[9.0/10] One of my biggest complaints about the early seasons of BoJack is that its psychology was too simple. It would try to draw a direct line from point A event in BoJack’s past to point B problem in BoJack’s present to try to account for some bit of bad behavior or mental pathology, when the truth is that most of our problems’ causes or more complicated than that.
How encouraging it is, then, to witness the evolution of this show’s take on that sort of cause and effect about what ails BoJack, to an episode like “A Horse Walks into Rehab”, which not only resists oversimplification when trying to account for alcoholism, but which weaves a tapestry of events that led him to this point into a larger frame story about trying to get clean and remember why you’re doing it.
The four vignettes we see to set the stage for the origins of BoJack’s drinking go back in time, tracing each event and unpacking them to make his present state seem more like an accumulation of sad moments and bad reinforcement than some straightforward explanation. He was too nervous to pull off a big scene on his show until an assistant gave him a little extra “juice,” and he’s suddenly pursuing the supermodel he was too nervous to convincingly kiss moments ago. He’s awkward at a party as a teenager, but then one beer later, he’s not only the life of the party, but being cruel to people who were kind to him.
He walks in on his dad cheating on his mom, and has what’s manipulatively framed as a father/son bonding experienced turned into a way for his dad to use guilt and a form of abuse to keep BoJack from spilling the beans. And another sad family celebration of a broken home leaves a tiny BoJack imitating his parents and trying to get that warm feeling of home any way he can. None is the sum total of why BoJack tries to numb himself with substances. Instead, each are a piece of the puzzle.
But we also get to see the endpoint of that, something we’re reminded of in the opening flashback to the night of Sara Lynn’s death, the moment when BoJack hit rock bottom. What’s so striking isn’t just that gut punch to start the show’s final season, but also the way his guilt and resolve not to repeat those mistakes is conveyed visually.
Those cuts to key moments in BoJack’s development as a drinker end with dissolves, the acid realizations boring back into his conscious thoughts. The opening montage starts as a humorous sequence of BoJack not really trying at rehab, only to see Sara Lynn’s picture on the clerk’s selfie wall, and be reminded of why he’s doing this, redoubling his efforts to take this seriously. And when he looks at the bottle he sneaks in, or other hints of his temptation and addiction, he sees the stars of the planetarium, a psychological reminder of what this vice has cost him, and the people unlucky enough to endure it with him.
Despite all that, “A Horse Walks into a Rehab” is a thoroughly funny episode! It finds a deft way to check in on the rest of the cast in a quick but funny ways, that delivers one of the show’s trademark wordplay parades and an amusing interlude about Diane’s phone number of all things. The layered swerves of BoJack and fellow rehab-mate Jameson dealing with their issues inside her dad’s giant movie memorabilia room is a real treat. (“The glass from The Graduate!” had me in stitches.) And even small bits like the idea of a gritty, Zack Snyder-helmed Mario reboot or the title card “Two Jamesons later” are eminently laugh-worthy.
Still, what keeps the episode from feeling indulgent is the story it tells in the present to connect with the past. BoJack’s efforts to keep Jameson from relapsing is a nice echo of his relationship with Sara Lynn, one where he’s working out his own demons but trying to keep the past from repeating. That’s a nice way to dramatize both his guilt and his growth, while letting the difficulties of getting better be channeled and shared by another personality who can act as a foil rather than giving BoJack the whole of the spotlight.
The reveal that Jameson is not merely some BoJack-like young adult with neglectful parents and slim chances to grow up healthy, but rather someone with a supportive dad who’s made some hard life choices, helps drive that home, for BoJack and the audience. It’s a story that portends a season-long theme of taking responsibility for your actions, even when they’re shaped by events and decisions that, if not fully forced on you, were also not fully in control. It’s that difficult line -- between responsibility and an understanding of other forces at work, that makes recovery so hard, and this exploration of it so compelling.
It’s the kind of complex, multi-causal storytelling that is a far cry from the simplicity the show started with. What led BoJack here is not just bad parents or a bottle. What might save him from is not just the memory of Sara Lynn. It’s also the decisions that he made, the people that he’s hurt, the number of friends and confidantes who still gather in his wake, and the possibilities he sees for something better on the other side.
What made BoJack horseman an alcoholic, what makes him the person he is today, is a cocktail of past and present, of kindness and cruelty, of regret and resolve. As BoJack Horseman embarks on its final season, it doesn't shy away from the layers of that, which BoJack starts to finally peel away here, however painful that may be. The person who shows up on the other end may not be the healthy person BoJack aspires to be -- there’s still an acid tongue that comes out when BoJack’s told to stop deflecting -- but with that understanding from him, and from the series, that the road to get here wasn’t simple or easy and that the road to recovery won’t be either, he and the show that bears his name may close things out as a more mature, understanding, complex creature than either began as.
