6x04 Surprise!

[7.7/10] This is another great example of BoJack taking a classic sitcom form, turning it up to eleven, and then drawing back down to something full of heart and pathos. The notion of a couple having a fight with everyone scrambling to avoid getting in the middle of it goes back at least twenty years to Friends and almost certainly before that. BoJack taking that idea to a ludicrous extreme leads to all sorts of wacky comic hijinks, as all of Mr. PB and Pickles’s friends and family try to dodge their sight and attention in increasingly ludicrous ways.

Some of that is just Looney Tunes-esque comic fun. Everybody scrambling for the baby, or ducking under the bed, or diving in and out of sight makes for stellar physical comedy. Some of it goes to another level, where people are conveniently present when the unhappy couple are shit-talking them. (My favorites were Mr. PB’s brother pretending to be his own framed picture, and the guy Mr. PB met at the gas station hearing that “he sucks” and looking distraught over it.) There’s a lot of great visual gags and manic insanity, like BoJack and Diane doing robot voices to coach up Mr. PB, or BoJack’s fainting goat sponsor ending up in Mr. PB’s “thunder room” with words of encouragement that, well, cause him to faint.

But this being BoJack, there’s also a more personal layer to it. It’s not much, but I like Todd being the reason that Princess Carolyn can’t keep a nanny, and her instead offering to have him be Ruthy’s nanny. It’s an obvious solution, but one that works (for now at least). At the same time, I like Diane and BoJack scrambling to hide from sight at the same time they’re both coming to terms with Diane moving to Chicago. Diane telling BoJack it’s amazing that he’s two months sober and that she couldn’t leave if she didn’t know he’d be okay, and BoJack responding that that’s not a friendship, it’s a “hostage situation” is the right combination of sweet and heartbreaking.

And of course there’s Mr. PB and Pickles working through Mr. PB’s cheating confession. I’ll admit, some of the social media stuff is over my head (though I get the gist of the influencer and Pickle Pack) jokes. But I like how the show balances the sort of public craziness of how Pickles processes her pain with the earnestness of that pain, her not wanting to be mad at the man she loves but also not wanting to let something like this slide. Mr. PB making the effort to genuinely hear her and not just aim to fix things, which Diane notes as dismissive, is a good way to show some growth and effort from him, and while the idea that the solution is to just let Pickles sleep with somebody seems baaaaaad, it’s at least bad in the way a naive young woman and a blithely optimistic guy would think of as a genuine solution.

Overall, this episode is a nice combo of the show’s trademark outsized madness and the deeper well of feeling that makes it more than just a bunch of weightless gags.