For context’s sake, Season 1 Episode 6 starts with Morty working up the courage to ask Jessica to the Flu Season Dance, only to then be intercepted by Brad.

From an outsider’s perspective, Morty presents as a nervous, shy, and insecure younger boy without much to offer but with a lot of heart, who is being unfairly mistreated by someone who pushes him back, thinking that Morty should “stay in his place” and date on his (lower) level.

From Brad’s side of things, Morty is a random who’s hitting on his girlfriend, and not even a worthy rival at that. He explains that even he wouldn’t go so far out of his own league. Jessica stands there and smiles as Brad praises her and insults Morty, until Brad states he doesn’t hit on girls prettier than herself. She frowns, sarcastically thanks him, and he smiles, adding on that his talents lay in athletics, not prose. If she wants that, she can have that. As he leads her away, arm around her shoulders, Morty looks down, defeated.

(Tangentially, I’d also like to add there’s a common misunderstanding had with this scene that Brad and Jessica are not dating, and Morty’s potential date was “stolen” from him by Brad intervening and discouraging Morty from talking to Jessica. However, the scene ends with Brad saying, “You want good words? Date a languager.” Additionally, if that misinterpretation were the case, that would make Jessica even worse as a person.)

At the dance, Morty, armed with a love potion extracted from an annoyed Rick, smears some onto Jessica’s arm. Jessica, initially aggravated by this, quickly succumbs to its effects. Grabbing Morty close and proclaiming her love for him. Morty confesses his own love as well, just as Brad (who’s drinking) passes by and overhears him. Brad does a spit take, angrily crushes his cup, and places himself between Morty and Jessica, pushing Morty back and prepared to get physical. He asks if he’s bothering Jessica, the obvious sight of Jessica embracing Morty going unaddressed.

Jessica pushes Brad back immediately, grabbing Morty back and screaming at Brad to leave him alone, calling him a jerk and repeating her love for Morty. Brad is genuinely shocked here, looking quite sad before Jessica gets in his face, stating: “He is more man than you will ever be.” She then sneezes, infecting him.

This scene flips the main point of Brad’s earlier verbal degradation of Morty and overall emasculation back onto Brad. Brad sees himself as the superior man to Morty, as a valued athlete, boyfriend, and peer in school. The rest of the student body, as well as Jessica, has been shown to share that same opinion. So there’s supposed to be satisfaction in this scene, seeing Morty finally win, and Brad devolve into a Morty-obsessed drone, but it only spells the disastrous beginning of the end of this dimension.

Moving onto the season finale, Episode 11 has Morty clashing with Rick and Summer for throwing a party in the parents’ absence, while their guests make a mess of the house in a chaotic whirlwind that Morty takes upon himself to control. We find out that sure enough, Brad and Jessica are both in attendance (though do not arrive together), to which Rick assumes the latter will quell Morty’s anxiousness.

This proves to be a gross underestimation of Morty’s ability to annoy Rick.

With the sudden Kool-aid Man-esque appearance of the leader-combination clone Abradolf Lincler, Brad (who’s drinking and appeared to be having a conversation with Jessica while Morty lingered behind her) is bumped into while Lincler monologues at Rick. This begins a confrontation that has Lincler awkwardly trying not to sound racist, suddenly looking to Rick for help, while Brad takes the encounter very personally. He turns everything Lincler says against him, even quoting the Third Reich’s promise to reign a thousand years.

Jessica attempts to interject, pointing and demanding Brad leave him alone, but Brad yells for her to stay out of it, pointing a finger right back at her.

Jessica is extremely upset by this. To which Rick yells out, “Kick his ass, Brad!” The people surrounding join in on this chant, notably not added to by Grace S., Jessica’s friend who tried to calm her down at the dance. Lincler looks around while Brad crushes and throws down his cup, and starts the smoothest ass kicking in the show thus far.

Jessica yells at Brad again as he throws himself at Lincler, then runs out of the room. Morty expresses his outrage with Rick, but is then pushed in Jessica’s direction, claiming he did Morty a “favor”. This is the second time Rick has helped Morty meddle in Jessica’s relationship, this time for his own benefit.

Morty follows through, meeting Jessica in the front outside and apologizing for Rick’s behavior. However, this apology is ignored, Jessica instead beginning to vent her frustrations with Brad, “UGH. Brad is such a jerk. He’s always trying to prove what a man he is. I just want to find somebody nice and sweet.”

Although this could be taken as Jessica’s feelings about Brad’s behavior towards her, based on the previous scene’s context about race, the Civil War between the Lincoln-led Union against slavery in the United States and the pro-slavery Confederacy, the centuries of chattel slavery (that may have brought Brad’s ancestors to the States), and the ideology of the Third Reich of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Jessica’s rant comes off as instead focused on Brad’s own pattern of behavior toward others.

