Mental restraints of the puppeteered
[or: Frying his backups (part 2)]
Okay so this theory has been sitting in my head for a long while and I had the feeling it might be accurate but I could not find a way to tie it up with the rest of the plot my headcanons...
Until now, when something changed (namely, the possibility that Rick Prime has been puppeteering other Ricks).
So.
1. Let's observe this scene:
I think we can all agree that Evil Rick was having lunch alone (there are a lot of bittersweet fanarts where Eyepatch Morty seeks comfort from post-surgery Evil Rick in some way or another, but if this one scene is typical of their post-surgery interactions, it appears this hypothetical comfort-seeking was not a thing. They did not even eat together). He broke the plate, either accidentally or on purpose. He picked one of the shards up. The rest is history.
So what I'm seeing is that he was not puppeteered 24/24.
In the incredible, gut-wrenching fanfiction "Ghost in the machine" which you should all totally read (in fact, drop this rambling post and go read it now!! Go go go go!!!!! Like, shooo!!! Come back after you've read it, if you still feel like it. Because there will be SPOILERS in the following 2 paragraphs!!!!) Evil Rick was constantly following orders, 24/24. Even when Eyepatch Morty did not puppeteer him directly, he still had orders to follow, like "bring me this object" or "stand there and wait", and the wiggle room for Evil Rick to resist was minimal. Said resisting mostly took the form of twitching (ergo momentarily disrupting whatever he was ordered to do) at crucial moments, maybe kinda like a computer lagging at the worst possible time. Like I said, absolutely incredible fic, go read iiiiiiiiiiit!!!
But now that Unmorticken has aired and we saw more of their interactions, if we think about the above scene, I think we can reach the conclusion that that's not how it worked. Evil Rick may have received an order to eat, as well as orders to keep the place neat and tidy (and therefore he began picking up the shards) but actually jamming the shard at his eye is not a matter of twitching nor just barely managing to change the trajectory of a movement at the last possible second. It's a fully deliberate action, from start to finish. He had the agency to do it.
So I think we can reach the conclusion that Evil Rick was technically free to... be himself when not puppeteered.
With some restrictions in place, of course:
I am just spitballing here, but I'm thinking of what kind of other actions Eyepatch Morty may have forbidden Evil Rick to do, such as:
Cannot damage any equipment (duh, otherwise he'd be throwing a massive tantrum, destroying everything Evil Morty is working on)
Cannot attack Eyepatch Morty (duh, otherwise the kid would never get a moment's rest lol)
Cannot escape
Cannot call for help
...and probably a bunch more, such as "cannot speak" because of Evil Rick's lack of words when Evil Morty came to him during his failed suicide attempt... Plus the fact that he has a scar on his mouth, which a couple of amazing fanart and fanfiction made me wonder if Evil Rick said something during his surgery that Evil Morty very much could not stand hearing so he shut him up with a scalpel or whatever he was holding... before shutting him up for good.
What a nightmare, huh?
And that's when he was allowed to be himself. The rest of the time he'd be forced to watch himself kill Ricks, and kidnap and torture a thousand versions of his grandson.
2. Now, if the theory that Evil Morty was once himself puppetered it true...
...wouldn't he also have a similar list of prohibitions restraining his actions? Such as:
Cannot harm Puppetmaster Rick
Cannot escape
Cannot operate a portal gun (we've never seen Evil Morty operate a portal gun made by a Rick, he made his own. Is that a coincidence? Of course, both are "portal guns" so maybe that's a stretch, unless he calls his own portal weapon something else, like the dinosaurs called their own "portal pistol" lol. Or maybe using a portal gun to escape counts as "escaping" and therefore a separate order is not needed. Edit: WRONG!! It's a blink-and-you-miss moment, but when he and Evil Rick dragged the corpses of the murdered Ricks in the Morty agency, Eyepatch Morty was the one seen holding the portal gun)
Cannot reveal to anyone what Puppetmaster Rick has been doing to him (maybe. Is that one even necessary? Would anyone even help him if he did reveal it?)
3. Like I said, I'm just spitballing here, but I think the above stand to reason. I mean they just seem like reasonable precautions. If this assessment is accurate, we can reach the following conclusions:
a) If Evil Rick's puppeteering experience was a nightmare, Evil Morty's was a living hell considering what Puppetmaster Rick was doing to him, especially if he was not allowed to leave the house and ask for help.
b) The fact that Evil Morty managed to free himself while operating under such massive handicups is another testament to his incredible intelligence and resilience.
c) It may be another reason he showed no empathy to other Mortys in his attempt to escape. They've had it easy, they had their chances to leave the Citadel or kill their Ricks, they had a million other ways and opportunities to escape and either never bothered or blew them. Now it's his turn.
