In what could be described as the “B plot” of this episode that chiefly features Rick treating his nemesis, Mr. Nimbus (voiced by Dan Harmon) to a cozy dinner, Morty is charged with retrieving bottles of wine from a dimension where time runs quicker so that the drink is aged to Nimbus’s liking.
“Time moves faster in there? It’s like a Narnia thing?” Morty asks his grandfather after he opens up a portal and tosses some wine jugs in.
“I’m not a beaver who believes in Jesus Christ but yeah it’s pretty much a Narnia thing,” Rick concedes.
The first time Morty enters into the other unnamed world (let’s just call it Narnia for simplicity’s sake), he meets a very nice couple named Hoovy and Bova. Hoovy (who is voiced by guest star Jim Gaffigan) helps Morty carry the wine back into his world, where he gives the lad some sage advice on wooing his crush Jessica. It’s a legitimately sweet moment, immediately undercut by Hoovy stepping back through the portal to discover that decades have passed and his wife is dead. Their previously unborn son, Japheth, confronts his father and stabs him to death for abandoning the family for all these years.
Morty’s innocent interference in the cow people’s lives (or they could be goats, it’s a little unclear. Rest assured, they have hooves) sets off a century-spanning saga of rapid technological growth, societal upheaval, and unimaginable pain. As Morty continually returns to Narnia to fetch more wine, this episode, written by Jeff Loveness, tracks the evolution and in some cases devolution of the community. Japheth’s killing of his father leads to an intense paranoia of “The Dark Child’s return.” Castles are built, necromancers are introduced, fathers are killed by their sons yet again, and a futuristic cow/cyborg named Adam brimming with the blood of three other cow men is set into Morty’s dimension to settle the score once and for all.
He fails, of course, but in the process Morty’s crush Jessica is brought back into Narnia where she remains in suspended, conscious, animation for centuries.
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