Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 5 SPOILER Recap: “Jer Bud”

Rick and Morty Season 9 reaches its halfway point with the fifth episode, “Jer Bud.” What kind of adventure awaits in this particular episode? Will Rick and Morty be together again or split up? And will the story actually involve Jerry being transformed into a basketball playing dog as the title suggests? All these questions and more will be answered in our full spoiler breakdown of “Jer Bud.” This is your final warning if you haven’t seen the episode yet, so let’s get cracking.

What happens in Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 5 “Jer Bud”?

Credit: Adult Swim

We open on Jerry nervously prepping for a job interview with an advertising firm. Space Beth suggests he take a worry worm, a parasitic creature that eats anxiety and dies after a few hours, to help calm his nerves. The rest of the family’s prodding ultimately convinces him to do so, and he leaves as Rick opens a portal for an excited Morty. We quickly see the reason he was excited as Morty lands on a veritable Planet of the Dogs and reunites with his former pet Snowball from Season 1’s “Lawnmower Dog,” voiced again by the legendary Rob Paulsen.

Snowball, now the emperor of the planet, takes Morty on a tour of dog society, including their monorail, the advanced mech suits they use to walk around, and the Mups, bizarre-looking humanoids bred as pets by the dogs. Snowball repeatedly attempts to reassure Morty that Mup breeding is totally fine and normal, which only serves to underscore how weird it is. This is made worse when a pair of primitive, shriveled humans called mancors attack Snowball at his mansion, after which the dogs show Morty a video about the exact nature of Mup breeding that’s made to sound nice but is obviously horrific.

Credit: Adult Swim

Feeling uncomfortable with all this, Morty decides to leave early but the car chauffeuring him is attacked by dog cops. He is then pulled out of the situation by two mancors, who take him to a human rebellion camp. After being explained the full extent of the subjugation humans faced at the hands of dogs and being ambushed by Snowball and the dog military, Morty agrees to join the Mancors in an assault on Snowball’s mansion, though he continuously insists that it’s because he’s mad at Snowball and not because he’s taking a moral stance on the future of their society.

Back in the Jerry plot, his job interview goes so well that he ends up securing a dinner meeting with a client that evening. He decides to take a few more worry worms since the first one worked so well, but the worms end up breeding inside him, slowly taking him over. Rick, Beth, and Space Beth take Jerry to Space Beth’s worm dealer, Sweet Marie, to try and fix this, only for Marie and her enforcers to try and kill them with Rick and the two Beths being forced to kill Marie as a result.

Credit: Adult Swim

As the worms start to eat up the last bits of Jerry’s anxiety, they force Jerry to create situations that maximize discomfort in order to further feed. Case in point, at the client dinner, Jerry repeatedly insults the client to his face, but this actually makes him more interested in giving him the position. Jerry even manages to convince them to get on a plane to New York to talk to the Board of Directors at the client’s company, Nip Slip Vodka, immediately after the dinner. The plane crashes mid-flight due to Jerry sabotaging it as he helps his future boss’s pregnant wife (whom he invited on the plane because of the aforementioned discomfort thing) deliver her baby.

After the plane crashes, Jerry takes his future boss and Mr. Nip Slip (Yes, that is his actual name) to the inside of the top of a water tower, whereupon the three of them strip naked as worms pour out of Jerry’s every orifice. Rick, Beth, and Space Beth finally arrive to try and fix Jerry, but Jerry’s future boss and Mr. Nip Slip say he’s perfect this way as they consume handful after handful of worms and officially hire him. This causes Jerry’s anxiety to lessen and Rick’s anxiety to increase (He’s gotten too used to Jerry being home all the time to think about him having a job), leading the worms towards Rick.

Beth and Space Beth rescue the “incidentals” as Rick contains all the worms in a giant orb on top of the water tower, freeing Jerry. Jerry’s future boss asks Rick if he needs help marketing the orb, to which Rick replies, “Only if you put Jerry on it.” Back in the human/dog civil war storyline (never thought I’d write that sentence), Morty and the mancors successfully storm Snowball’s mansion after a brief attempt to arm the Mups ends in hilarious tragedy. Snowball and Morty face each other one-on-one, but in the process, realize how much they care about each other.

This doesn’t stop the others from fighting, though, so Morty goes out on the balcony with Snowball and threatens to kill him if both sides don’t stop the violence. Unfortunately, Morty didn’t have a plan for once they did actually stop fighting, so once Morty makes it clear that he has no intention of leading the society or even killing Snowball, the dogs and the mancors go right back to fighting. Morty and Snowball hide out in Snowball’s panic room, have a heart-to-heart about how neither humans nor dogs are perfect, and emerge to a destroyed society just as Rick arrives to pick up Morty.

Rick displays a “weird for anyone but Rick” level of pride in Morty for being a centrist about the civil war and helps the dogs, mancors, and Mups resolve their tensions with surplus worry worms. We then wrap up the episode with a post-credits scene of Jerry at his new advertising job on a Zoom call with a mancor, a dog, and a Mup, all three of which are clearly high out of their minds on worry worms.

Is Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 5 “Jer Bud” worth watching?

Credit: Adult Swim

I’m not sure if this or “Rick Fu Hustle” is my favorite of the season so far, but it’s definitely a close race between the two. I loved seeing Snowball come back and the Planet of the Apes pastiche at play with the human/dog conflict, and Jerry becoming more and more of a smooth powerhouse as his anxieties were eaten by the worms was a ton of fun. It’s got some of the biggest laughs of the season, a great payoff to one of the show’s earliest storylines, and it just plain works as a story in its own right. Overall, this is another excellent entry in Rick and Morty‘s stellar ninth season.

Rick and Morty Season 9 airs Sundays at 11pm on Adult Swim, with new episodes streaming next day on HBO Max and Hulu.

Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 5 SPOILER Recap: “Jer Bud”