When Rick and Morty premiered on Adult Swim, the animated show brought a whole new meaning to the term “dysfunctional family” — with “dysfunctional” being used too kindly to describe the Sanchez and the Smiths. The series revolves around the eponymous Rick Sanchez, the smartest man in the universe, and Morty, Rick’s grandson, on their adventures throughout not just the universe but the entire multiverse.
It becomes obvious right from the beginning of the series that Rick is a very smart but reckless sociopathic scientist who finds life a traumatizing and pointless experience due to his seemingly endless knowledge. However, his family members aren’t all that great either; his grandson is a less-smart, anxious, and easily stressed teenager who’s often dismissed as idiotic; his granddaughter Summer has an all-encompassing obsession with herself, and his son-in-law, Jerry, is a selfish, spineless character.
However, the most disturbing character of the show isn’t Rick himself, but his daughter and Morty’s mother, Beth, whose sociopathic tendencies surpass even those of her father’s and lurk under her bare resemblance of level-headedness. Now, for the most part of the show, Beth’s severe abandonment issues, clingy nature, need for her father’s approval, and complete negligence of her nuclear family becomes very apparent and present in nearly every episode.
But all of her less desirable traits pale in comparison to what the audiences learn about Beth as a child in Season 3’s episode titled The ABCs of Beth. In the episode, we learn that Beth had an extremely disturbing childhood, and not just because of Rick’s neglectful parenting, but because she was, as Rick put it, “a scary [F-word] kid.” In fact, he admitted to creating an entire imaginary world called Froopyland, so he could protect the neighborhood from little playful Beth’s sociopathic tendencies.
During the same argument in which he revealed that he made an imaginary world to protect the neighborhood, Rick also offered a vague explanation as to why that was necessary. Apparently, he got tired of cloning a replacement for every less-than-polite little child or a foolish animal that crossed little Beth’s socio-path (the wordplay was also used in the series). This implies that Beth actually hurt other children for being less-than-polite, leaving it to Rick to clone and replace her victims.
She clearly displayed sociopathic tendencies and lust for blood from a very young age. She would often request Rick to build the various things she could play with, like a whip that forces the people to like her or a fake police badge. But Beth’s playbox of madness contained much more than that. It also had a raygun, invisibility cuffs, a lightning gun, night vision googley eyed glasses, sound-erasing sneakers, fake fingerprints, sound-erasing sneakers, an indestructible baseball bat, etc.
And the list of horrific stuff built by Rick at the request of his daughter doesn’t end there either. There are also fall-asleep darts, a parent trap, rainbow-colored duct tape, poison gum, a stuffed animal with anatomically correct innards, and well, the list just goes on. It becomes quite evident that Beth didn’t become a horse surgeon as a result of her love for animals. If nothing else, a collage made entirely of severed horse hooves paints a very clear picture that she did it out of bloodlust.
Beth even left her childhood friend in Froopyland, pushing him into a swamp made of honey and leaving him stuck there for decades until she finally decided to return and retrieve him. Following Rick’s revelations of how messed up she was as a kid, the later section of the episode sees Beth returning from Froopyland covered in blood with her childhood friend’s thumb — politely asking Rick to make a clone.
By the episode’s end, she comes to a realization that she’s just as messed up as her father, or even more so. So, Rick presents her with a choice: if she so desires, he’ll make a clone of her and pass it as the real Beth to her nuclear family, offering real Beth a chance to go free and scour the universe free of any constraints of her everyday family life. If not, she can finally luxuriate in a life she alone chose for herself.
The episode ends with Morty and Summer coming home from an adventure with their own father to find Beth and Rick home. Apparently, Beth chose to stay with her family instead of indulging and doing whatever she wanted. Or did she, and what really happened to Beth?
