‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9 Episode 7 Recap & Ending Explained: How ‘Mortgully’ Turns a Beloved Eco Fable Into a Brutal Study of Evolution

Rick and Morty are no strangers to raiding places they should probably leave alone, and ‘Rick and Morty’ Season 9 Episode 7 puts that habit through its most punishing test yet. The episode, titled ‘Mortgully, The Last Rickforest,’ sends the pair to a forest planet in search of valuable tree sap, only for the tree in question to turn out to be a conscious, ancient being known as the Warden. The installment marks a clear riff on the 1992 animated film ‘FernGully, The Last Rainforest’ and stands as the 88th episode of the series overall.

What follows is less a simple space adventure and more an extended meditation on power, mortality, and the cost of always getting your way. Season 9 has been built around questioning the control Rick typically exerts over every world he visits, and this episode pushes that theme about as far as it can go. The result is one of the stranger, more visually ambitious entries of the back half of the season.

Mortgully The Last Rickforest Premise

Rick and Morty travel to a planet to farm a special sap from an alien tree, unaware that the tree is sentient until it begins lecturing them about their resource hungry nature. Before either of them can react, the tree grabs them with its roots and promises the worst possible punishment, burying them underground.

The roots keep pulling them downward until their bodies disintegrate entirely, stripping away every layer of personhood until only a single glowing light remains, presumably their souls. Those souls are then reincarnated inside an underground biosphere, not as Rick and Morty, but as single celled aquatic organisms surrounded by hundreds of other creatures trapped the same way.

The Ancient Tree even mocks Rick with a raised eyebrow at one point, a small but pointed touch given how rarely the character is put in his place. That dynamic sets up the episode’s central engine, a forced climb up the evolutionary ladder with no guarantee of ever reaching the top.

Evolution Cycle Inside the Biodome

Rick and Morty slowly evolve from single celled organisms into multicelled beings, then water dwelling creatures, and eventually land based life, but every step forward comes with brutal setbacks and hard resets. It is only once they reach ape form that Rick sees his opening, fashioning the world’s first weapon out of a sharpened stick and installing himself as leader of the animal kingdom.

Morty does not share in that victory, dying during the takeover and reverting back into a unicellular organism to start the climb over again. The two characters end up splitting into starkly different strategies, with Rick commanding an interspecies army through force and Morty instead falling in with a group of pacifist creatures who choose to evolve into herbivores rather than predators.

As birds, the pair discovers the Warden has defenses even against flight, and later, after evolving into dinosaurs and then chimpanzees, Rick ends up battling a group of gorillas while Morty is killed in the fighting, sending both of them spiraling back to square one. One recap summed up the sequence bluntly. Rick and Morty gotta evolve, broh.

Ending Explained and the Warden’s Fate

Morty’s gentler approach eventually pays off, and when a visibly weakened Warden descends into the biodome demanding the animals resume killing one another, the trapped creatures strike back instead, launching harpoons into the tree and tearing it out by its roots. With the Warden dead, the animals are freed from the reincarnation cycle, though they remain confused about why they have not returned to their original bodies.

Rick and Morty convince the other animals that all they need to do is close their eyes and believe, then quietly sneak away on a hot air balloon while nobody is watching. They make it back to their ship, land in the garage, and somehow return to their own bodies just before crashing onto the couch, where Morty grabs Summer’s biology textbook, looks it over, and tosses it aside with a dismissive nope.

A post credits scene confirms the other trapped animals eventually escaped and returned to human form as well, shown catching up at a space food court. One review described the episode as feeling like a combination of ‘Food Chain’ from ‘Adventure Time’ and ‘Naturama’ from ‘Futurama.’

Rick and Morty Season 9 Finale Countdown

The full episode lineup for the season runs from ‘There’s Something About Morty’ on May 24 through the finale ‘Field of Dreams’ on July 26, with ‘Mortgully, The Last Rickforest’ landing as the seventh entry on July 5. It follows episode six, ‘Erickerhead,’ in which Rick’s head and body are separated after a portal accident before eventually reuniting.

A Blu-ray and DVD release for the season has already been set for November 3, 2026. The network’s long-term investment in the franchise is notable too, with Adult Swim having renewed the series through Season 10 in 2023 and then through Season 12 in 2024, a commitment that stretches the show’s run through at least 2029.

One outlet’s real-time reaction to the episode called the extended sequence of Morty moving through animal and plant life cycles beautiful, adding that the animation this season has been remarkable, a sentiment worth reading in full on Bleeding Cool. With four episodes left before ‘Field of Dreams’ closes out the season, ‘Mortgully’ leaves the door open for how much further Rick is willing to go before the finale forces a reckoning.

Between Rick’s ruthless climb to the top of the food chain and Morty’s quiet refusal to play by those same rules, which version of survival do you think ‘Rick and Morty’ is ultimately siding with heading into the final stretch of Season 9.