[7.8/10] There's a moment in so many episodes of BoJack Horseman where you realize something terrible's about to happen, and you feel awful. And then it does, and you feel worse.
That’s kind of what this episode is about. “Ancient History” teases you with a series of reunions -- between BoJack and Hollyhock, Princess Carolyn and Ralph, and Todd and Emily -- with the hopes that each pairing might be able to patch things up and get back to a good relationship. But this is BoJack, where such things are impermissible (or at least rare), so you can just sort of feel yourself being taunted with these things, and the knowledge that the show is just as quickly going to break everyone apart.
That’s part of what makes the show great. As much as it plays around within the sitcom format and riffs on sitcom tropes, it’s just as inclined to subvert them and show how real life tends to be so much less heartwarming than television normally makes it feel. There’s a reason that this trio of duos each went their separate ways, and as much as we might want them to just drop back into one another’s lives and have everything be okay again, that’s not really how the world works, and “Ancient History” reminds us of that in a pretty heartbreaking fashion.
The most heartbreaking of these is BoJack and Hollyhock. Hollyhock’s PTSD at returning to BoJack’s house after the events of last season is well-earned, and I appreciate that the show doesn't shy away from Hollyhock’s discomfort at returning the place she was dosed. But an incident where she pours BoJack’s pain medication down the drain after thinking it’s happening again sends them on an adventure to try to find more pills that deteriorates in advisability and morality with each step.
You feel bad because you can tell that Hollyhock loves BoJack -- she says as much -- for coming to see him and go through all of this. She’s one of the few. BoJack, screwed up guy that he is, loves her back, but doesn't know how to tell it or show it, especially when he’s some combination of in pain and needing his fix. The best he can do is tell her not to take a semester off to look after him, to go take classes and kiss boys instead, because he knows that if she stays he’ll just drag into more nights like this one, and he doesn't want to do that to her. It’s the most sincere way he can show someone his love -- to not get them too wrapped up in his orbit, which he believes (not entirely wrongly) to be a destructive one.
Todd’s trying misaimed ways to show his love as well. His interludes with Emily are the lightest in the episode, but still kind of sad, as he makes a wacky sex robot to try to service her needs in the ways that he can’t. The dildo-adorned robot’s herky jerky movements and ridiculous phrases bring the laughs that come from an ace trying to build a giant sex toy. (File this under “sentences I never imagined I would write.”) But there’s also the melancholy of both Todd and Emily trying to think of ways that they could work as a couple given their emotional connection, but coming up empty. You root for them to be able to bridge their differences, and the show knows it, and so tugs at your heartstrings a bit when they inevitably can’t.
There’s a similar setup with Princess Carolyn and Ralph, as through some contrived but acceptable circumstances, she’s trying to option one of his greeting cards over dinner when she gets the call to come pick up her new baby. It is an absolute treat to see them together again, as their dynamic is as adorable as always. But when PC gets the baby, and Ralph says he wants to be back in her life, since this solves the fight that split them apart, PC turns him down, saying she made plans in her life, and he’s not in them.
It’s the least earned of these three failed reunions. The show’s heart is in the right place, and you can see that it’s trying to show that PC moved on with her life, but it feels undermotivated. She clearly still has feelings for Ralph, and while it makes more sense for them to take it slow and get reacquainted rather than diving headfirst into parenthood together, her outright rejection feels like the episode making an aspirational point more than one that fits the character, and rushing all of this within a single episode (which, granted, is a necessary concession for a lot of T.V. shows).
So each reunion ends in a little more pain. For BoJack that becomes literal, as his misadventures with Hollyhock prove that his pain is not as physical as it is a chemical dependency. The show’s shuffled BoJack’s substance abuse to the background for the most part this season, but here it rears its ugly head again, as alcohol abuse has worsened since last we saw, and he’s mixing it with pain pills and intentionally getting himself into car accidents to get more.
It is, frankly, disturbing, but Hollyhock’s brief return to his life doesn't motivate him to become a better person, it just motivates him to try to get his fix in a way that she’d have no choice to concede was a situation where he genuinely needed them. It’s the kind of self-destructive and self-justifying behavior BoJack Horseman and BoJack Horseman are known for. From the minute Hollyhock told him it was okay to take the pills but only if he needed them because he was hurt, from the moment Ralph and Princess Carolyn are laughing like old times, from the moment that Todd declares he has a brilliant idea to solve things with Emily, you know it’s going to end in ruin. It’s hard to decide what feels worse -- seeing the car crash coming, or watching it hit.
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.
