Gromflomites: The Galactic Federation of Rick and Morty, Krombopulos Michael and the Currency Crash

The Gromflomites entered Rick and Morty in the show's second season, in "Mortynight Run," broadcast on August 2, 2015, and their government took over the Earth by the season's end. The Galactic Federation is the series' interstellar state, a bureaucracy of licences, prisons and currency that regards Rick Sanchez, a scientist who invented interdimensional travel and answers to nobody, as a terrorist; its agents are green, compound-eyed, mandibled insectoids in armour, the Gromflomites, who staff its ships, its checkpoints and its jails, and who bring to every scene the manner of a species that has spent centuries in uniform. The show was created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon and premiered on Adult Swim on December 2, 2013, and the Federation is its longest-running institutional villain, the thing Rick is always running from and the thing his family, in the end, is made to live under.

The occupation came through a wedding. In "The Wedding Squanchers" (October 4, 2015), Rick's friend Birdperson marries a woman named Tammy, who turns out to be a Federation agent; the wedding is a trap, Birdperson is shot, and the Smiths flee to a tiny planet before Rick surrenders himself to spare them. The Federation annexes Earth, Gromflomites patrol the suburbs, Jerry gets a job he does not understand at a Federation office, and the season ends on an occupied planet, a cliffhanger the show left hanging for eighteen months.

Gromflomites are insects in the pulp manner. They stand human height, in green chitin, with a segmented body, four fingers, a mouth of mandibles and a pair of large eyes that the animation renders as expressionless; they speak, wear armour and uniforms, carry blasters, and behave, in every scene, as employees. The show has never described their home world or their biology beyond what the design implies, and it does not need to; the Gromflomite is the Federation's clerk, a species that files, arrests and guards, and its horror is procedural. In the Federation's prisons Rick is questioned by a Gromflomite interrogator and, in the show's most sustained satire of an alien bureaucracy, made to see how much of the state runs on insects doing their jobs.

The exception is Krombopulos Michael. In "Mortynight Run," a Gromflomite in a helmet and a cheerful mood buys an antimatter gun from Rick, hands Morty a business card, announces that he is an assassin who kills anyone for money and loves his work, and goes to murder a cloud-like being held in a Federation facility; Morty, appalled, chases him and crushes him with the spaceship by accident. He is on screen for two minutes and has been a meme for a decade, the show's cleanest joke about the moral vacuum of a species built to take orders, delivered by the one Gromflomite who took none.

"The Rickshank Rickdemption" aired without warning on April 1, 2017, as an April Fools' surprise, and ended the occupation in twenty minutes. Rick, in Federation custody, has his memories probed by a Gromflomite officer, lures the probe into a fabricated backstory, escapes through the mind of his interrogator into the Federation's network, and, having taken control of its central computer, sets the value of the Federation's currency to zero; the economy dissolves, the Gromflomite garrison on Earth walks off the job, the occupation government resigns, and the president of the United States takes back the planet by default. The episode ends with Rick, having also removed Jerry from the family, alone with a bag of Szechuan sauce, and the Federation ends as a state that could be deleted by an edit.

It came back as a remnant. Later seasons brought a New Galactic Federation under Tammy, Birdperson's revival as a cyborg and a war in which the Federation's leftovers are one faction among many; the Gromflomites remain its soldiers, and the show has used them, when it needs a uniformed alien to fall over, ever since. The Federation's arc, from an unseen menace to an occupying power to a footnote, is the series' argument about institutions, made with insects.

Insect-like aliens who run things are a real category in the abduction literature. The mantis aliens article collects the accounts, which since the 1980s have described tall, praying-mantis-like beings present at examinations as supervisors, giving orders to the Greys, and the glossary's entry on insectoids covers the broader type; the Gromflomite as a functionary, an insect in a uniform who does not enjoy its job, is that figure with the awe removed. The Federation itself has a real counterpart in the lore. The idea of a galactic government that has been dealing with Earth's authorities in secret runs through the contactee and channelling literature, and in December 2020 a retired Israeli space security chief told a newspaper that a Galactic Federation was in contact with the U.S. government and waiting for humanity to mature; the alien channeling article describes the tradition he was speaking from.

Rick's answer to that idea is the show's. The Federation is real, it is vast, and it is a bureaucracy that a sufficiently contemptuous individual can delete with a spreadsheet, which is the opposite of the awe with which the lore describes its councils. The Gromflomites' fictional cousins are the Irkens, another empire of small green functionaries with a hierarchy, and the Kree and Skrulls, whose empires the Marvel films treat with the seriousness Rick and Morty refuses. The lore's galactic federations are always wise; Rick's can be brought down by setting a number to zero.