We know that to an extent, Jessica is making a very valid point, both as a girlfriend and peer. Brad is a jerk, but not for the fight we just saw. We saw how in Episode 6 he belittled Morty, pointedly not for hitting on his girlfriend but instead for not even being worth it. Brad is justified here in context, but he took it a step too far to say that for Morty, there’s no chance in the world that he or people like him could find luck with girls like Jessica. It’s not their place.

Brad then follows up with the implication that if he were more successful or more wealthy, he’d be allowed to be with a prettier girl than Jessica. All while saying that Jessica is the prettiest, the highest caliber that he can get. At her sarcastic gratefulness, he brushes her off, and displays an unwillingness to change, like he would rather she leave him to find happiness than abandon his role in this social system.

Although, to counter this, the vulnerability Brad exposes in himself can’t be ignored. In the same breaths that he says that Morty is beneath both him and Jessica, he shows how highly in regard he holds her, how closely he follows the doctrine of high school hierarchy for her sake, and how willing he is to stand up for her and her standards. He performs his duty promptly and plays the role of a jerk jock without issue.

He’s comedically self aware and understands that although he was just saying very shallow things, he also shows how much he understands Jessica’s wants and desires, how she’s capable of knowing what she wants out of a relationship. He may say, “Date a languager (instead).” But he’s also showing that he respects that she could make that decision as a result of him.

It’s not a profound way of saying it, but Brad knows where his shortcomings as a boyfriend are and how that could effect the future. He expresses himself in ways he knows how to communicate, expressing how much he desires Jessica physically but also respects that their personalities have clashing areas.

Brad sees her as the prettiest girl in school, someone’s who on his level and respects as an equal, but also someone who might not see him as her dream guy. That’s alright. She can make that decision for herself, but for now, until that happens, he’ll be there for her regardless. Maybe not in the chivalrous way we dream, but he’s making an actual effort to show up.

We also see that when Jessica was embracing Morty, telling him she loved him and being obviously “happy”, Brad’s first decision was to push aside Morty, focusing on how he could defend Jessica from someone so far beneath their shared level, and someone he already told off for talking to her. The scene implies that he only notices when Morty talks, but the intimate posing should have been acknowledged if Brad were interested in confronting Jessica. Implying perhaps Brad is willing to put up with Jessica wandering as long as she’s still his.

When Jessica calls him a jerk here, and less of a man, it is in its most obvious context, directing vitriol at Brad that perhaps he isn’t completely used to maybe, but is aware of. He knows he isn’t perfect, he knows he’s not the poet she may want, but her saying Morty is more a man than he is specifically for Brad to swallow. That comes from actual dissatisfaction with Brad and is repeated in her later rant. It was the love potion that was able to let Jessica actually confront her issues with her relationship. It’s what shocks Brad to hear, even if he already knew it.

When Brad yells back at her at the party, Jessica’s feelings come back to the surface and come out at the most inappropriate time possible. Maybe Brad was yelling because he remembered how he felt before he was infected (alt. universe after all) or it was the same communication difficulties he had when he said he wouldn’t hit on a prettier girl.

However, people don’t owe nazis the space for debate and civil conversation, never mind the targets of the violence sewn by them. Maybe Jessica was just talking about Brad yelling at her, or she was trying to keep him from getting physically involved with someone again for the sake of his own ego, like she says is common with him. She has the right to be mad at that. Raising your voice at anyone, especially a loved one can be very damaging and even triggering.

However, Jessica centering her own feelings after a confrontation like that not only comes off as selfish, but also makes her look like a fascist sympathizer. Instead of accepting the apology, having some perspective, or saying outright what her actual problem was, Jessica redirects Morty’s genuine apology for Rick’s bad behavior and manipulation of the situation, into a complaint about her African-American boyfriend confronting a racist.

On top of this, we also know that Jessica had nothing to say when Brad was berating Morty, only speaking up when it had to with herself, her self image, her ego. But the moment that she chooses to tell off Brad, to get him to leave the situation alone, she chooses Hitler. Then chooses to position Brad as the jerk, the aggressor, and being “too sensitive”, when we know Jessica has on two occasions attacked Brad’s masculinity, when Brad’s earlier argument was centered around the emasculation of Black men by white men.

And at the end of the episode, we find Brad and Jessica right back together, to Morty’s disappointment. So, maybe everything just works out. Maybe the two see the beauty and ugliness in each other, and can’t think of any other person to love. Maybe it’s just convenience as two popular shallow kids boost each other’s popularity.

