Every episode of Rick And Morty is full of wildly divergent adventures into fully realized sci-fi premises, but last week’s episode, which functioned as this season’s clip show, had more than most. It started with a truly intense segment, in which the titular duo found themselves being chased (or accompanied by?) some sort of Sandman clone through an Escher-esque dreamscape. Morty was gripping a “truth tortoise,” who somehow psychically conveyed a truth to him so horrible that it led him to yearn for the memory itself to be erased, thus rewiring the very fabric of his perceived reality and leading to a full-episode exploration of memories too painful to bear.

In a show known for not pulling its punches, digging into the bleakest possible jokes about its characters’ existential fears, what might that Truth Tortoise have told Morty—about himself, about Rick, about their family, or about the awful futility of existence? Redditor u/TheFlippyFloppy reversed the video to find Justin Roiland uttering to Morty one of the most awful secrets imaginable:

Yes: The tortoise is a Beatle, and Paul is dead. That old thing. This almost feels like a case of the show’s writers knowing their fans well enough to predict that they’d go in search of the Truth Tortoise’s unbearable secret, and then trolling them with one of the most overexposed conspiracy theories in pop culture. For what it’s worth, our money was on it being something about Evil Morty, too.


[via Vice]