The End of Bobo Pony

You’re flying now

You see things much more clear than from the ground

It’s all okay, it would be

Were you not now halfway down

Bojack is over. After the crazy 6-season ride, we got our final 8 episodes on January 31st 2020. As you can tell by the date of this post, I didn’t have any initial thoughts - or rather, I did, but I wasn’t jumping to share them with the world. It was a long, drawn out story and it actually feels good to finally put it to rest. Maybe the decision to split this season into two halves helped? The first part built the tension and left us hanging at one of the most suspenseful moments for the series, and then asked us to wait 3 months before finally diffusing it. And that last part has thrown everything it could at us - relapse, redemption, reflection, restarts, literally everything that could go wrong for Bojack did. Meanwhile, his friends slowly started to push their own respective boulders up the hill, proving that it can be done, but leaving their horsefriend behind as a result.

Ending on the 6th season seemed like a good call. The show was in a really good place at this point, hasn’t overstayed its welcome quite yet, but it felt like it already said everything it needed to, and all that remained was to write the closing chapter. But here’s the thing - one of the series’ stronger themes was that real life isn’t like TV, it doesn’t follow storytelling rules, you can’t expect to find meaning or closure in everything. While the show still tried to weave an interesting narrative as a work of fiction, it consistently broke through dramatic structures and subverted the expected tropes to support that message. So you just had to wonder - what would be a proper finish to the Bojack Horseman story? Is there any way it could be satisfying in the classic storytelling sense while staying true to the aforementioned motif?

[Spoiler Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of the events from the second half of the season rather specifically, including the last two episodes.]

All I’d give for toes to touch

The safety back at top

I think the show had me fooled for all these years. I thought that fundamentally, at its core, it’s a story about getting better. Putting your past behind you, moving on, healing the scars, recovering from trauma. Making a conscious effort to improve yourself, to fix your life, kick the bad habits and replace them with something positive. What I considered to be the series’ essential scene was the short exchange between Bojack and a baboon, who upon seeing horse’s struggle with running, comes up and reassures him: “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”

“Every day it gets a little easier.” If it were just those empty words of encouragement, I wouldn’t think too much about it, but he continues - “But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part”. The call back to reality. Nothing comes easy. Running sucks. You will get tired and you will get discouraged, that initial spark of motivation will be gone before you notice and the demons of laziness and comfort will take over. But when that happens, remember - “it does get easier”. The message of hope, that little thing from the bottom of Pandora’s box that is the only thing we get to help us push through all the big, scary obstacles that life puts in our way.

So I’ve had hope for Bojack. Every time he fell, I thought to myself: “Well, what has he learned from this? Is he really back at the bottom, or is he starting a few steps higher than before now? Will he clear the early levels of his journey to improvement faster next time because he already knows how to navigate them?” I kept looking for the bright spot, and I was convinced that this is the intent of the story. Of course it also famously said “You can’t have happy endings, because if everyone’s happy, the show would be over, and above all else, the show has to keep going.” But I thought this overt message was meant to be deceiving, that this was something that Bojack convinced himself is the case, and the creators wanted us to also buy into, all so that the gradual change and improvement would slip under our eyes. Use that mindtrap of not noticing the growth, because as it's slowly occurring right in front of you, it can be easily missed without a natural a point of reference. I expected that would be one of the final lessons Bojack learns, and one that creators leave us with - the encouragement and hope that change could be happening and we might be improving, maybe we just can’t see it.

What a fool I was.

But this is it, the deed is done

Silence drowns the sound

Surprisingly, my favorite arc of season 6 did not center on any of the main characters, at least not directly. It was the investigation done by two reporters digging into the events surrounding Sarah Lynn’s death, sensing some sort of mystery around it - and it quickly develops into a comprehensive report on everything that Bojack tried to hide from the public throughout his life. A lot of which we either witnessed on the screen or heard about - all those dreams he destroyed, all the inappropriate advances he made, all the lies, all the selfishness.

But those investigative reporters must’ve seen worse throughout their careers, because they are completely apathetic to the harms and suffering they uncover, and just glee about all the juicy scoops and discoveries. Thus we as the viewers get this unbiased, detached retelling of everything that happened in Bojack’s life, a more objective one to accompany his own personal perspective in which he could lie or omit things he doesn’t want others to know about, or just doesn’t want to think about himself. We may know he tends to make excuses, deflect and emotionally manipulate people, but knowing it doesn’t mean we’re immune to his tactics. This different perspective is a great way to confront that and reassess what we think of him as a character.

