I just binged the whole thing last night. I think this might be the best of the seasons so far. Very multi-layered, very dark.
I’m a little more than halfway through and so far season 3 had more of an impact on me. But that could change when I finish :). But the quality is definitely still high - I was worried with where they could go from season 3, but so far they have managed to deftly hint at just enough growth that Bojack the character hasn’t become completely unbearable( you can only watch people continue to sink so far until it becomes unwatchable ).
It was the best season so far. Multiple really good episodes. However it started slow with Mr. Peanutbutter and his plot.
That was painful to watch…in a good way.
Pretty much everything about Bojack’s family except a few moments at the end was painful. I was really not prepared for Mr Sugarman having Mrs Sugarman lobotomized… But…yeah, that whole bit explained a lot about BoJack’s childhood. ‘Never love anyone like I loved Crackerjack’…yipes.
Gotta say, though…wow, that season ended light for BoJack… I mean, it’s far from perfect, but, even his asshole move at the end came from a good place, and he followed it with a well-intentioned, actually positive moment of humanity? And Hollyhock…They connected. She didn’t die (miraculously). Neither of them pushed the other away for her good (let’s face it, if this goes south, it’s Hollyhock who’ll suffer, and they both know it), and it looks like they won’t need to. I mean, it helps that this looks like they’ll mostly be not in the same place, meaning she won’t be in the trajectory if shit hits the fan for him, and his potential to fuck it up with a drug/booze fueled mistake is minimized (she knows he’s an ass, so his ability to permanently destroy anything with a drunk-dial is limited), but compared to literally every other relationship in his life, this is incredibly healthy. He’s even got a project that seems like it’ll avoid the pitfalls of his other post-Horsing Around work (presuming he learned the various lessons from Secretariat).
I finished bingeing the whole season this morning, and I thought it was great. It did end well for Bojack, but Princess Carolyn’s story was pretty dark. One episode was really devastating:
The Ruthie episode, where her descendant is telling about PC’s worst day ever, but how it all had a happy ending, but then it turns out that it’s just something PC uses to make herself feel better and that it’s all pretend. That was dark.
Also, with Diane it will be interesting how it shakes out:
With how often Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter are disconnected, and she while she does love him they are so different. They could be getting a divorce, but I could also see them doing therapy and that being interesting.
Todd is always my favorite, and I love his crazy terrible business idea that might actually be a brilliant idea for Los Angeles.
I’m going to have to watch again to catch a lot more things, especially the visual jokes. My favorite was a Frogger joke with a frog crossing the road. Second favorite was more and more people wearing Todd’s outfit as the season went along. And my favorite cameo was Tim Gunn at that fashion show.
Amazing forth season. Episodes nine and eleven hit the hardest, about Princess Carolyn and Bojack’s mother.
This was such a great line:
“As a modern American man I am woefully unprepared to manage a woman’s emotions. I was never taught, and I will not learn.” Joseph Sugarman (from episode two).
This was said in the 1940s by Bojack’s Grandfather who raised a woman who married another man just like him who of course never taught Bojack. And on and on it goes. This is probably the story of 95% of the faltering marriages in America.
Some of the episodes were very well done.
Here’s the problem I have though. Up to now, Bojack’s problem were more relatable, his insecurities and self-centeredness, and self-loathing had an impact, because we all can identify with them.
But this season revealed that his emotional problems have a very specific origin in something horrible that happened to his mother when she was a child, something very specific that is extreme and unusual (in the viewers’ experience) that most of us probably don’t have in our personal histories.
Giving that very specific origin story makes Bojack a little less universal.
That was his mother, not Bojack. Bojack just grew up with a resentful mother and coward father, which is a pretty common shitty family dynamic.
I also don’t think it’s rare to have grandparents that went through some horrible things. World War Two, the great depression, racism, and sexism in the 1940s were pretty horrific and traumatizing. And that’s only in America. If your grandparents grew up in Europe, like mind did, you have the war on their doorstep and the holocaust. My grandmother ran away from her village during the war when she was five years old. Planes were bombing her village as she left. After she left the Nazis burned alive everyone who stayed in the village. She raised my mother, who raised me. I didn’t become an alcoholic, but it was a really close call.
Yes, I know that, and that’s exactly what my post says. But the show strongly implies that Bojack’s personality problems originate in what happened to his grandmother. That dicked up Beatrice and Beatrice fucked up Bojack.
Sure, a lot of people’s grandparents went through bad things, but we aren’t making a show about you. If we were we would have to decide what to put on and what to leave out. And we wouldn’t put in stuff about your grandparents unless they were relevant to explaining something about you. The only reason to show what Bojack’s grandparents went through is because it says something about Bojack.
Sorry, got cut off … this particular thing it’s not something universal, from my point of view. It’s not within the regular experience of most of us. It doesn’t really translate or analogize well to what I’d consider general human experiences.
And really they could have made it universal just by leaving out Honey Sugarman’s lobotomy. Beatrice could have been just as screwed up without that. Leave in Honey not being able to deal with Crackerjack’s death. That would have worked.
There is no implication here. The line from Honey Sugarman to Bojack Horseman is crystal clear.
The point I was trying to make is that it’s common for someone to have a grandparent who went through something traumatic which affected their children and grandchildren. What happened to Honey Sugarman doesn’t make Bojack’s story any less universal.
