Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 7 Ending Explained: How Did They Beat the Tree Warden?

Leave it to Rick and Morty to turn a simple tree-sap heist into a millions-of-years-long evolution nightmare — and somehow still land a punchline about a hot air balloon. Episode 7, “Mortgully: The Last Rickforest,” is a FernGully parody with real emotional teeth, and its ending flips everything you thought you knew about the Warden.

Quick-glance breakdown before we unpack it:

Rick and Morty: Starve the System, Don’t Fight It

Rick and Morty land on a forest planet to harvest valuable tree sap, only to discover the tree is a conscious ancient being called the Warden. Punished for their greed, their bodies are dissolved and their consciousnesses dropped into an underground biosphere as microscopic organisms, forced to repeatedly evolve — fish, birds, dinosaurs, primates — every time they die.

The twist: the Tree Warden was never actually trying to reform anyone despite its speeches about learning through evolution. Instead, the whole ecosystem stays alive because of a much bigger system that had been trapping alien species for generations.

Once Rick and Morty figure this out, they stop trying to beat the system on its own terms and instead target the source of the Warden’s power. Morty convinces the other prisoners to build a peaceful ecosystem instead of hunting each other, which slowly weakens the Warden. Only then does Rick launch the final attack, with the prisoners firing harpoons into the Tree Warden and literally pulling it away from its roots, killing it once and for all.

The escape has a classic Rick and Morty punchline too — Rick and Morty convinced everyone to close their eyes and believe before sneaking away in a hot air balloon, quietly ditching the group they just liberated.

For more on the show’s overall run and creators, see the Rick and Morty Wikipedia page.

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