But that’s not why this is my favorite arc. Rather, it’s just how much fun the reporting duo is. Their dialogues are filled with clever wordplay and banter, animation makes clever use of mise-en-scene to tell tiny gags and create small narratives, primarily with use of gestures and looks, and the interplay between the two aspects squeezes a lot of story and entertainment out of the small amount of screentime they’re allotted. Their interactions are absolutely exhilarating, full of astute observations and colorful language, and it’s delivered at a uniquely rapid-fire pace that waits for no one and takes no prisoners. The viewer gets to share a wild ride with two manic characters, experiencing the thrill of investigation alongside them.

I’ve talked about this in my previous seasonal review, but it bears repeating - Bojack Horseman is so much more than “the depression show”, and the scenes with this duet are a great example of that. Alongside one-off gags, Princess Carolyn’s tongue twisters, evolution of recurring jokes, occasionally biting social commentary and surprisingly juvenile vulgarity, it helped shape the bizarre tone and structure of this cartoon about talking animals. And Bojack Horseman has delivered some of the funniest and most iconic moments I’ve seen in many years. The deep introspection of misery and extensive exploration of various mental disorders predictably jump to the forefront, but I really want to sing praises to all these other aspects as well. In the overall scope of the show they were probably meant to be the sweetness used to help cushion all the dark bitterness that the viewers had to swallow. But if that’s the case, then it was a great success - for me, Bojack was never a difficult watch. Shocking, heart-wrenching, sure, but it never made me want to switch tabs to cute pet videos, I was thoroughly hooked throughout every season until the final credits rolled.

Before I leaped I should’ve seen

The view from halfway down

The investigation eventually bears fruit - it’s discovered that Bojack hid his involvement in Sarah Lynn’s death, claiming he just happened to find her dead, when in reality they were on a bender together. He obviously feels a lot of guilt about that - not just because she died and he lived, but also because he’s the old guy she was looking up to, and it was his responsibility to take care of her and help her get away from drugs, but instead he treated her like an equal, a fellow celebrity and addict, and further enabled her destructive behaviour. He never confronted that guilt, never attempted to work through it, just tried to push it down and forget about it, same as all these other times he hurt someone.

It leads to a pretty “fun” episode during which Bojack learns that there are reporters digging into his past, but he doesn’t know which part of it yet, so he has to once again revise his entire life story and highlight every despicable thing he did so that he can try preparing for the confrontation with the press. He’s accompanied by his 3 most dependable friends - Diane, PC and Todd. That whole sequence is awkward and complicated in a very human way - right now, Bojack is clean, out of rehab, has a respectable job and is doing more work into becoming a better person than ever before. However, that doesn’t invalidate all the things he did in the past - and if one of them only comes out to light now, then there’s no excuse for him not to see the consequences of his actions. But what good will it do? What if he loses his job over it, what if the public shame drives him back to his demons? It won’t bring Sarah Lynn back, is there any worth in putting him through it? I think the characters felt very uncomfortable about having to help him in this situation, they were probably mad at him and the last thing they wanted to was to figure out how to bail him out. But they also didn’t want to abandon him, to hold the guilt of not helping him when he needed it.

But at the same time, everyone’s just tired. Tired of platitudes. Tired of putting on a smile, tired of turning a blind eye. Sure, they’ve had emotional outbursts before, but this time it’s not about what Bojack did to them - it’s about what he did to someone else, something they hold no responsibility for and really shouldn’t have to deal with, but they’re getting dragged into by virtue of continuing a relationship with him. One by one, they let him know how they feel. Todd already gave up on Bojack before and doesn’t trust or expect anything out of him anymore. He doesn’t mind doing a favor or casually hanging out, but they really are more of acquaintances than friends at this point, he won’t drag himself through emotional mud for him. Is that selfish, or responsible? Who knows, but Todd made his choice and is sticking with it. That leaves the two girls in the room - conscientious Diane and savvy PC. The idealist and the realist. Their advice predictably differs - Princess Carolyn is figuring out schemes and contortions that will minimize the damage caused to Bojack, help him survive through this whole ordeal and hopefully recover from the bump and continue on his current path. Diane doesn’t believe that will work, she thinks that’s just delaying the inevitable and the only way forward is to tell the truth and deal with the consequences. They both care for him, but they express it in a different way. Cynical PC goes into mercenary mode - she just thinks pragmatically about how to deal with this situation, how to find an optimal solution that will result in least suffering. Miss Nguyen however is pushing him - telling him to do the right thing and take responsibility, because as his friend, she has expectations for him. She wants that relationship to be a two-way street, give and take, and she strongly believes this is what he needs to do at this point in time, whether he likes it or not. But then he’s suddenly called by the journalists, and he compulsively lies and denies the allegations, and at that point Diane is done. It’s probably not easy for her, but she just can’t help Bojack with clear conscience if he’s not willing to tell the truth. Like Todd, she’s drawing the line. And Bojack is slowly getting abandoned.

