It’s not often that Rick and Morty‘s Summer (Spencer Grammer) gets to be an episode’s bad guy. That’s one of the reasons that make “Night Family” so much fun. But there’s a chance that eagle-eyed fans may have seen this betrayal coming a mile away. A behind-the-scenes interview with Season 6 writer Rob Schrab and director Jacob Hair reveals that Summer’s big change was at least in part a response to one of Rick and Morty’s most quoted memes.
“Night Family” begins with Rick (Justin Roiland) begrudgingly giving every member of his family their own night person, basically an alter ego that can pilot their sleeping bodies to do chores. Initially, it seems like a foolproof plan. Everyone is getting abs and learning to play the trumpet. But that happiness is short-lived once Rick refuses to grant Night Summer’s request to rinse off his dishes. What follows is Rick and Morty’s scariest episode to date.
According to the series’ creators, the idea behind “Night Family” has been in the works for years now. But it was Schrab’s idea to take it more in a John Carpenter direction and turn Summer into the episode’s big bad. “What if this teenage girl turned into a ponytailed Hannibal Lecter?” Schrab says in the video.
But more than an interesting about face, making Summer the night family’s leader reveals how she really feels about her grandfather. “Rick classically says, ‘Your opinion means very little to me.’ That’s a meme,” Schrab says. Rick first says that to Summer in Season 1’s “Rick Potion #9.” “This episode is revealing that that’s not exactly true .”
“[Night Summer] really emerges that Summer’s resentments, her deep-seated problems with her grandfather are taking shape in the form of this rebellion of the Night family,” Hair adds.
It’s rare for any character to come close to pulling one over on Rick, but some version of Summer managed to do it. There’s a good chance this teenage girl is a lot more like her grandfather than we may have realized.
