Rick Sanchez
Richard "Rick" Sánchez is one of the two titular protagonists of Adult Swim's Rick and Morty franchise.
Created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, he is voiced by the former during the first six seasons of the series, then by Ian Cardoni beginning with the seventh season, and Yōhei Tadano in Rick and Morty: The Anime, after voicing the character in the Japanese dub of the series and various promotional short films. Rick is a misanthropic and alcoholic mad scientist inspired by Christopher Lloyd's Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown from Back to the Future and Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic from Marvel Comics. In September 2021, Lloyd portrayed Rick himself in a series of promotional interstitials for the series.
The first three volumes of the Rick and Morty comic series follow the Rick and Morty of Dimension C-132 while most issues of subsequent volumes follow the main Rick and Morty from the television series, with the final volume and Rick and Morty Go to Hell following another alternate Rick identified as Devil Rick in the latter series, and featuring a Girl Rick designed after cosplayer Santana Maynard by series writer Kyle Starks; the video game Pocket Mortys meanwhile follows the Rick and Morty of C-123. Known for his reckless, nihilistic behavior, pragmatic moral ambiguity and pessimistic personality, the character has been well received.
Fictional character biography
Backstory
Rick Sanchez from Earth C-137 is a mad scientist who seems to know everything in the universe and thus finds life a traumatizing and pointless experience. Following the murder of his wife Diane and daughter Beth Sanchez in his native reality by his parallel self Rick Prime, Rick dedicates his life to hunting Prime down, developing inter-dimensional travel and a portal gun. Along the way, Rick befriends Birdperson and becomes a leading figure in the revolution against the Galactic Federation throughout his mid-30s. In one of his many times captured by the Federation, they discovered an element dubbed "Sanchezium" that could be used to restrain him. After being rejected by Birdperson, Rick returns to his journey of vengeance, before ultimately becoming the leader of a fledgling "Citadel of Ricks". The Citadel had originally formed to oppose him after he had killed a number of alternate versions of himself on his journey of vengeance, and under his guidance oversaw the binding of the multiverse's Ricks into a "Central Finite Curve" in which they are all the "Smartest Man in the Universe", manipulating the flow of realities in which his daughter lived to ensure that she met Jerry Smith in order to produce an endless number of hypothetical grandchildren, allowing them to hide from the Federation using their brainwaves. Depressed by his failure to locate Prime, Rick eventually abandons the Citadel and casts himself into the multiverse once again, crashing into the garage of a now-adult, living version of Beth from Rick Prime's reality, where Prime had abandoned her and Diane twenty years prior. Rick befriends her son, that reality's Morty Smith, and frequently traveled with him on adventures through space, visiting other planets and dimensions with him. In the third season of the show, it is revealed that he is at least 70 years old.Television series
Season One
Rick's trademark catchphrase in the first season is "Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub", first introduced in the episode "Meeseeks and Destroy". In Birdperson's native language, the catchphrase translates to "I am in great pain, please help me", an indication of Rick's depression. Justin Roiland revealed the catchphrase was created by mistake when he messed up reading the script; he was supposed to say "wub wub wub wub wub".In the episode "Rick Potion #9", Rick reveals his disdain towards love, in which he claims that it is "a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed". When Rick and Morty irreversibly mutate all humans on Earth except for their family members, they abandon the dimension for a new one. Rick locates a universe in which the alternate version of himself has undone the damage inflicted by the love potion, but where the new dimension's Rick and Morty have been killed, allowing the C-137 Rick and Morty Prime to take their place. Despite Morty's trauma concerning this knowledge, Rick is nonchalant about moving to the new dimension.
Rick's intelligence is portrayed to transcend that of metaphysical beings, as demonstrated in the episode "Something Ricked This Way Comes", where he outsmarts Satan / Mr. Needful.
In the episode "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", after numerous Ricks in alternate dimensions are murdered, the Trans-Dimensional Council of Ricks accuses Rick C-137 and orders for him to be arrested. Rick C-137 finds himself captured by an "evil" Rick, but is saved by a legion of alternate-dimension Mortys led by his Morty.