I really should’ve thought about

The view from halfway down

Eventually the conscience becomes too heavy and Bojack decides to get ahead of the reporters and come clean on his own terms, in a staged environment with a mellow talk show host. And wouldn’t you know it, that jaded horse got lucky for once - the reception to the program is great, people are being very understanding and empathetic towards his situation and they commend him for speaking out honestly. In fact, why doesn’t he just do it again? Come clean with more stuff, get more sympathy, continue clearing his conscience until he can finally be free of his burden. But turns out that’s pushing his luck too far - the second interview is brutal, the host got all the dirt on him that reporters have gathered and brings up his cases one by one, and the Pandora’s box is open. He’s simultaneously confronted by a huge, huge part of his past, and he was nowhere near ready to work through this amount of regrets at the same time. The public opinion turns on him. In the end his past biting him in the ass was inevitable.

As Bojack is once again left alone, he ends up associating himself with that asshole celebrity from the previous season, as he’s the only one willing to accept him. From there, one mistake leads to another, and eventually he relapses. Alcohol and drugs are back on the menu and Bojack is becoming more unhinged than ever before. This leads us to the second-to-final episode - the traditional hallucination ep. They seem to be generally regarded as each season’s highlight, praised for excellence in both uniqueness and execution. I’m personally partial to the very first one, “Downer Ending” - because it snuck up on me, because of how it flowed, because I really like Death Grips’ “No Love”, because it referenced Peanuts, and because of how it ends. I know there’s a lot of acclaim for “Time’s Arrow” and I can see why. But “The View from Halfway Down” definitely leaves its mark as the ultimate one. It presents a bizarre dream which Bojack believes to be a recurring one, where he sits down for a meal with some of his dead friends, family and idols. Afterwards there’s a talent show, and at the end of each performance everyone exits through a dark door. At first Bojack’s not worried, “oh this is about when I wake up from this dream usually”, but then it keeps on going and he starts to fear it more and more, eventually coming to a “realization” that all he’s seeing is just a product of his own sub-consciousness as he’s in a near-death experience, and it looks like this time he may not come back. That whole contextualization and how the “dream” changes as Bojack becomes aware of what’s going on is certainly fascinating, and it creates some really interesting questions - what does Bojack really think of his family? How did Secretariat merge with Butterscotch into one father figure in his mind? Why is CJJ in this dream? And the reading of the poem I’ve been quoting throughout the article stays on my mind as one of the most poignant and memorable moments of the whole show.

But what’s perhaps most intriguing is what comes afterwards. The question is obvious - did Bojack really die, or not? At first it’s treated as a simple joke playing with expectations. We see the cardiac monitor show disappearance of activity, and then we zoom out to reveal it’s from an episode of “Horsin’ Around”. We see a headline “Horseman Dead”, and then we zoom out to see that Bojack is in fact not dead, but instead he gets a 14-month prison sentence for “pretty much everything”. But something about the rest of that episode feels rather… Unsettling. For one, the only people who audibly speak in it are the main characters - Bojack, Mr PB, PC, Todd and Diane. Bojack is holding a theater workshop in the prison, but none of his participants say anything to him, even the guard who nudges him only gets his attention with a single grunt. Bojack visits several locations that hold huge significance for him (the diner, the observatory, the Hollywoo Sign), and there are callbacks to stuff like being left at the party by Mr PB after he promised him attention, somehow finding a cotton candy in his hands. Weird lines like “I just know something’s bad gonna happen if I go to that wedding”. Most curiously, the fact that absent from this episode are both PC’s husband (at their wedding!) and Diane’s fiancee - people whom I believe Bojack has heard of, but never actually met. And I also feel like there’s a lot of closure that ep. Bojack finally gets to hear Mr PB acknowledge his flaws and work on them, he reconciles with Todd, he’s finally able to offer some support to PC for once, and apologizes to Diane at the end. And it closes on that bizarre shot where the two sit in silence and look up, as if there was something there… Like a life function graph, which was displayed on top of the very same shot at the beginning of the episode.

