, Rick tells Morty that the serum doesn’t affect anyone related to Morty by blood, so luckily that means no one in his family will want to have sex with him. For a moment, the antidote appears to have been successful until everyone begins to grow mantis-like features and other appendages. Now, not only do they still desire to copulate with Morty, but they also have the urge to cut off his head and then eat him. This mantis love virus soon infects Earth’s entire population, all of whom not only want to mate with Morty, but subsequently consume him.
Meanwhile, Jerry approaches Beth and asks her if she still loves him. Beth tells Jerry that loving him is the equivalent of building a homeless shelter, a job no one wants to do, but people who care will do it anyway. She is then called to work to help with some horses after an incident at the racetrack and Jerry begins to suspect she may be having an affair. Despite Summer’s warnings, Jerry decides to stop at St. Equis, where his wife works. Along the way, he encounters a massive highway roadblock and is confronted by several mutant victims. Finding a shotgun in an abandoned police car, Jerry armed himself and shot his way through the horde. After a successful operation, Beth’s co-worker Davin makes a move before contracting the Mantis-love virus. Just then, Jerry, with his clothes in tatters, bursts into him with a crowbar and beats him to death. Meanwhile, Rick and Morty travel to a remote area in the desert. As Rick tries to prepare a third serum to undo all his previous work, Morty watches the news and is horrified to learn that the virus has spread across the planet. Rick then claims to have created the solution by taking DNA from several sources, including a koala, a rattlesnake, a chimpanzee, a cactus, a golden retriever, a shark, and a dinosaur. Morty is confused by Rick’s contrivance and asks how it would return people to normal, but Rick only chides him for questioning him. As they fly over the city, Rick tries to create hype so he can rub his supposed success in Morty’s face, until Morty finally just gets tired of Rick’s arrogance and releases the third airborne virus himself. At first, the serum seems to have worked as some people return to normal, but just as quickly, people begin to turn into disfigured humanoid balls that Rick dubs “Cronenbergs”. Rick then sarcastically says, “You’re welcome.” to Morty, claiming that he made him, “Mayor, ‘I told you so town'”. The world is soon overrun by these disfigured monsters, and Jerry and Beth fight their way through them to survive, eventually reuniting with SummerAs dawn breaks, Rick and Morty sit on a rooftop overlooking the chaos around them. Rick tries to be light-hearted and jokingly points out that no one wants to have sex with Morty anymore, so he needs to go in the right direction. Morty, on the other hand, is still absolutely horrified that the world was in ruins and asks Rick how he could be so irresponsible. Unwilling to take the blame, Rick reminds Morty that he was the one who asked for the serum to begin with, claiming that Morty was a total jerk. Morty accepts his responsibility for the disaster, but is quick to remind Rick that he was the one who botched the original serum, mixed together a bunch of random genes, hoped for the best, and ended up turning the entire world’s population into Cronenbergs.
Next, Morty states that Rick had to figure out a way to fix everything. At a loss for what to do, Rick finally decides to use his ultimate emergency solution. The scene cuts to Rick and Morty’s garage, where Morty congratulates Rick on saving the world from the Cronenbergs. Rick asks Morty for his screwdriver and happily begins to finish his invention from earlier. Just as Rick turns the screw in for the third time, the device violently explodes, instantly (and messily) killing Rick and Morty. From the rooftop scene, Rick and Morty then step out of the portal and Morty panics at the sight of an incredibly bloody garage with the corpses of him and his grandfather lying limp and burned on the ground; until Rick calms him down by telling Morty that there are an infinite number of realities and in a few of them he managed to save the world from viruses. Rick goes on to explain that he simply had to find one of those realities in which they died soon after so he could come and take their place. Morty, still horrified, asks Rick what will happen to the world they left behind, only for Rick to tell him there’s nothing they can do about it, so they shouldn’t think about it. Rick goes on to remark that Morty should be glad he screwed up like he did, because if he hadn’t, they would have been the versions of themselves that died in the explosion. The episode ends with Rick and Morty burying their dead bodies in the backyard. Once done, Morty returns to the house in a daze with the thousand-yard stare, looking around his new home and sitting on the couch, clearly shocked by everything that has happened.
After the credits, the rest of the Smith family from the Cronenberged dimension are shown living out of a van equipped with armor and survival gear and roasting the dead Cronenberg over a fire. Summer creates her own television shows standing in a cardboard box, while her parents, Jerry and Beth, admit that they don’t miss Rick and Morty at all, and even though the world is falling apart, they have actually found happiness. Meanwhile, Cronenberg Rick and Cronenberg Morty are transported from a reality they call Cronenberg World, in which Cronenberg Rick has accidentally turned everyone into normal human beings.
