What Is an Asimov Cascade in ‘Rick and Morty’? (2024)

If you still have a headache after last night’s episode of Rick and Morty, you’re not alone. “Mortyplicity” had so many decoys and so many standalone plots it was next to impossible to tell when one story ended and another began. But there’s one reference in Season 5, Episode 2 that’s been making viewers scratch their heads. What exactly is an Asimov Cascade?

“Mortyplicity” truly embodies what Rick and Morty does best: taking a sci-fi concept and pushing it to its absolute limits. Rick makes a decoy of his family to confuse his enemies. But when that decoy family starts to be hunted by another decoy family in a quest to see who is the real family, things devolve into chaos. Here’s what that nod to one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time meant.

What Did That Asimov Cascade Reference Mean in Rick and Morty?

It was only a matter of time before Rick and Morty started to directly quote hard sci-fi. Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific science fiction authors of his time. Over the course of his life he wrote or edited over 500 books. He was so ahead of the future, his 1941 story “Liar!” actually coined the term “robotics.” But Asimov is best known for creating the Three Laws of Robotics.

The laws first appeared in 1942 short story “Runaround,” though they were foreshadowed in his other work. Essentially these laws boil down to never allowing a robot to hurt any human, especially not a robot’s creator. Over the years this fictional device has been adapted into an unspoken rule of sci-fi that’s been endlessly followed, broken, and altered.

Rick creating a ton of decoy families made of flesh-covered robots explains the Asimov reference. So what does the “cascade” mean? As Rick explains, since the decoy families are near-perfect decoys of the real Smith family, every decoy Rick would have the idea of creating his own decoy family. Then those decoy Ricks would create their own decoys and so on and so forth, thereby creating a literal cascade of Rick, Morty, Summer, Beth, and Jerry copies. We’ll let Rick take it away.

“When squids started killing decoys, decoys started checking their decoys and learning that they’re making decoys,” Rick says in “Mortyplicity.” “That’s making them seek out and run into other decoys. Making them realize they’re decoys, making them start to kill other decoys.”

What Are the Laws of Robotics?

So what exactly are those Laws of Robotics? The first three laws mentioned in “Runaround” are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Eventually a fourth law was added. Known as the zeroth law, this was added at the end of the novel Foundation and Earth. This zeroth law reads, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The original three laws are written as subordinate to it.

What Does Rule 34 of an Asimov Cascade Mean?

If you’ve never heard of Rule 34, I’m so very sorry. Your innocence is about to be shattered. Rule 34 of the internet essentially means that if something exists, there will be p*rn of it. There are no exceptions to this rule.

“But there’s no p*rn in ‘Mortyplicity’!” you scream at your smartphone. That is correct. “Rick Dinner Mort Andre” was Season 5’s horny episode, not this one. That doesn’t mean the smartest man in the universe made a mistake. As is often the case in this wild show, Rick is likely speaking metaphorically.

Rick has over-described sci-fi concepts getting out of hand in flippant terms that seem weird at first but eventually make sense. “Rattlestar Ricklactica” has a great example of that when Rick says he’s going to let “snake time travel eat its own tail.” Later we see the snakes do literally just that. What Rick probably means by the Rule 34 comment is that “Mortyplicity” is so full of decoys and complex yet rushed pondering on the Laws of Robotics that it’s p*rn to sci-fi nerds. Hence Rule 34 of an Asimov Cascade is p*rn about a complicated and over-the-top execution of the “robot questioning its humanity” narrative.

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