‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9, Episode 7 Recap & Ending Explained – A Twisted ‘FernGully’ Parody Delivers One of the Season’s Best Endings
Adult Swim’s flagship sci-fi comedy has never been shy about mining beloved movies for inspiration, and this season has leaned into that instinct harder than ever. Between riffs on kung fu classics, horror staples, and now a certain rainforest fairy tale, ‘Rick and Morty‘ Season 9 has made pop culture parody one of its defining tricks for this back half of the season.
That trend continues with the seventh episode of the season, titled ‘Mortgully, The Last Rickforest,’ a clear riff on the 1992 animated film ‘FernGully, The Last Rainforest.’ The episode marks the 88th installment of the series overall and continues the show’s pattern of using a familiar premise as a launching pad for something far stranger than the source material ever attempted.
The episode kicks off with Rick and Morty landing on a forest planet to harvest what Rick calls primo tree sap, only to discover the tree they are cutting into is actually an ancient, sentient being known as the Warden. Furious at being defiled, the Warden captures the pair and drags them underground into a biodome prison, where their minds are extracted from their bodies and reincarnated as amoebas.
From there, the episode becomes a demented crash course in evolutionary biology. Rick and Morty quickly learn that dying in this cycle just resets them back to square one as amoebas, so the two spend the episode repeatedly evolving into new forms, first fish, then early alligators, then spiders, then birds, all in an attempt to either escape the biodome or outsmart the Warden from within it.
Each attempt collapses in some new and increasingly absurd way. As birds they discover the Warden has defenses even against flight, and later, after evolving into dinosaurs and eventually chimpanzees, Rick ends up fighting off a group of gorillas while Morty is killed in the skirmish, sending them both spiraling back into amoeba form yet again.
While Rick spends part of the episode as a baboon commanding an interspecies animal army in a more militant push to find a way out, Morty takes a gentler path, falling in with a group of pacifist creatures who evolve into herbivores rather than predators. The two threads eventually collide when Rick realizes brute force keeps failing and Morty’s more cooperative approach might actually hold the answer.
That answer turns out to be starvation rather than escape. Rick and Morty pitch a new plan to the other trapped animals, evolving into an early neanderthal and a plant-based lifeform, respectively, proposing they build a self-sustaining ecosystem that will effectively starve the Warden out by refusing to keep feeding his cycle of violence.
The plan works, and when a visibly weakened Warden eventually descends into the biodome demanding the animals resume killing each other, Rick, Morty, and the rest of the trapped creatures strike back, launching harpoons into the ancient tree and tearing him out by his roots. With the Warden finally dead, the animals are freed from the reincarnation cycle, though they remain confused about why they have not yet returned to their original bodies.
Rick and Morty, ever the opportunists, convince the other animals that all they need to do is close their eyes and believe, then quietly slip away on a hot air balloon while nobody is looking. The two make their way back to their ship, return to Earth, and land back in their own bodies just in time to crash onto the living room couch, where Morty grabs Summer’s biology textbook, glances at it, and tosses it aside with a dismissive “nope.” A post-credits scene confirms the other trapped animals did eventually make it out and return to their original forms, catching up at a space food court in their restored human bodies.
The episode leans heavily into the show’s trademark mix of gross-out comedy and surprisingly effective visual storytelling, using the evolutionary structure to wring plenty of jokes out of prison politics, animal hierarchy, and Rick’s usual instinct to dominate every situation he finds himself in. With the season now entering its final stretch, ‘Mortgully, The Last Rickforest’ keeps the momentum going as ‘Rick and Morty’ barrels toward its Season 9 finale later this month.
What did you think of the ending?
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