BoJack Horseman had an incredibly high bar to reach after the critical success of its riveting fourth season, but by all accounts season five has raised the bar even higher by bringing a cohesive and meticulously crafted narrative to the table.
The titular character, BoJack Horseman, has done terrible things in his life. From nearly sleeping with a teenager in season two, to almost choking his lover and co-star on the TV show Philbert, to death while high on painkillers in season five.
That’s not to say he’s a bad person, or horse-man, though. In fact, the series specifically states through BoJack’s friend, Diane Nyugen, that while he is definitely not a good person, he is not a bad one either. He is just a person.
When BoJack asks Diane, a writer for the blog Girl Croosh, to write an article revealing every terrible thing he has done so he will be taken down she refuses, claiming that it would be only feeding into his self-destructive behavior by giving him an easy out. It makes the audience ask why the show portrays BoJack so broken and downright monstrous at times if they seemingly refuse to hold him accountable.
Season four delved deep into BoJack’s toxic relationship with his mother, Beatrice Horseman. Episode six of season five presents the best bottle episode in recent memory. The entire episode is the eulogy Bo- Jack gives at his mother’s funeral. Bojack does what he does best and makes the entire eulogy about him and the way his mother treated him.
“When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough. That even though your parents aren’t what you need them to be, over and over and over again, at any moment they might surprise you with something wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the proof that even though my mother was a hard woman, deep down, she loved me, and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made her life a little bit brighter,” BoJack said. “Even now I find myself waiting.”
The last thing Beatrice said before her death was, “I see you.” This causes Bojack to realize that even after 54 years of life, all he wanted was to be noticed by his mom. Bojack entertains all the possible meanings of that sentence, but realizes that he will never know if she even knew he was beside her.
Later he recalls that she died in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and concludes that she wasn’t noticing her son for the first time, or saying that she understood him, or even that he was in her field-of-vision. She was just reading a sign.
BoJack responds to this realization with anger and despair, saying, “Suddenly, you realize that you’ll never have the good relationship you wanted, and as long as they were alive, even though you’d never admit it, part of you, the stupidest… part of you, was still holding on to that chance. And you didn’t even realize it until that chance went away.
“My mother is dead, and everything is worse now. Because now I know I will never have a mother who looks at me from across a room and says, ‘Bojack Horseman, I see you.’”
This exploration of BoJack’s psyche presents a complex character that wants to be good, but feels so broken he indulges in self-sabotage. In the era of the MeToo movement it’s difficult, yet all too familiar, to see people who have done appalling things not be held accountable for them.
It’s easy to think that the writers not holding BoJack accountable for his actions are taking the easy way out, but beneath the surface this decision by the writers holds a different message. Since its first season, BoJack Horseman has demonstrated how our bad thoughts feed off each other.
Mental illness can nurture addiction, while addiction can make us do horrible things to our loved ones. Instead of excusing BoJack’s behavior, perhaps they want to help us understand why normal people can do awful things, and how we may better combat these behaviors before they come to fruition.
Through this we can help these people take responsibility for their actions and earn redemption instead of ruining their lives and taking away what little they had left of their humanity. Can we honestly say that Harvey Weinstein took responsibility for the way he treated those women?