One of Rick and Morty’s favorite tricks is taking a hacky sci-fi trope and reworking it as a means of commenting on its characters’ suite of personality disorders.
Case in point: Unity. In the season 2 episode “Auto Erotic Assimilation,” viewers watch as Rick, Summer, and Morty are cornered by a group of humanoid aliens that are being assimilated, one by one, into a creepy hive mind. That hive mind is Unity, Rick’s old romantic partner, voiced from moment to moment by half a dozen different performers including Rob Paulsen and Patton Oswalt, but primarily by Christina Hendricks.
As an invasive mind-controlling entity, Unity takes over planets, forcing individuals to abandon their uniqueness and become part of a collective consciousness. This irks Summer and Morty at first, on account of the whole “she’s destroying the very idea of free will” thing, but they soon realize that Unity has actually done some pretty amazing things on the planet she’s conquered. She’s turned suicidal addicts into marine biologists, kept weirdos from taking pictures of teenagers’ feet, and prevented a doozy of a nipple-based race war.
Unity, Rick and Morty, and the complex morality of having different kinds of nipples
The morality of Unity is tricky, especially for a 21-minute cartoon that once featured a singing cloud character named Fart. Helpfully, the philosophical ramifications of her lifestyle get back burnered a little when Rick convinces his old flame to start partying again like they did in the old days. The drugs and exhaustion take a toll, and Unity starts to lose control of her planet, sending the newly re-individualized population spiraling into self-destruction. Meanwhile, Unity stays busy getting Rick whatever he wants, be it a giraffe that’s willing to sacrifice its dignity, every redhead on the planet, or a dangerously on-the-nose Community reference.
As anyone who’s ever gotten a text from their ex at 3:00am was about to find out, there’s usually a good reason why people break up in the first place. Unity realizes that Rick is more capable of destroying what’s unique about a person than she ever was, and she breaks up with him in a series of notes left on every surface of the planet. We’re left watching Rick try to justify his addiction and selfishness, telling his grandkids that he was the one who broke things off with Unity. The story ends with Rick accidentally getting too wasted on beaker chemicals to take his own life. This show gets dark sometimes.
On a more positive note, Unity moves in with another hive mind at the end of the episode – a real weirdo named Beta-Seven with heavy Borg overtones. Whether or not Rick’s prediction – that “a month from now, I’m gonna be making out with you in a bunch of red wigs” – ever panned out has yet to be explored on the show.