I could be biased due to my particular family history. But a lot of my friends have similar stories. But my friends also happen to be decedents of European Jews.
In any event, the Honey Sugarman story made Bojack even more relatable to me. That’s just my opinion.
The details of how the Sugarmans screwed up Beatrice explain the exact timbre of how Beatrice screwed up BoJack, but it doesn’t change the story of the Sugarman/Horseman family. It’s about a cycle of neglect and abuse perpetuating itself. BoJack is screwed up, because his parents were screwed up. His mother was screwed up because her parents were screwed up. The same almost certainly applies to Butterscotch.
If Crackerjack hadn’t died, with its knock-on effect on Honey, and Joseph’s reaction to Honey’s turn, things would have been different, obviously, but that applies even if the Sugarman situation was less extreme than it was.
It boils down to ‘Beatrice’s parents screwed her up, so she and Butterscotch screwed up BoJack’.
Honestly, it would apply just as well to a sunshine and lollypops alternate universe where Beatrice’s life was great. NoJack Horseman’s healthy mental state would also have a direct line traceable through Beatrice to the Sugarmans.
If the exact details of the things fucking up BoJack (and getting fucked up by BoJack) were going to prevent universality, then I’d say that went out the window with season 1 episode 1, with the whole ‘formerly hugely successful, now washed up actor’ part.
Thought on a very minor point…
Hollyhock looking like BoJack is almost certainly at least partially due to their markings…
But…
The markings they share are the ones he shares his mother - the blaze - not the ones he shares with their father - the stripe.
This is going to bug the hell out of me, now…
The universal story of a cycle of neglect ended for me with the lobotomy. It’s kind of like making Honey the victim of a serial killer. It’s no longer within the plausible experience of the vast majority of people.
No, because that’s part of the premise—a washed up former star who suffers from the same kind of emotional problems and intimacy problems as anyone else, just dialed up a bit because of his circumstances.
Oh and I have to say that I’m so over Todd’s storylines. They have none of the grounding that makes the other stories so incisive. It’s just wacky hijinks.
Finished watching the season after taking it in in small doses, and I have some various thoughts.
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They’ve always updated the opening credits based on who was hanging around Bojack’s house at the time, but I never really thought about it until the last few episodes when there was nobody there but himself.
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This season did the best job of carrying a season-long arc (Hollyhock’s search for her mother), but the B-plots about Mr. Peanutbutter’s run for governor and Todd’s clown-dentists just felt like filler. I would’ve liked to see PC’s arc get more development. I’d much rather have seen a Governor Todd arc follow from the ending of the first episode.
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I so want a drone-throne.
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Can we all agree that Hollyhock’s dads are a bunch of jerks? They immediately blame Bojack for her OD without even bothering to hear his side of the story, they didn’t spend any of the time she was in Hollywoo worrying about her or acting like she didn’t have their permission to be there, tried to cut him off from her and tell him “You’ll never talk to her again” even though she’ll be a legal adult in a few months and free to talk to anyone she chooses, and even after Bojack told them about her true parentage they tried to hide it from her with their “secret dad language”.
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The mouse version of Passover is pretty bizarre and off-putting, especially since regular Passover presumably also exists in this world since Butterscotch is an anti-Semite who refers to screws as “fancy Jew nails”.
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The cave-in episode was probably the best stand-alone episode of the season.
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Hollyhock cutting off Bojack’s attempted 1999 flashback before it could get to the generic 1999 song was the best stand-alone gag.
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“I can’t believe this country hates women more than it loves guns.”
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“The blog is called ‘Girl Croosh’. ‘Stupid Girl’ is just a subsection of it.”
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“Diane Nguyen, seen here eating a messy sandwich…”
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I loved the Easter egg reference to “Howl” with Butterscotch wanting to go to San Francisco so he could be with “the best minds of my generation”.
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Preventing the spread of scarlet fever by burning the patient’s possessions; was that a thing in the '60s? It seems so positively 19th century.
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So, did “Ethan Around” ever make it to air?
I thought the mice were supposed to be WASPish and cats were supposed to be Jewish-ish.
Do you mean 1940s? That’s when Bojack’s mother would have been a kid.
The mice did seem to be a little of both, though the whole idea of a special dinner commemorating their ancestors’ flight from an evil king definitely seems to be based on the Seder.
Right, yes. It still seems like the sort of thing that would have fallen out of fashion after vaccines and antibiotics became available. Factually, was it still done in those days?
Oh, absolutely. Scarlet Fever( which I had the joy of experiencing in the early 1970’s )was pretty contagious and in the bad old days they did indeed burn anything that was suspected of being contaminated. These days you’d just wash everything and sterilize surfaces, but that wasn’t as easy back then and hysteria was a bit higher due to significant child mortality rates in living memory. It’s a central part of the plot of The Velveteen Rabbit( written in 1922 ) :).
Just finished the season myself and I continually find myself awed by this show. Nothing else on TV does this deep digging on depression and pain. And there were some absolutely incredible episodes (Stupid Piece of Shit, Ruthie, Time’s Arrow are standouts).
As for the previous discussion on BoJack’s relatability. I don’t think it affected that one way or the other. I think the show has always made the point that BoJack isn’t just a self made jerk, but his assholery is the process of generations of neglect and abuse. It goes to length to say who we are is the result of our upbringing and ancestors. The question is whether BoJack’s terrible family history has broken him past the point of recovery.
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