5x03 Planned Obsolescence

[7.7/10] Another quite good episode, one that focused on three different nascent relationships and the different challenges.

I think my favorite of them was Mr. PB’s and Pickles’s. There’s something so innocent and honest about both of them, and I like the exploration of the difficulties of dating post-divorce from both sides of the equation. Mr. PB’s truth-telling coupled with Pickles’s understandable uncomfortableness with him still having feelings for Diane is believably awkward but also earnest. And the “not date, date” is a good comic spine for their plot. (The Lady and the Tramp riff and the 21 Pilots dig were both laugh out loud funny.)

But the best part is the ending, where the show resolves it with more honesty, an admission from Mr. PB that he can’t make any promises about the future, but wants to be straightforward with Pickles, and can’t control when he meets someone special in his life. He and Pickles seem like a perfect match (which, on BoJack, probably means they’re destined for failure, but still!) and it’s nice to see them getting past the (non-literal) elephant in the room.

I also enjoyed the farce of Todd meeting Yolanda’s parents. This is definitely BoJack at its broadest, essentially doing a Frasier-esque farce with an insane twist. But still, the idea of Todd and Yolanda having to keep their asexuality under wraps with Yolanda’s over the top sex-positive family was wacky yet fun. There was a lot of winking humor and setups, but the show played them well.

And as with the Mr. PB story, I like that it ends in a place of honestly after all that zaniness, where Todd states the truth that neither of them had been able to face -- that the only thing he and Yolanda have in common is their aseuxality. Of all the lies told that night, the one that exposed the cracks in their foundation was Yolanda fibbing about him going to college, which is an interest nugget of drama in an otherwise wild and wooly comic setup.

Last but not least, I like BoJack’s encouragement of Gina’s musical dream, as a means of trying to make amends and maybe advance their currently no strings dalliances into something more. I like the show doing the hard work of showing BoJack being better, but also learning that doesn't magically make him happy or make him automatically improve others’ lives. The musical thing is a great blend of old and new BoJack, with him busting her chops in the way you’d expect, but then trying to make things right and worrying he just made things worse. There’s a lot of complexity there that I appreciate.

Overall, another solid episode from this season with three different flavors of relationships, each with their own complications and outcomes, explored in a realistic but outsized way.