4. Okay, now... what do you think happens to all these mental restraints once Evil Morty severed his connection to Puppetmaster Rick by tearing his receiver off???
One scenario is that they all became void. They were cancelled. Evil Morty was free to be himself, however he wanted. This could very much be true, and in that case my rambling ends here, I have nothing more to say.
Another scenario is all the old restrictions were still in place and effective, and he would just receive no new orders nor be directly puppeteered anymore. (I suppose this would make it into a good metaphor about abused people being conditioned to act in certain ways and it being very hard to rebel against them. E.g. imagine Evil Morty being unable to confess to other people about what happened to him because he'd expect pain and failure and no support, similar to actual abuse victims learning to expect accusations and failure and no support) Assuming the second scenario is true, then let's head off to the next points:
5. Depending on the exact extent of Evil Morty's mental restraints, it may be that using Evil Rick as a puppet was not only a clever way to get the upper hand, but that he had literally no other choice. E.g. imagine if he actually was physically incapable of operating a portal gun. He would literally need to hold it via Evil Rick's puppeteered hand. The whole thing would be Eyepatch Morty taking all his mental restraints and turning each and every one of them to his advantage in a convoluted, ingenious way.
6. Judging by Evil Rick's halted suicide attempt, it seems that while he knew that removing the receiver would kill him (I mean... you don't normally die by poking your eye out, so it has to be tearing your receiver off that will kill you, and he knew that) the puppeteered have no knowledge of the restrictions placed on them until they stumble upon them. (That, or Evil Rick knew he was not allowed to commit suicide but was desperate enough to try nonetheless.)
Therefore it's theoretically possible there are still some restrictions employed that Evil Morty is unaware of, which are waiting to spring up on him if the right (wrong) conditions are met.
Personally I think that's unlikely because I'm sure he has studied his own implant extensively since he became president and had access to adequate equipment, but:
7. Even if he studied it, this doesn't mean he was able to alter it nor undo it. From what we've seen it appears that unauthorized removal of part of the puppeteering implant equates with a death sentence. And while Puppetmaster Rick thought it unlikely his scrawny, stupid Morty would ever be able to put together a plan to break free or have the guts to mutilate himself, if the puppeteering equipment was originally, I dunno, a prototype designed by Rick Prime and was intended to be used against Ricks, then it's entirely possible that it is designed to kill the victim both for trying to remove the implant itself and for altering the accompanying code. It's the absolute prison, and despite whatever fast-acting healing equipment Evil Morty successfully used to remove his receiver in the past, it might be that it barely worked and he might not be too keen on trying his luck again.
8. So let's continue this thought experiment and assume that, if not all, at least the core mental restraints of the mind control implant are still very much effective inside Evil Morty's brain.
...Including the "cannot harm Puppetmaster Rick" one.
Now, I don't want to reduce the very important plot point of Evil Morty's mental restraints into semantics of "attack vs hurt vs harm vs kill", but... I'm going to go ahead and assume there are limits, definitions, to these mental restraints, otherwise Evil Morty would never been able to even look at Puppetmaster Rick wrong if there was the tiniest chance of it eventually leading to Puppetmaster Rick getting harmed. So I'm going to assume that the restraint is about something blatant.
Like... shooting Puppetmaster Rick, running him over with a car, poisoning his food, strangling him are all no-go, but aggressively poking him with your finger or not warning him about his impending doom might be okay.
My guess is that restraining Puppetmaster Rick is also okay, because as long as that the "no harm" order is still in action, Puppetmaster Rick would just immediately puppeteer Evil Morty into stopping or freeing him. The puppeteered cannot really get very far with this, especially when they're a child with no equipment of their own... Or that is what Puppetmaster Rick would think.
9. Anyway, before season 7 we don't see Evil Morty directly kill (or try to kill) another Rick. (It's not his fault the Ricks walked into various deathtraps, occasionally when he even specifically told them not to lol) This observation tipped me off to the possibility that some restrictions might still be in place... Of course, I cannot think on why there'd be a restriction against Evil Morty killing random Ricks, so it might simply be that in his attempts to bypass the restrictions against Puppetmaster Rick Evil Morty has learnt to think outside the box and later fully employed this skill to minimize the risk to himself.
And in season 7, he has no difficulty in killing Nice Rick, nor to shoot and attack Rick Prime during the Prime Fight.
10. BUT THEN WHAT'S THIS ABOUT:
I couldn't stop thinking about this phrase!!! It just doesn't make any sense!! WHY DID RICK PRIME ACT LIKE EYEPATCH MORTY WAS INCAPABLE OF KILLING HIM?!
