The Smith family is having breakfast around the dining table. Rick excitedly plans an adventure with Morty to "kill God," while Jerry rarely mentions an upcoming job interview. Beneath this seemingly peaceful daily life, danger lurks. Suddenly, a group of grotesque squid monsters break into the house and slaughter the entire family without warning—and this is only the beginning of the chaos.
Meanwhile, another Smith family is engaging in a bizarre family activity: a hunting game with "Mr. Always Wants to Be Killed." Rick repeatedly reminds his family not to actually kill him. Just then, the bracelet on Rick’s wrist suddenly sounds an alarm. His expression darkens as he tells his family, "The decoy family’s been eliminated," urging everyone to pack their bags and flee immediately. On the way, Rick explains that since Space Beth was wanted, he created countless duplicate families as "decoy targets" scattered across the country to confuse potential pursuers. But before he can finish speaking, their vehicle is hit by a passing squid monster spaceship, and the entire family is instantly vaporized—apparently, this wasn’t the real Smith family either.
Similar scenes unfold one after another among different "Smith families": The Rick family on vacation receives the alarm and is about to escape when a squid-shaped grenade blows them to smithereens, with the dying Jerry getting finished off with a coup de grâce; A fourth Rick activates the house’s explosion-proof shield and tries to handle the crisis calmly, but still can’t escape the squid monsters’ fatal attack. It isn’t until the fifth Rick family appears that the plot takes a crucial turn. Faced with the bracelet’s alarm, Rick explains the decoy family’s operational logic in detail to his family. Summer suddenly poses a soul-stirring question: "Do the decoy families know they’re duplicates?" Rick bluntly replies, "They wouldn’t be good decoys if they did." Summer follows up with another question: "Then could we be decoys too?" The question catches the usually confident Rick off guard. He hastily tells Morty to check the inside of his buttocks for an identification barcode—only for it to be a prank by Rick, who diffuses the awkwardness with a fart.
Determined to find the mastermind, Rick decides to take the initiative. He takes his family to a decoy family’s residence to lie in wait. He enters a password to switch the decoy family to "Analysis Mode," freezing them instantly. As the family tours the house, Morty makes a shocking discovery in the basement: this decoy family has been secretly creating their own lower-level decoys. Rick activates the decoy Rick’s head, confirming this fact that goes against his original design. He realizes the situation has spiraled out of control—the duplicates, originally programmed to "not create lower-level decoys," have started an infinite nesting doll cycle. He immediately decides to terminate the entire decoy program, and the only way to do that is to eliminate all duplicates.
Beth strongly opposes this, arguing that the duplicates also have independent consciousness and shouldn’t be slaughtered arbitrarily, but Rick couldn’t care less. Soon after, they encounter another decoy family. Rick tries to activate the other’s Analysis Mode with the password, only to find it completely ineffective. He then realizes that the other family isn’t one of his creations. As the two Ricks argue, they hear the sound of a third Rick activating Analysis Mode outside the door and quickly hide. The newly arrived Smith family repeats their previous actions, also discovering the house’s secret of creating lower-level decoys—and a melee breaks out.
Beths from both families propose a truce, but the Ricks insist that "only by killing the other can we prove we’re the real ones," eventually descending into a brutal hand-to-hand fight. Just then, a fourth family suddenly appears and burns down the entire house. The surviving Rick pulls out a whiteboard to analyze the situation: Squid monsters are killing decoys; higher-level decoys discover that lower-level decoys are creating even lower-level ones; when decoys of different levels meet, they kill each other to prove their "authenticity," forming an unbreakable death loop. Beth suggests that "killing the squid monsters will end the loop," while Rick comes up with a win-win plan—disguise themselves as squid monsters to eliminate both the real squid attackers and other decoys.
But after shooting down a squid spaceship, they discover that the so-called squid monsters are actually other Smith families in disguise. It turns out all decoys have fallen into a cycle of "disguising as attackers to eliminate their own kind," with everyone convinced they’re the real Smith family. As the number of duplications increases, the quality of subsequent decoys deteriorates drastically: Some become grotesque scarecrow-like figures and kidnap other decoy families to steal their skin to improve their appearance; Another family of puppet decoys establishes a secret base, gathering a large number of decoys tired of fighting in an attempt to coexist.
However, the hope for peace is quickly shattered when a decoy family disguised as squid monsters raids the base. Except for the puppet Jerry, who escapes alone in an elevator, all other decoys are wiped out. Meanwhile, a group of radical Ricks, eager to speed up the cleanup, use floating speakers to challenge all decoys and equip their families with high-tech weapons—except Jerry, who gets a low-tech gadget. When the shield’s energy runs out, the family charges into the battlefield and engages in indiscriminate slaughter with other decoys. Not far away, a high-level family disguised as low-level decoys watches coldly, waiting to reap the benefits.
After the final battle, only two high-level decoy families remain. One Rick possesses holographic projection technology, while the other has hidden nanotech defense devices in his teeth. The two engage in a high-tech showdown that eventually turns into hand-to-hand combat. In the end, the nanotech defense Rick wins. Just as he thinks he’s become the "only real one," Mr. Always Wants to Be Killed—who appeared at the beginning—suddenly shows up and eliminates the last surviving group. It turns out he was Rick’s ultimate insurance: no matter which decoy emerged victorious, they would be finished off by him.
Above all this chaos, the real Smith family is on an adventure in space with Space Beth. They simply receive an alert that all decoy families have been eliminated, paying no mind to the bloody farce unfolding on Earth. In the post-credits scene, the puppet Jerry who escaped alone is washed away by a river. He is attacked by beavers, used as baby crib material by a future civilization, turned into a tavern mirror frame in the cowboy era, and finally nailed to a cross. This loser who survived the melee is trapped in an eternal torment of immortality, perfectly echoing the absurd core of the entire episode.