In my continued quest to understand "The Vat of Acid Episode," I present the following:
Rick is actually the first one to use the device. At first, I thought this meant that he shunted himself to a different reality with a new Morty--but the purple mist appears around Morty, not him. So I guess he programmed the device to only affect Morty. Which makes sense because the rest of the characters don't have the purple mist around them every time Morty hits the button.
However, that DOES mean that when Rick hit the button, Morty jumped to another reality. So when Rick hit the reset button, I guess Morty just...disappeared? What did Rick do after that, chill in the garage for months on end and hope that the alternate versions of himself stuck to the plan? Which isn't unreasonable because the other realities were near-exact copies, but still. I'm assuming that he had to clone Morty or build a robot to keep the Smiths from asking questions while he was gone.
When Morty hits the reset button, he doesn't go back in time like he believed--instead, he jumps to another reality where the event never happened. For example, when he tries to jump over the manhole and falls in, he hits the reset button. He skips over to another reality where he never tried to jump over the manhole in the first place. He tries again, fails again, presses the button--he's in a new reality where, again, he never tried to jump over the manhole. Basically, he just keeps going backward.
Time passes like normal until Morty hits the button. However, he doesn't go back any further than the original save point. Essentially, he keeps living his life and occasionally goes back a few minutes, then lets time pass normally again.
Eventually, we get to the months-long plot where Morty starts dating a girl he met on the street. Rick disappears from the family at some point (I still say he was off crying about it, judging by the meltdowns he's had when Morty left in the past.)
At Morty's welcome home party, Jerry hits the reset button. This kicks Morty over to a reality where his relationship with the girl never happened. And since Morty never started dating that girl, Rick is back in the garage, waiting to destroy him.
When Rick confronts him with the truth, that's when it gets a little fuzzy. The guy that Morty is talking to is far from his original Rick (but again, the realities were so similar that he was probably a near-exact copy of the original.) Rick merges the realities together...aaaand we're back to our original Rick, who knows everything now that he's merged with the others. That dude seriously played the long game. He had to wait months for Morty to show up again--and if Morty never brought it up to his "current" Rick, he might have never seen him again at all.
Since the realities merged, Morty has to face the consequences of his actions. Morty tried to kill himself multiple times, so I feel like he should have turned into a pile o' blood and guts on the floor. It's also not clear how much time has passed--since he lost time every time he jumped, how did that work when all the realities merged together? At this point, you just have to accept that it's cartoon logic, lol.
At the end, Rick tells Morty to fake his death in the vat of acid to escape the consequences. Then he reveals that they're not even in their original universe, meaning that Morty didn't have to fake his death--Rick was just rubbing his face in it. Boy, what a fucked-up episode!
"The Vat of Acid Episode" is one of my all-time favorites because it's one of the few times that we actually see that Rick is brilliant, instead of the show just telling us. It also shows how far he's willing to go--and how much he's willing to sacrifice--for the sake of cruelty. No wonder Evil Morty exists.
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