Appears in rick and the dead Season 1, Episode 9, “Something is coming from here,” Butterbot is perhaps the closest franchise to distill Rick’s universe of nothingness into a single moment. However, the joke turns darker when the series kills off the tiny robot, rubbing salt into the wounds of its monotonous existence.
Butterbot is what it sounds like – a little cyborg created by Rick to deliver butter to him on the family dinner table. Cruelly, Rick gives the little robot enough sense to think about its purpose in life. When the robot asked its creator for an answer, Rick replied: “You pass butter,” The robot looked down at its hand and muttered: “OH MY GOD.” Rick replied, “Welcome to the club, friend,” conveys his vision of the universe as a functionally meaningless set of random events, at best devoid of any purpose and at worst deeply disappointing.
However, this is not the last time fans see Butterbot.exist Rick and Morty #50 (Created by Kyle Starks, Mark Ellerby, Sarah Stern, and many other creators), this companion comic series returns to the format of “Morty’s Spiritual Instigator,” in which Morty discovers that Rick has extracted unbearable memories from his mind, so he’s ready to go on an adventure. One of these memories is the death of Butterbot, who tried to help free Rick and Morty when they were being held in an alien prison.
In this flashback, it is revealed that Morty adopted Butterbot after his television debut and taught it to do whatever it wanted contrary to its design. Butterbot has a lot of new goals, treating Morty like a hero and even mimicking his hesitant speech patterns. Unfortunately, once Butterbot actually tried to help, it was immediately crushed under the alien guardian’s feet, which Rick points out is an obvious result since the robot is specifically designed to deliver butter.
Butterbot’s death is bleak, but it’s also the perfect complement to its “birth”. rick and the deadButterbot’s original joke was about how frustrating it would be to meet your creator only to find out that you don’t have big goals. However, with its death, Butterbot overcame this frustration and tried to define meaning for itself… only to be destroyed, as it couldn’t really grow beyond its original design. It’s an existentially terrible end for Melancholy’s character, as it has twice been defeated by its disappointing purpose — first by not having any greater reason to exist, and then by not being able to achieve much more.
rick and the dead Never shy of injecting some deeply dark messages into jokes, Butterbot’s life-and-death tragedy ranks with the series’ most scathing argument about the human condition — and it underscores the message that existence not only lacks an innate meaning, but that even creating that meaning may ultimately be impossible.