Rick and Morty escape a back-alley alien deal by jumping into a vat of fake acid, but Morty's refusal to call the trick a real invention sets off a month-long campaign of petty revenge. Rick fakes a 3 a.m. apology, hands over a "save-point" device, and lets Morty rewind embarrassments, a Jessica do-over, and an entire indie-movie romance complete with plane crash and frostbite — until Jerry mistakes the remote for the TV remote and wipes it. Then comes the gut-punch: it was never time travel, every reset killed an alternate Morty, this isn't even Morty's Rick, and a merged-dimension mob led by Justice Sotomayor arrives at the garage demanding Morty publicly kiss the vat.

The episode is a master class in scope mismatch — a grade-school dignity fight escalated into a Prestige-style multiverse murder spree, then revealed to have happened in a  ...