Rick and Morty boss discusses heartbreaking season 5 finale speech

  In the last episode of season 5 of the immensely popular animated show Rick and Morty, Beth Smith took over as a robot and delivered a heartfelt speech about what it means to be human. However, in true Rick and Morty style, things went south very quickly.

"I can't help but think that we're not truly human if we don't sometimes also get angry and sad," Beth said before breaking down into tears. This was a devastating moment for Smith, who has been an integral part of the show since its first season in 2012. She later called the episode "the saddest thing I've ever done."

The speech, which aired on Sunday afternoon, was a unique finale for Rick and Morty. The show typically has a self-aware, satirical bent to it, and it's usually at its best when satirizing the zeitgeist. However, two weeks before the episode aired, Smith revealed a deeply personal reason for why she felt Beth's speech was necessary.

"That line actually came from something very near and dear to my heart," Smith wrote on the show's official Tumblr . "The past year has been hard for many of us in the trans community. We have lost so many of our people to violence and hate. I know that it is not intended to be a preachy speech and I do not mean to make it one, but I also think that in this moment when we are more important than ever, the pressure is on to have those conversations in real life. How do we support our loved ones? What can we do? How can we get along?"

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Smith's final speech was released right before the close of season 5. The show's writer and creator, Justin Roiland, told Dazed Digital that he and writer Mike McMahan had initially hoped to write a speech for Rick that was more "biting," but his plans were derailed when Smith asked them to make her character's words more sincere.

"We wrote a diarrhea of diarrhea of a speech for Rick instead," Roiland told the site. "And she said, ‘Guys can we just try something else?’ And it turned out so much better. We were like, ‘Oh shit, this is a good speech.’ It was so nice to be able to make the speech that we had originally been planning for Rick without bashing it."

For Smith, it had long been clear that Beth's character would need a dramatic close-out. "I have always thought of Beth as having an endgame," she said in December. "I have always known she’d be coming to the end of her time on our show.