I love that finale. It delivers on everything I’ve wanted, answers every doubt I’ve had about how to tie the show's messages into its format. It is clearly a last episode, there is something special and final about it, but on the other hand you could just as easily point out how simple and meaningless it is. At the same time it fucks with us by planting all these hints and seeds of doubt I’ve outlined in the previous paragraph. Are all these just red herrings, or is this some end-of-evangelion-esque double ending situation, where ep 15 and 16 show the exact same thing (Bojack’s near-death-experience) but one speaks more towards the audience while the other is a more accurate representation of that character’s mind? I don’t really need a clean answer, the fact it’s so bizarre and uncertain yet understated are what I think is exactly what this show needed for its ending.

I wish I could’ve known about

The view from halfway down

How does one even begin to sum up this entire 6-season ride? I guess I can start by saying that Bojack safely ranks among my favorite TV shows of all time. There’s a bit of South Park’s bluntness and vulgarity, Futurama’s absurdity and sense of wonder, and perhaps Daria’s internal clash between cynicism and idealism in it. But at the core, it’s definitely its own thing, with original philosophy and unique thoughts on life, waging a war against closure, examining morality, happiness and purpose. It chose a rather interesting setting in Hollywood, a den of decadent late capitalism full of self-centered sociopaths, which also simultaneously plays into the “life is a stage” metaphors, except instead of a classy theater you get afternoon sitcoms and popcorn flicks. Our cast is in the epicenter of the cult of success and the culture of explaining everything through stories, and they show some of the shortcomings of such lifestyle. Their attempts at overcoming them may seem hopeless at first, but after enough trial-and-error and effort, it is possible to succeed.

But even if, say, 4 out of 5 people manage to find happiness, it doesn’t really matter to you if you’re the one that doesn’t. And as Bojack has been our conduit into the world of Hollywoo, it’s his eyes and mind we observe and process the events through - so how can we be satisfied with an ending where everyone moves on, but he still learned nothing? When every time he was able to climb a little bit higher up that mountain, ultimately it just meant he had a harder fall? Even if my theory is entirely incorrect and he did survive and there is more life ahead of him, what hope is there even left for him? For once the season ends with no big idea of how he’ll turn his life around or otherwise improve it. He’ll get out of jail, and then what? I guess it doesn’t matter. “Life’s a bitch and then you die, but sometimes life’s a bitch and then you keep on living” - those are just two sides of the same coin. It’s about who you are and what you make of life, not about reaching the end of your story arc and finding out what awaits you there. It’s not that Bojack the show is trying to be “more realistic” by being closer to how real life works, because it clearly isn't, it’s a comedy that follows storytelling rules and features improbable coincidences in the name of making things funny or poignant. At the end of the day Mr Horseman can’t escape being a protagonist, and we can’t escape looking for arcs, narratives and metaphors. So all Raphael and his team can do is speak to us through those very same devices they are attempting to examine and hope they are at least capable of properly explaining their own failings.

I’ll remember Bojack for its brilliant comedy done at the most unexpected times, for it’s callbacks, episodes based around gimmicks and some really pointed conversations. I’ll remember “it gets easier”, I’ll remember “I think all you are is the things that you do”, I’ll remember “it’s you, and fuck man, what else is there to say”. There may be one or two characters that failed to grow on me, a couple of episodes I wasn’t a huge fan of and some societal issues that I don’t think were given fair portrayal. But those are pretty much nitpicks in light of the show's overall thematic and narrative strength, how dissonant yet cohesive it was as a whole. I’m glad it happened, and I’m glad this is when and how it ended. 

Back in the 2010s I watched a very famous TV show, about Bojack the Horse - don’t act like you don’t know - who tried to hold on to his past. Did he succeed? How long was he able to last? Did he make us understand? Well, you’re gonna have to make up your own mind on that.

Some screenshots taken from https://bojackhorseman.fandom.com/, I hope they don’t mind.

For further reading, I recommend the videos on the show over at Wisecrack: https://www.youtube.com/wisecrack/search?query=bojack