The latest season of Rick and Morty has been spectacular and full of surprises. After a “year and a half… or longer” between season two and three, creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have turned Rick into a literal vegetable and prompted the revival of a limited-edition McDonald’s condiment from 1998. Now fans on Reddit have discovered a pretty trippy Easter egg in the latest episode, “Morty’s Mindblowers,” that references one of music nerds’ favorite conspiracy theories.
In the opening scene, we pick up on the grandpa-grandson duo as they attempt to turtle-nap the Truth Tortoise while a Tim Burton-y villain chases them through a wild MC Escher labyrinth. In the chaos, the tortoise looks into Morty’s eyes and grumbles out an indecipherable, Satanic-sounding message.
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When the audio is played backward, Reddit user u/TheFlippyFloppy found the clip sounds like Roiland’s voice saying, “I’m a Beatle, Paul is dead”—a nod to the long-lived conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and the band left secret backward messages about it in some of their songs. While we can’t verify the conspiracy, or whether Roiland is actually a Paul truther, we did download the original audio from the episode to reverse it, and it checks out.
The effort made to insert hidden gems like this one point to why season three is the most critically acclaimed yet. Fans voted last week’s episode, the sprawling, gritty, “Ricklantis Mixup,” the show’s best ever, but it might be topped with whatever Roiland and Harmon have in store with just two episodes left.
Rick and Morty airs Sundays at 11:30 PM on Adult Swim.
