5x05 The Amelia Earhart Story

[7.6/10] Nice to get a Princess Carolyn-focused episode in the mix here. I like the interwoven triptych storytelling in this one, where you have glimpses of Princess Carolyn’s young life in North Carolina, a frame story in the present as she returns to her hometown to try to convince a young mother to let her adopt her baby, and cellphone-spurred flashes of incidents on set at Philbert that PC has to clean up from afar.

Each is good on its own and each works in concert with one another. There’s a lot of parallels here, and some of them are a little clumsy at times, but for the most they illuminate one another. You see how PC’s take charge attitude that she learned by necessity growing up has her going the extra mile in order to win the mom-to-be over, and how it keeps her handling her clients and friends with expert skill.

There’s a lot to unpack in each of these segments, but I like all of them. The flashes back to her young life tell a somewhat stock story, but BoJack spruces it up with an assist from David Sedaris and some harsh realities and blame put on PC at a young age. The present shows PC trying to balance the insanity of her friends and clients with going after the thing she really wants, while showing the mixed bag that following her dreams has been.

Overall, this is an episode that I probably need to watch again to get everything, but it deals with a lot of complex ideas and threads them and time-displaced stories nicely. There’s a lot of sadness on this show, but also a lot of realness, and it’s nice to see Princess Carolyn getting her moment in the sun this season to channel both of those things.