So I kept thinking on what sort of mental restraints might still be active inside Evil Morty's brain.
Like, what? Is it something like him "not being allowed to kill a Rick who isn't currently posing a threat", so he could shoot Rick Prime in the beginning but not now that he's restrained? (But he shot Nice Rick again with no problem inside the box, when he was down and weaponless and dying...) This didn't really make any sense, like... why??? So I dropped this theory and forgot about it...
... until the theory that Rick Prime has been mind controlling other Ricks came up. By more than one fan!!!! (and we followed different lines of thought to reach it!!!)
SO LET'S PUT EVERYTHING TOGETHER:
(1) Evil Morty absolutely does still have some mental restraints in his brain and has been carefully operating around them this whole time, trying not to trigger them.
(2) One of those mental restraints effectively prevents him from killing Puppetmaster Rick. This would provide an additional explanation about why Eyepatch Morty didn't kill Puppetmaster Rick the moment he realized said Rick was freed by Rick C-137 resetting all portal travelers. Like, I can think of other explanations:
Puppetmaster Rick being terrified of the Citadel and having no idea that it no longer exists and worrying that they'll come get him to throw him in the Machine of Unspeakable Doom again, therefore laying as low as possible, either hiding himself so effectively that even Evil Morty can't find him, or protecting his home base to withstand an attack from the Citadel itself, making it extremely difficult for Evil Morty to defeat him.
Evil Morty being either extremely scared or extremely repulsed by him, simply never wanting to deal with him ever again, and thinking it highly unlikely Puppetmaster Rick would ever be able to successfully track him down as long as Morty took certain precautions...
...But it's also very likely that Evil Morty is physically unable to do it. Like, I doubt Evil Morty is morally above neutrino-bombing an entire planet just to get this one Rick, but maybe he can't do it. Maybe he is not allowed to fire such a weapon.
(3) In fact, the only things Evil Morty can do is hide himself in the fringe between worlds, employ a number of sophisticated shields, and surgically add the mind-cotrol-implant-overriding fingerguns on himself. An attack with these might at worst cause pain for Puppetmaster Rick, but as we've seen the fingerguns don't actually physically harm nor kill their target, they just... override the target's nervous system. So he can use those against Puppetmaster Rick.
(4) Fast forward to the Prime Fight, where Evil Morty uses a gun to try to kill Rick Prime--and why not? Of course he can do it. He also attacks Rick Prime with his bare hands and hijacks one of Prime's Dianebots to pummel him into a pancake. All good.
(5) Eventually, Eyepatch Morty's temporary allies go down, all the weapons and physical attacks he has tried got him no results, there are no more Dianebots for him to hijack and he's about to get shot:
Desperate, he tries one last thing: the finger-gun, which would only work if Rick Prime also has a mind-control-implant in his forehead.
(6) Bingo!!! It works.
(7) ...But this means that Rick Prime is also defined by a "Puppetmaster Rick status". Whatever mental restraint Evil Morty struggled to operate around is updated to extend to Rick Prime.
While the remains of the mind-control implant inside Evil Morty's head did not receive any new orders (as he no longer has a receiver), the old orders are still in place, and the updated knowledge concerning Rick Prime's status as a "Rick who puppeteers others" (or "admin" if you like) firmly slots him inside the "cannot harm" box.
(8) Whatever. Evil Morty is annoyed, but he knows how to work around this. He's unconcerned.
We have no confirmation of this, but it's likely Puppetmaster Rick had a special room and special equipment and used it update or oversee Evil Morty's implant (I mean... we've come up with similar imagery for Evil Morty and Evil Rick). Evil Morty therefore knows Rick Prime should also have something similar, and knows just what to do. He immediately drags him to the control room, where indeed the relevant equipment is waiting for him.
What I find funny is that Evil Morty probably didn't stick himself inside the wall panels to get all those cables out, but puppeteered Rick Prime to do it in his stead.
And this explains why part of the room was wrecked: Evil Morty was unfamiliar with Prime's strength and implants, and as we've seen, when controlling an unfamiliar body with implants, accidents might happen:
Evil Morty then puppeteered Rick Prime into sitting on his chair (aaaaand I assume deactivated his time-healing ability) before holding him still.
(9) Rick Prime woke up, saw/felt the fingergun and cables on his forehead, noticed he was unable to move, saw Evil Morty, remembered Evil Morty shooting him with something... and probably also immediately began employing his own implants and defense systems to get feedback on Evil Morty's fingergun and on how it could be overridden.
Doesn't this line make a lot more sense now???
