What do you really fear?

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:49:13 -0700

I must confess that my guilty pleasure show of the last decade has been Rick and Morty. The multi-verse world of Rick and Morty perfectly captures the post-modern moment we find ourselves in; We now each get to live in our own little universe constructed from a pastiche of found cultural objects. Yet in a world where we have experienced and deconstructed everything, we still find ourselves dissatisfied because at the end of the day the pastiche simply enables us to avoid the terrible responsibility of ourselves. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the concluding episode of Rick and Morty season 7, Fear no Mort, which is probably one of the scariest episodes of TV I have seen in a while.

The episode finds Rick and Mort visiting an alien carnival of terrors with their usual jaded, nonchalant attitude. Surrounded by grotesque, biological cyborgs, they note that after seeing everything they really have nothing left to fear. Hearing this, a well-dressed man approaches them to note that it is so true that there is little left to fear, and that in fact the scariest thing in the multi-verse is on Earth. The trio take off and find themselves at a Denny’s. Rick and Morty groan at the below the belt joke, but the mysterious man shrugs and goes to get some pancakes.

Inside the Denny’s, the server notes that if Rick and Morty want the fear hole it is in the bathroom. The pair visit the bathroom and discover a mysterious hole in a bathroom stall. An accompany TV with built-in VHS player informs them that the hole manifests people’s greatest fears and then consumes them. The pair roll their eyes and walk away, only for Morty to bolt and jump in the hole. In the hole, a monster grabs Mort and proclaims its intention to stuff Morty with magots just before Rick shows up to kill it and take Morty out of the hole.

The pair laugh in mortified relief that they escaping the hole and head home. Yet something is not right. Suddenly, Rick’s dead wife (Diane) suddenly appears in the family’s living room, confronting Rick and Morty with the realization that they are still in the hole. As Rick goes down memory lane with Diane, Morty explores his terror of not being accepted. Everything seems to go well as Morty puts himself into more and more embarrassing situations and the simulation begins to break down. At last, Rick makes peace with Diane and goes to help Morty confront his fear of rejection. The simulation breaks down into darkness and the pair find themselves climbing out of the hole.

Yet as they name more fears they keep popping out of the hole. They eventually proclaim that they no longer need to know if they are in the hole and leave the Denny’s to live their lives. Years past, Morty grows up, Rick continues to have adventures, and the pair eventually move into a house together in Morty’s middle age. Then one day Morty realizes he has become his father, and the pair suddenly are popping out of the hole again.

Morty wonders if they were simply born in the hole, to which Rick responds they are going to get out of this and he will never leave Morty behind because he is irreplaceable. Morty looks up with terror as he realizes that Rick would never say this in real life and proclaims, “This entire thing has been about me. You’re not even in the hole are you?” Rick’s mouth opens and is filled with the blackness of the hole, which says that Morty’s fear of relying on Rick has been delicious. Morty awakes at the bottom of the hole to see Rick looking down at him with an inquisitive expression.

Morty quivers in fear after climbing out of the hole, but as Rick notes he also seems to have been lightened a bit. The terror of the hole was that it peeled away the cultural pastiches Morty had constructed around himself (body horror, teenage rejection, middle age, etc.) until only the common denominator of these scenarios remained, Morty. In this rejection of the constructed pastiche, the episode offers an alternative to our postmodern condition in which our baseline of reality is found by confronting ourselves so that we free to act in the world rather than acting out against the world.

prelude-to-the-future on Logan's Essays

What do you really fear?