WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Rick and Morty‘s Season 5 finale, “Rickmurai Jack,” which aired Sunday on Adult Swim.
In Rick and Morty, the creative team has a way of keeping fans guessing what’s canon and what isn’t. It’s allowed the show to plant random clues, with the luxury of integrating them into the story later if deemed necessary. For example, audiences thought Diane and Beth’s explosive deaths were a fabrication in Rick’s mind, but Season 5 confirms that really happened. Now, as the season ends, with another strange name surfacing, fans wonder who Kyle is and how he is connected to Rick.
In the Season 5 premiere, “Mort Dinner Rick Andre,” Mr. Nimbus poked fun at Morty as a sidekick, telling the scientist, “I liked your other one better. What was his name… Kyle?” It left fans curious, especially as Nimbus knew Rick the longest. So, if there were someone before Morty who Rick used to adventure with, Nimbus would know.
Then again, Nimbus could have just been playing on Morty’s insecurities or got him confused from a fleeting past meeting. But Kyle comes up again as Season 5 concludes when Rick and Morty fall out over the kid messing with his portal gun. Rick opts to spin a wheel to find a new sidekick, which includes “Kyle 2.0” as one of the options and indicates the original Kyle is someone of special significance to the genius.
There was a Kyle in the “Teenyverse,” but that alien being killed himself in an existential crisis over how he was a puppet in the microverse worlds Rick made, so Rick isn’t referring to him. Plus, Morty knew that Kyle too. Therefore, this Kyle has to be someone with a special bond and intrinsic value, with some theorists believing — given how the episode talks about Rick bunching together universes to make his own confined multiverse — that Kyle could be a Morty he used previously.
Rick traversed the Central Finite Curve hunting his family’s killer, so it could be that his first Morty was from the “Morty Market” in the form of Kyle before losing him and crashing into Beth’s world where he’d then meet this replacement Morty.
Another possibility — and a quite darker one — is when Rick crashed into this Beth’s home; she actually had an older son, Kyle, the first grandkid Rick took dimension-hopping. Nihilists believe Rick may have gotten him killed, reminding him of the debacle with losing his family and then tampered with Beth’s family’s minds. It could explain their tics, mental trauma, why they’re so dysfunctional and why Rick is so abusive to Morty with his lofty expectations.
From Jerry’s failures to Morty’s lack of confidence to Summer being angry all the time to Beth drinking like her dad, they may indeed be suppressing memories of a Kyle the audience has yet to meet. Of course, Kyle could just be a random buddy like Nimbus, Birdperson or Mr. Poopybutthole, but only time will tell. That is if the writers decide to pick back up on this thread or if they purposefully threw this seed out there, knowing the internet will futilely chase it down a rabbit hole.
Scour the clues regarding Kyle’s identity in Season 5 of Rick and Morty, now streaming on Adult Swim’s website.
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