‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9’s Time Police Comeback Is the Payoff Fans Have Been Waiting For
The Time Cops of ‘Rick and Morty‘ have always been lurking somewhere out beyond the fourth dimension, and the show’s ninth season just proved they were worth the wait. The Langoliers-inspired Fourth Dimensional Time Cops from the Season 2 premiere showed up in the ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9 premiere to arrest Evil Morty for crimes against the space-time continuum, delivering one of the most satisfying payoffs in the show’s recent history.
For a series that has spent years building out one of the most intricate fictional universes in animation, this moment felt less like a surprise and more like an inevitability. The comeback of the Time Cops proved that even a show as chaotic and anarchic as ‘Rick and Morty’ has internally consistent lore and, therefore, real stakes.
Who Exactly Are the Time Cops in ‘Rick and Morty’
The Time Cops are not a casual invention. They are fourth dimensional beings that regulate time, enforce strict temporal laws, and operate out of the 4th Dimensional Time Cop Headquarters. It is illegal for third-dimensional beings to possess time crystals, manipulate their own timelines through uncertainty, or engage in time travel at all.
Rick and Morty Time Cops are a species of fourth-dimensional creatures whose role is to keep the balance of the space-time continuum. They have heads resembling testicles and long arms ending in standard five-digit hands, but no legs, instead relying on levitation for mobility.
According to Rick Sanchez, Time Cops are biologically immortal. Their most recognizable officer, Shleemypants, has been one of the show’s most beloved background figures for years. Shleemypants is an immortal and omniscient Time Cop with the ability to time travel, who appeared in the episode ‘A Rickle in Time.’ He is an alien who works as a multidimensional police officer, keeping the multiverse safe from all benders of spacetime.
Beyond their unsettling appearance, the Time Cops possess powerful temporal abilities and are completely immune to time manipulation entirely, as seen in ‘There’s Something About Morty’ when Evil Morty freezes time in the Bunker Dimension, and almost immediately after, the Time Cops appear instantly, completely unaffected. Their arsenal is equally bizarre and lethal. Time Cops are frequently seen equipped with larva guns, sentient larva-like weapons capable of transforming their targets into third-trimester fetuses, and they also travel encased in clear blue time bubbles.
The Season 2 Origin That Started It All
The foundation for everything that happened in Season 9 was laid back in the second season opener. ‘A Rickle in Time’ premiered on July 26, 2015, with the Time Cop Shleemypants confronting Rick about a stolen time crystal after Morty and Summer’s indecisiveness splits time and brings them to uncertainty. It was a defining moment for the show’s mythology, introducing the concept that time itself has a police force.
In ‘A Rickle in Time,’ Keegan-Michael Key voiced the Time Cop alongside Jordan Peele as the second testicle monster, a casting choice that gave the alien enforcers an instantly electric energy. In Season 2 Episode 1, Rick fractured time when he stole a time crystal and couldn’t put it back together.
They needed the time cop’s help, but when Shleemypants decided to try to arrest them and put them in jail forever, Rick fractured time again as a way to escape. That early dynamic established the ground rules of the Rick-versus-Time-Cop tension that the show would keep returning to.
The term ‘Time Cop’ in ‘Rick and Morty’ is believed to be a reference to the 1994 film Timecop, where agents worked for the Time Enforcement Commission to prevent illicit use of time travel. The writers clearly had fun leaning into the parody while building something that felt genuinely threatening within the show’s internal logic.
How Evil Morty Walked Right Into the Trap
The Season 9 premiere episode, ‘There’s Something About Morty,’ originally aired on May 24, 2026, and it wasted no time getting to the point. Rick and Morty returned for its ninth season with a premiere episode centred on the comeback of Evil Morty, whose latest actions once again place Rick and the Smith family in danger across the multiverse.
Evil Morty reveals he has rebuilt the Omega Device, which has the power to erase every version of a person across the multiverse by killing a single variant.
It turns out it was Rick who showed Evil Morty the blueprint for the time-stopper, and it did not take Evil Morty long to bring it from paper to reality. Even this, however, turns out to be a part of Rick’s plan, as the moment the button is pressed, every time cop in the vicinity storms the bunkerverse at once, forcing Evil Morty to submit.
The genius of the setup was that Rick used Evil Morty’s own arrogance as the weapon. With Evil Morty having grown complacent by always having the upper hand, Rick outsmarts him by playing to his arrogance and ego to create an opportunity to destroy the Omega Device across the infinite multiverses and get out from under his thumb.
The Time Prison Mid-Credits Scene and What It Means for the Future
The arrest itself was a crowd-pleasing climax, but the mid-credits scene is where things got genuinely intriguing. Evil Morty is transferred to a time prison, where officials warn he will face aggressive inmates rather than remain in suspended stasis. The episode strongly hints that Evil Morty’s story is far from over and sets up a possible return later in the season.
In the post-credits scene, Evil Morty arrives in prison expecting major punishment, but learns that life in prison is boring and consists of eating mush. That final image, the show’s most cunning villain reduced to staring at a bowl of slop in a mundane cell, carries a comedic punch while setting up future consequences. The final shot is him staring toward the camera with narrowed eyes, hinting that he’s already plotting his next move.
Showrunner Scott Marder and co-creator Dan Harmon have already teased that Evil Morty may return, with the Time Cops arrest leaving his future wide open. The creative team seems fully aware that putting one of animation’s most compelling villains behind bars is not an ending. New episodes of ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9 release every Sunday, with streaming on HBO Max and Hulu beginning June 6.
Why the Time Police Matter More Than They Seem
The Time Cops have never been just a running gag. Each appearance has served a distinct narrative purpose, from humbling Rick in Season 2 to cleaning up the snake timeline mess in Season 4’s ‘Rattlestar Ricklactica,’ and now delivering the first real institutional check on Evil Morty.
The Time Police prove they are more than Rick can handle, which is explicitly shown when they successfully arrest Rick, something not even a government made up entirely of himself could do. Since the Time Police observe the time stream and all crimes that flow through it, unsanctioned time travel itself would definitely alert them, leading to immediate incarceration.
What makes the Season 9 use of the Time Cops so satisfying is that it reframes Rick’s long-established hatred of time travel as something tactical rather than philosophical. He has always known they were watching.
The fact that he weaponized that knowledge against the one person who thought they were smarter than him is a masterclass in long-game storytelling. Evil Morty’s return made Season 9’s premiere one of ‘Rick and Morty’s best episodes in recent memory, and it adds even more depth to the show’s best villain.
Whether the Time Cops were always heading toward this moment or whether the writers found the perfect convergence of threads, the result is the same: years of lore paid off beautifully. Now that Evil Morty is behind bars in a temporal prison with narrowed eyes and a bowl of mush, the question fans are burning to answer is whether even the multiverse’s most unbreakable enforcers can hold him for long.
