A Rickle in Time

Co-creator Justin Roiland was adamant that episode one of season two pick up where its predecessor left off; co-creator Dan Harmon also remembered he toyed around with the idea of freezing time for the entire length of the season.[2] There was talk of the frozen-time conceit being just a joke for a cold open, but the writers decided to expand it to the entire episode, with Roiland saying, "Okay, let’s try to actually do that and try to tell a whole story that shows why time is sort of problematic."[3] It was difficult because instead of parodying/subverting a trope—a common path for many episodes—the writers essentially had to invent their own rules for fractured time.[4]

An early incarnation involved Morty and Summer going about frozen time when they are confronted a time policeman—which evolved into the time-traveling testicle monsters. These characters were originally inspired by Stephen King's miniseries The Langoliers.[5] This version was cut because they deemed it too "basic" with nowhere to go for a potential second act.[6] One deleted element of the splitting time was referring to it as a "time quake"; an early version featured Rick berating Morty for wearing "shorty shorts", which caused time to split.[7] The reason for the fractured time was ultimately re-developed into something more specific to the characters. At first, chaos as a whole was responsible for the split time, but they decided on uncertainty as a cause solely to serve a joke about flathead/Phillips head screwdrivers.[8] "When you're talking about how to define chaos, let alone uncertainty, that's [when] you get into a semantic spiral," producer Ryan Ridley said.[9] Harmon felt it a suitable source for the time split because uncertainty was "an intersection between quantum physics and [the] human condition."[10] The team was happy when they created the joke that Rick believes his parallel self is plotting to kill him, because it "felt like [we] were writing a cartoon."[11]

The earliest incarnation of the B-story involved Rick taking Beth and Jerry and placing them amongst a sea of random individuals on an island or parking garage to occupy them;[12] Harmon characterized it as an "homage to event programming," such as Lost.[13] It was re-developed because they felt such series "fizzle out" or end unresolved, which would not help the episode comedically.[14] Another version fused the episode's B-story more prominently with its A-story in that when a "time quake" would occur, Beth and Jerry would unknowingly experience repeated moments,[15] and their settings would change between the past, present, and future.[16] In the end, the A-story was so complex already that they chose to create an independent narrative for the B-story. To this end, Roiland felt that the writers "probably could have done a little better" on that half of the show.[17]

Roiland characterized the episode as "brutal to [story]board and animate."[18] Director Wes Archer, his brother Martin Archer and Scott Alberts storyboarded multiple different versions of the episode. Archer estimated its opening was re-developed "three or four times."[19] Their first thumbnail pass took two weeks, with the first full animatic taking an additional three weeks.[20] At this point, the team realized the episode was not working. Harmon wrote another draft and the writing team stayed up all night pitching jokes for it. It was then sent off to Archer and his team for another animatic.[21] "They were able to reuse a lot, but they had to go in and re-board a bunch of stuff and they were troopers the whole way through. Never once did they complain," said Roiland.[3] This alternate version, labeled "Attempt #1", was released on the season two Blu-ray and DVD sets.[22]

The show is animated in the software Toon Boom Harmony, which kept crashing constantly during the episode's production. This was due in large part to the shots where, ultimately, 64 separate realities play out onscreen. The overload of layers and elements would cause the software to crash. The final episode was the result of multiple composited shots, stitched together: "They basically had to output it and then rotoscope over the top of it in order to get the final fixes in," Roiland said.[3] There are subtle differences in several but not all duplicated shots.[23] When the in-house animation unit for Rick and Morty would receive shots back from their international partner, Bardel Entertainment, they would attempt to edit shots further for more variety.[24] To finalize single shots, a computer would have to be out of service for nearly fourteen hours to complete rendering.[18] In one instance, a layer went missing nearing the end of a shot, necessitating another full composite.[25]

At the time of its post-production, Harmon was working on the sixth season of Community and Roiland was "really wishing he was here for [this] particular episode."[26] The episode's troubled production put the entire season behind schedule.[27]