The multiverse-traveling duo Rick and Morty have gone on their fair share of perilous adventures to a number of dangerous locations, but when they went to the Immortality Field Resort, they didn’t have to worry about any potentially deadly threats, or so they thought.
Rick first became aware that the resort was not death-proof when he went there with Jerry in the season 3 Rick and Morty episode “The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy” as one roller coaster takes guests outside of the immortality field for a moment during the ride, leaving them vulnerable. When Rick later goes back with Morty, he learns that there is, in fact, a second lethal exception to the immortality resort.
In Rick and Morty Presents: Hotel Immortal #1 by Alejandro Arbona and Marc Ellerby, Rick and Morty find themselves involved in a murder mystery while hanging out at the Immortality Field Resort. An alien of the Mleczarnian race is found dead in the resort’s kitchen pantry, and while Rick is indifferent to this shocking development, Morty takes it upon himself to help solve the mystery as he feels sorry for the alien’s son he left behind. After lining up a number of suspects and coming to a few creative conclusions as to how this alien died, Morty finally convinces Rick to help solve the case, something he is able to quickly do once he learns the details of Mleczarnian existence. As it turns out, this particular alien race within Rick and Morty lives on a radioactive planet with cesium in their atmosphere. Because of their resulting biology, the species is basically Shrödinger’s Cat, always simultaneously alive and dead so long as they stay in the ‘closed box’ of each other in their sight. Once one of their kind is out of sight of another, their wave function collapses and they are either alive or dead the next time they are seen. So, when this Mleczarnian went off by himself, he was risking being dead the next time he was seen, and unfortunately for him, he was dead.
Because of the uniquely tragic nature of the Mleczarnian existence, there was no way for Rick and Morty‘s Immortality Field Resort to account for this death. The alien race is in a permanent state of quantum superposition, just like Shrödinger’s Cat, and this guest was technically dead when he arrived, he was just simultaneously alive. For this reason, his death could not be reversed and the resort could do nothing to keep him alive for the duration of his stay.
While tragic, no other guests (unless they are Mleczarnian) have to worry about suffering this same fate. However, it is fitting that this exception would occur as it speaks to the vast landscape of the universe in which Rick and Morty is set. Because there are an infinite amount of life forms existing in every conceivable way, there would of course be a species that could die in a place where death is seemingly impossible. Rick and Morty’s immortality resort has a second lethal exception, and it likely won’t be its last.