[7.6/10] Oh BoJack. I always love the ambition of this show. It takes chances and comes up with unorthodox ways to tell stories that, of all things, put it in the company of shows like How I Met Your Mother that often found sideways methods to make their points. I love the conceit of this one, with BoJack living in his family’s old summer home and fixing it up with a helpful neighbor while the ghosts of his mother and grandparents’ trauma flit in the same space.
There’s a central idea here -- the way that the loss of people we care about messes us up, leaves us unstable and unhappy in a way that we can pass on, that make us hurt people we care about because the grief is overwhelming and sometimes the ways we or others try to fix it only hurt more.
And it leads to a wonderful moment of synchronicity, where BoJack’s dragonfly neighbor sings at a local outdoor spot while unknowingly harmonizing with BoJack’s grandmother in the past, each reflecting on the person they’ve lost, each finding a respite from their pain. It speaks to the connections between past and present, to the universality of grief, and makes for a fitting high point to the parallelism between BoJack’s current predicament at the summer home and his family’s issues there decades earlier.
But man, BoJack is the sort of show that just has to elbow you in the ribs and say “DO YOU GET IT?” for both comedy and drama. Its emotions are always so loud, its themes always so heavy-handed. It tries to shortcircuit the issues there by having its characters wryly wink at what it’s doing (see: BoJack calling out the dragonfly’s dead wife issues before they come to the fore), but it’s still just so damn blunt.
Hell, the last part of this one feels like a Lifetime movie. The reveal that BoJack’s grandmother had a lobotomy is too much (man). Yes, these things really happened, but it’s too perfectly tragic a conclusion to her already rushed, grief-fueled escapades here. The same goes for the Dragonfly recreating the flight that got his wife killed and declaring “I don’t want to live.” It just doesn’t feel real -- it feels over the top. The idea of art is to provoke an emotion, but when you can feel the show trying to push your buttons so obviously, it just doesn’t click.
BoJack can be powerful. Its S3 endgame is striking in how much it achieves with those dramatic moments, but this one feels like its drowning in those obvious attempts at drama and sadness without really earning them, giving us tropes instead of truth, which aren’t softened by the show calling itself out for that. There’s still a lot of good stuff in this one, and again, I really like the conceit, but where they go with it is just too far too fast.
9.5/10. If you'd said to me, "Hey watch this short film that's a cross between Lost in Translation and the opening act of Wall-E," I'm pretty sure I would just look at you funny. And yet that's pretty much what this was, and it worked beautifully. The undersea world BoJack found himself in, where he couldn't eat the food, couldn't engage in his usual vices, and most of all couldn't speak or understand the local dialect, captured the experience of isolation and confusion that can come from visiting a foreign country through a distinctively BoJack lens.
But it also created a great atmosphere for a format-bending episode. Offering a nigh-wordless half hour of comedy in a show that makes its hay from its dialogue could either be gimmicky or bold, and thankfully this episode tended toward the former. It helped to put the viewer in BoJack's shoes -- only able to communicate and express mood through non-verbal cues like gestures, body language, and the score.
And in the absence of dialogue, Bojack Horseman reverts to a certain Looney Tunes-esque vibe where BoJack finds himself inadvertently responsible for an adorable little seahorse moppet. (I had flashbacks to the "Buttons and MIndy"segments of Animaniacs and a dozen other classic cartoons.) The design and personality of the seahorse baby struck the right balance of adorable and mischievous, and it created a nice opportunity for BoJack to be caring, brave, and as always, eternally frustated.
But this being Bojack, of course there's a quiet strain of melancholy through the whole thing. When Bojack returns to the seahorse babe to its father, the dad is mildly grateful, but mostly blase, and the baby doesn't even wave to him when it's time for BoJack to say goodbye. They went through this experience together, through shark attacks and taffy explosions and being stranded, and the moppet is too little to even look up for his soup or appreciate what his equine friend did for him. There's an emptiness there, a sort of existential realization that all that effort, which was quite noble in and of itself, feels a little hollow without someone to share it with or to appreciate it.
So through this experience, BoJack finally finds the words to apologize to Kelsey Jannings, noting that grand acts are nice, but that accomplishments, even ones far more important than winning and Oscar like returning a child to their parent, can seem like building a sandcastle, inevitably fleeting and meant to be washed away with the coming tide. But that those connections between individuals are what sustain us and give us life and reason to go on in a world of sandcastles.
Again, this being BoJack Horseman, those words too are washed away before he can get them to Kelsey in any sort of readable fashion. To add insult to injury, he realizes in the end that he could have talked this whole time, which is the right combination of sad and funny. But overall, this is a wonderful episode that uses some great Warner Bros. silent capering to further the show's project of examining its lead's attempts to find meaning in his life, and finds an inventive way to convey that experience.