The season finale brought him back as well, showing us more sides of both him and Jessica, even when they’re not with each other. When Jessica gets upset with Brad, it’s not enough to actually leave him, but enough to cry in Morty’s ear about him beating up Hitler (after she specifically told him not to). This could’ve been the moment for them separating, to satisfy Rick’s plan to shut Morty up, but it wasn’t. Instead backfiring, with the episode ending with Jessica leaving, smiling under Brad’s arm, and adding more fire to Morty’s dissatisfaction with Rick.

However, jumping forward to season 2, we see no sign of Brad the entire season, while we do see Jessica getting much closer to Morty in Big Trouble in Little Sanchez. It’s entirely up in the air on how this came to be, although it can be assumed it was in part due to Tiny Rick boosting the popularity of Morty and Summer. This is notable, considering Brad’s main issue with Morty talking to Jessica was that she was “out of his league”. Later on, Jessica also comments that Summer selling out Tiny Rick was “self-destructive”. It’s at that, Morty seems to realize how he’s lost focus.

Brad’s absence here is additionally questionable considering that after jumping forward to season 3, in Rest and Ricklaxation, we hear that Brad and Jessica have broken up, and she’s looking for someone special, and nothing she’s “ever remotely considered in the past”. This is odd news considering that upon hearing this, Morty seems surprised and excited at this “new” prospect. It almost seems like these are taking place in alternate timelines where Jessica never went on that date with Morty just last season.

Brad doesn’t get mentioned again until the end of the episode, after Jessica shows that she only really cares about Morty enough to get Rick off her back and to have someone hanging around who worships her enough to serve as her emotional dumping ground. Rick and Jessica seem to share that in common (for at least this episode). Brad apparently got lunch with Jessica, and the two are on amicable terms, with her friends assuming the two will get back together.

Moving on to the comics, there are two additional instances of Jessica being with Brad but still pursuing Morty, adding onto Morty’s consistent pursuit of Jessica despite her relationship status. In Issue #20, we see Brad discourage Morty from Jessica by pointing out his shortcomings as usual, then promptly get handsy with Jessica. (I’m going to count it as them being written to be in a relationship again.) When Morty later appears at tryouts physically enhanced, Jessica is openly attracted to him, to which Brad makes no comment on, instead outraged at Morty’s sudden transformation.

Following this established dynamic up in Issue #27, when Morty asks Jessica to the dance, she says that Brad is already taking her, and further explains that irregardless, Morty’s whole deal is really weird. However, later on Morty says that Jessica’s changed her mind now that Brad broke his leg at practice, quite excited at the prospect. This is then squashed when after the dance, Morty explains that Brad made a miraculous appearance, then said that he called dibs on Jessica, and then dumped Morty in the toilet (with help from his friends). No mention of Jessica, no explaining why he was okay with her taking Morty to the dance, nothing.

From this, it implies Brad’s open to competition from others, but only those he perceives as equals. He’s more concerned with his ego than Jessica’s infidelity. Although this doesn’t mean he doesn’t fulfill his role as a protective boyfriend, (he always makes space between himself and others, always shields Jessica from whatever’s in front of her) he’s just very honest about what his main issue is. That isn’t that Jessica isn’t completely happy with him, it’s that his status is threatened when someone like Morty wins.

I think it’d be a reflection of Rick’s dynamic with Morty to an extent; stepping in to protect Morty when it counts, thoroughly dominating the oppressive force. To differentiate their dynamic however, in contrast Brad is more willing to show and express his caring outright. For ex: Brad had no problem interjecting in Morty’s attempt to ask Jessica to the dance.

This is his girlfriend, who he is taking to the dance, and is the prettiest girl at their school. She is the best, and what he’s allowed to have as a popular successful athlete. He has a very cut and dry adherence to social hierarchy, even controlling aspects of it, and he doesn’t believe he deserves anything above or below that because it would contradict the role he‘s supposed to be filling.

However shallow that is, combined with Brad’s willingness to do what it takes to protect his own people, himself, and make it obvious why he’s doing it, a friendship with Morty would be very fulfilling (mostly for Morty). To be friends with Brad would mean that Morty is doing something right to be in his circle, and what would come with that is Brad’s loyalty. Someone who would make it obvious why they’re defending him, why he deserves to be in their circle, and why messing with him means messing with them.

It’s a much more obviously caring relationship than Morty would be used to. Morty wouldn’t have to spend time questioning whether or not Brad actually cares or likes him, we’ve seen how blunt the guy can be, without any shame. Brad has an unshakeable confidence about him that can’t be easily swayed, so questioning why he’d pick Morty would get you an earful. That’s exactly the kind of relationship Morty needs when his family is as toxic and uncertain as they are, while his love life is literally all over the place.