He really is getting the picture. And in fact he may be getting a much bigger picture than Evil Morty might like; he may be stealthily scanning Evil Morty's brain through some other implant of his; see it full of cables, recognize the similarities to his own handiwork. He might understand that Evil Morty has puppeteered others, might understand that Evil Morty was once puppeteered himself. He might get a feedback on Evil Morty's list of mental restraints.
And he immediately begins stealthily mounting attacks against the fingerguns, which retaliate each and every time, turning red and hurting him. He keeps trying nonetheless, while simultaneously trying to distract Evil Morty by sweet talking to him (which is nothing but a testament about how clever he is and his ability to multitask) but his fate is sealed; maybe he'd be able to override the fingerguns given enough time... But he doesn't have enough time, and Evil Morty has prepared himself for this exact moment moment. His fingerguns are not easy to be overridden.
(10) So Evil Morty successfully fries each and every one of Prime's puppeteered victims (which do not have "Puppetmaster Rick status") and Prime says this:
DOESN'T THIS LINE MAKE A LOT MORE SENSE NOW?
He got feedback on Evil Morty's brain control implant. He knows that from the moment the fingerguns worked Eyepatch Morty could literally not harm him anymore.
(11) Not that this matters, because Eyepatch Morty knows just what to do...
...bring someone who can finish the job:
DOESN'T THE ABOVE LINE ALSO MAKE SENSE NOW?
Evil Morty is not the one harming him!!! I mean if you wanna look at semantics he didn't even tell Rick C-137 to kill him, he said a joke, a pun.
And he has the added bonus of coming out of this looking like a team player (I mean... as much as he ever could) and gaining an enslaved, morally obligated Rick to himself lol (turning his mental restraints to his advantage)
(12) AND TALK ABOUT POETIC JUSTICE. RICK PRIME IS BEING PUPPETEERED TO SIT STILL IN HIS OWN CHAIR AND GET PUMMELED TO DEATH when he's the one who had been tricking and enslaving countless Ricks to be puppeteered by him forever.
He's literally forced to sit still there and live through it, unable to even lift a finger to protect himself. Poetic. Justice.
(13) Evil Morty had been very careful up to now to hide the fact that he has puppeteered others, but there is no way Rick C-137 didn't understand that Evil Morty is familiar with the puppeteering technology after this encounter (I mean... Rick C-137 knew not to remove the fingerguns, he knew to remove the cables, he knew what this whole thing was).
Which on one hand, doesn't mean he gets to reach any plot-relevant conclusions (at least, not yet) because he knows Evil Morty scans Ricks' brains and steals their technology. On the other hand... we don't know how much more he needs to put 2 and 2 together and reach the same conclusions that Rick Prime did.
(14) And now for my last point.
If all the above is true...
...and depending on the semantics of the mental restraints...
...I would not be surprised if it turns out that Evil Morty using the Omega Device against Ricks is nothing but a GIGANTIC BLUFF.
Like this is literally the worst he can do: improve its design, build it, threaten to use it. (Depending on whether he intends to do a demonstration on e.g. Churry he may not even ever bother to build it.)
Because he literally cannot fire such a weapon against Ricks as long as Puppetmaster Rick is alive. (edit: I'm gonna correct myself and change this to: he cannot use such a weapon against Ricks directly but he still can trick or force someone else to fire it in his stead)
Of course, he would still be able to fire it against Ricks' family, which is probably more effective as a deterrent considering Ricks' suicidal tendencies, but you get the idea.
(...On a different matter, Rick Prime wins plenty of extra cruelty points for vengefully trying to turn Rick C-137 against Evil Morty by warning him about a weapon he knows the kid literally cannot use (edit: cannot use in a moment's notice, in case a furious Rick C-137 pops up in his doorstep))
Again, this may not be true. We don't know if firing such a weapon by throwing another Rick in the Omega Device (and therefore killing eeeevery Rick) counts as Eyepatch Morty directly killing Puppetmaster Rick or not, but I fail to see how it's different from dropping a neutrino bomb on Puppetmaster Rick's head.
(15) Or maybe I'm wrong and I'm only trying to connect dots that don't exist. I honestly cannot think of another explanation for Rick Prime's lines to Evil Morty in Unmortiricken but this doesn't mean there isn't one.
And I do think Evil Morty being deathly scared of Puppetmaster Rick is adequate explanation for not wanting to even try to kill him, and plot-wise and character-wise I think it's a lot more interesting than semantics.
But then again, it's possible for both of these things to be true... Because even with Rick C-137 suddenly becoming his slave, Evil Morty very much did not jump at the opportunity to kill Puppetmaster Rick. He chose to remain hidden. He doesn't want to deal with him.