7 Best Inventions on Rick and Morty (That Only Appear Once)

First airing in 2013 on Adult Swim, Rick and Morty has become one of the most popular and highly-rated animated comedies on cable TV. The show, created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, centers on the adventures of Rick Sanchez (voiced by Ian Cardoni) and his grandson Morty Smith (voiced by Harry Belden) as they navigate a constant stream of chaotic, interdimensional crises. This has earned the series two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program. A ninth season is scheduled to premiere on Adult Swim on May 24, 2026. With distribution in 170 countries and 42 languages, Rick and Morty has become a lasting animated hit of the last twenty years.

At its core, Rick and Morty has always defined itself by playfully challenging traditional science fiction. The show takes well-established sci-fi concepts – ideas that have inspired entire careers – and uses them as the basis for humorous episodes. These episodes typically focus on a single scientific idea, exploring it to its most ridiculous and unsettling extremes. Often, the jokes revolve around unique, one-time-use technologies.

7) Curse Purge Plus!

The Rick and Morty episode “Something Ricked This Way Comes” is a humorous take on Stephen King’s Needful Things. It features a friendly shopkeeper who is actually the Devil, selling antiques that grant wishes but come with hidden curses. Rick, being Rick, figures out how to remove these curses from objects and starts his own business, “Curse Purge Plus!,” right across the street, offering the service for free. This episode cleverly shows that Rick’s incredible intelligence and his tendency to be spiteful are two sides of the same coin – his genius often serves his petty desires.

6) The Attribute Slider

The Rick and Morty episode “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer,” which parodies Total Recall, features a device that lets users adjust their core traits like strength, intelligence, and charisma, essentially turning human qualities into customizable stats similar to those in a video game. Summer uses it to become more physically and socially dominant for a party, sacrificing some of her intelligence in the process. While this device is a fascinating concept, the episode focuses more on comedic results than the disturbing idea of altering someone’s core personality. Even when Summer and Morty accidentally merge after misusing the device, the show treats it as a joke and doesn’t delve into the truly unsettling possibilities of the invention.

5) The Transdimensional Energy Relay

In the ninth episode of Season 7, Rick finds himself in Valhalla, disguised as Odin. He builds a high-tech windmill there to collect energy from the afterlife – the energy that keeps the dead’s consciousness alive. This energy is sent back to Rick’s garage on Earth, creating a powerful energy source. However, anyone killed by the device is sent directly to the afterlife. This idea is funny because it shows Rick seeing even something sacred like the afterlife as just another resource to be used with science, which fits perfectly with his cynical outlook.

4) The Dream Inceptor

The second episode, “Lawnmower Dog,” cleverly weaves together two storylines. The main plot is a funny take on the movies Inception and Nightmare on Elm Street. In the episode, Rick creates a device called the Dream Inceptor – a pair of earpieces that allows someone to enter another person’s dream while they’re sleeping. The dream world follows similar rules to Inception: dying in the dream means real-life death, and each deeper level of dream slows down time dramatically. However, instead of being serious like Inception, the episode quickly turns into a fast-paced, ridiculous adventure. This episode demonstrates that Rick and Morty will use science fiction as a foundation to playfully break down and satirize popular culture.

3) The Somnambulator

The Somnambulator is a disc-shaped device Rick buys that lets people learn and improve skills – like building muscle or learning a language – while they sleep. Their conscious mind doesn’t remember the activity, but they wake up with the benefits. In the episode “Night Family,” Rick uses it on his family, hoping to make them more productive, but things go wrong when their sleeping selves rebel. Although “Night Family” isn’t considered one of the best episodes, the Somnambulator itself is a really cool invention and remains a standout piece of technology from the show.

2) The Save-Point Device

The episode “The Vat of Acid Episode” is the only one from the show Rick and Morty to win a Primetime Emmy, and a special device called the Save-Point Device is central to its success. Rick creates this gadget for Morty, explaining it works like a video game save point – you can press a button to freeze time and return to that moment later. However, the device is much more sinister than it seems. Each time Morty uses it, he’s actually creating a new reality while destroying his counterpart in the previous one. Throughout the episode, Morty carelessly uses the device in many situations, unknowingly leaving behind a string of alternate versions of himself who cease to exist. He even develops a relationship with a woman he ultimately loses when Jerry accidentally resets the device.

1) The Microverse Battery

The sixth episode of Season 2, “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” features Rick’s most thought-provoking invention: the Microverse Battery. This device creates an entire universe within a special field, rapidly evolves life within it, and then relies on the energy generated by that civilization’s daily use of a device called the Gooblebox. Rick secretly uses most of this power for his spaceship, leaving the civilization completely unaware. What makes the episode brilliant is its layered structure: this advanced civilization then builds its own Microverse Battery, creating a repeating cycle of exploitation that mirrors Rick’s actions. It’s a clever, self-contained moral dilemma that becomes increasingly complex as the story unfolds.

What’s the most inventive one-off invention Rick created in a single episode of the show? Share your thoughts in the comments and join the discussion in the ComicBook Forum!

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2026-04-04 22:17