Season Two
In the second season premiere, "A Rickle in Time", Rick nearly sacrifices himself to save Morty, but saves his own life when he realizes that doing so is possible. In the episode "Get Schwifty", it is revealed that Rick was once in a rock band called the Flesh Curtains, alongside Birdperson and Squanchy. In the episode "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Rick transfers his consciousness into a younger clone of himself, whom he calls "Tiny Rick". He soon becomes anguished in his new body, and manages to return to his older true form, and murders a line of other clones he produced.In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy", Rick reveals that he powers his flying car with a battery that contains a miniature universe, or microverse, whose inhabitants unknowingly provide the required electricity. The inhabitants cease doing this after one of their scientists does the same thing for his own universe, and discovers that this is what Rick has done to his universe. Rick remorselessly destroys the miniature universe inside his own miniature universe, killing everyone inside. Nearing the end of the episode, Rick knows that his own microverse would choose to power his battery, or he would dispose of it and create a new one; as he put it, once he got out of the battery, he'd have one of two options: "either I'd have to toss out a broken battery, or the battery wouldn't be broken.".
In the second season's finale, "The Wedding Squanchers", Rick and his family attend Birdperson's wedding, where Birdperson is betrayed and killed by his bride Tammy, a double agent for the Galactic Federation. The family is forced to inhabit an unusually small yet Earth-like planet, as they cannot return to Earth due to Rick's status as a wanted criminal. Rick turns himself into the Federation to allow his family to return home, and is incarcerated on a prison planet under the charges of having committed "everything".
Season Three
The premiere episode of the series' third season, "The Rickshank Rickdemption" shows a possible origin for Rick, in which he was a well-meaning scientist who loved his wife Diane and daughter Beth, but had an encounter with a member of a militant group of Ricks who had achieved inter-dimensional travel during his own initial testing of a prototype inter-dimensional portal gun, who offered him the secret to creating the device, and joining their organization. Shortly after his refusal, and his pledge to quit science forever, a bomb was sent through a portal, killing Diane and Beth. Rick claims that this was a fake memory he created in order to trick his interrogator into implanting a virus into the mind-reading device he was attached to, allowing him to hijack his body and escape from the Federation prison, having actually turned himself in to access the Federation's supercomputer and wipe it out financially, before taking out the Council of Ricks while saving Morty and Summer. At the end of the episode, after indirectly convincing Beth to divorce Jerry for trying to convince the family to sell him out, Rick again insists, in a rant to Morty, that the death of his wife and daughter as depicted was a fake memory; in the fifth season, his wife and daughter from his home reality are confirmed to have been caught in an explosion, with both being killed, the fake part of the memory having been Rick immediately developing an inter-dimensional portal gun himself to find a new family, rather than what he did in actuality: spent months developing the technology before spending the next thirty years attempting to track down the Rick in question. Months later, Rick reluctantly attends family therapy under Dr. Wong in "Pickle Rick".In "The ABC's of Beth", Beth learns from Rick that her childhood magical fantasy world of Froopyland was an actual place all Ricks had made for her as a child: a real procedurally-generated and childproofed pocket dimension he created for Beth, and that her memories of her childhood friend Tommy Lipnip, getting lost inside of it are real. Upon reentering to locate Tommy, Rick discovers that the animals have become predatory and dangerous from segments of human DNA, with Tommy having survived to adulthood via a combination of bestiality and cannibalism. After Tommy accuses Beth of deliberately trapping him in the dimension as a child out of jealousy for his family, pushing him into a honey swamp in a murder attempt before leaving him there, Rick takes himself and Beth back without Tommy. After Beth accuses him of being a bad parent, Rick counters that he made Froopyland to keep her occupied because she was a violent child, and has no doubt Tommy's claims were true. Beth tries to go back to reason with Tommy, but ends up killing him and his offspring. Back at home, pondering whether she is evil, Beth is presented with the option by Rick of having a replacement clone of her created, so that she will be free to travel the universe without abandoning her family; on rewatching his own self-erased memory of the incident in "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri", Rick learns that Beth asked him to decide for himself whether he wanted her in his life, and his response was to use a centrifuge to randomize who was the original after creating a clone, having been unable to answer, in the present finally admitting to himself that he is "a terrible father". In "The Rickchurian Mortydate", while Rick is in a feud with the President, Beth begins to fear she might be the clone, with Rick's phrasing of the answer leading her to an existential crisis, and ultimately reuniting with Jerry and renewing their marriage, much to Rick's frustration. The season ends with the Smith family happy to be together again, although Rick is disappointed about losing his dominant position.