BoJack Horseman: What Time Is It Right Now
September 17, 2017 10:25 PM - Season 4, Episode 12 - Subscribe

Princess Carolyn pitches "Philbert" to company execs. Todd gets a better business idea. BoJack comes to a realization about Hollyhock.

Season finale!
posted by rhizome (9 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I want to protect that smile !!
posted by Pendragon at 2:01 AM on September 18, 2017 [5 favorites]


Yeah, that last bit was great and, really, made complete sense.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:28 AM on September 18, 2017


Is this the only time BoJack has ended on an up note? Definite signs of personal growth: him telling Hollyhock's dads it's not her fault, referring to the spiked coffee, rather than his usual "It's not my fault." Also, his immediate agreement to Princess Carolyn's project. No questions asked, no gloating, just she needed him.

Also... I can't help but think of the episode when he visited Diane's family and desperately wanted to be accepted by her boorish brothers. Now he is a brother. The idea of being a father, being responsible for someone's psyche and physical well-being, that was too much man. But he could totally be someone's brother. And thinking ahead, maybe even someone's uncle. All that out of a tiny smile on a cartoon horse's face.

I used to think the only way BoJack Horseman was going to end was in his suicide. Now, I'm not so sure.
posted by lovecrafty at 7:59 AM on September 18, 2017 [9 favorites]


Is this the only time BoJack has ended on an up note?

Well, not for Diane it didn't.
posted by FatherDagon at 8:16 AM on September 18, 2017 [6 favorites]


The entire time I watched this episode I was terrified that the bottom was going to fall out. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that things actually went well (except for Diane and Mr PB). It's sweet that there might even be an ace romance! Incidentally, it's because of Todd's arc that I discovered a married couple I've been friends with for years are ace. The show gave them confidence to be able to talk about it openly with friends so thar's pretty cool.
posted by miss-lapin at 12:08 PM on September 18, 2017 [12 favorites]


I really hope that there is a Season 5, because I would hate for that last scene to be the last glimpse we get of Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter. I have confidence that both of them can figure things out and get to a less-sad place (even if that means they go their separate ways), but it would suck to have them stuck there in canon.

One little detail that stuck with me about the Belle-room: Mr. Peanutbutter mentions how hard it is to get 5000 fake books. Which is yet another way he doesn't get Diane.

On a happier note, I particularly liked Bojack's personal growth in the scene with Princess Carolyn. Earlier in the season, I was grousing to my husband about the Bojack/PC dynamic. He's done terrible things to everyone, but she's had the hardest time entangling herself from him. She's still receiving work offers for him, and she's the one who does the emotional labor of remembering the nursing home where he sent his own mother. It meant a lot to me that he offered unconditional support when she was in a bad place, both by agreeing to be in Philbert and by telling her that she'd be a good mother.

I checked to see if that was really Barry Scheck in the Horsin' Around segment, it wasn't--it was Rob Morrow. I thought, "Why Rob Morrow?" looked him up on the imdb, and discovered that he played Barry Scheck in the American Crime Story series about the OJ Trial (which I didn't watch). This seems even funnier to me than having Barry Scheck do the voice.

Todd seemed to have two main arcs this season: the asexual identity stuff in the first half, and the creepy clown dentists in the second. I loved that these seemingly-unconnected arcs came together at the end.

Finally, Aparna Nancherla was fantastic all season long at making Hollyhock a real and relatable and loveable presence. The season wouldn't have been half as good if I didn't care as much about her as Bojack did. I hope if there is a Season 5, that she returns.
posted by creepygirl at 11:19 AM on September 21, 2017 [15 favorites]


SO, THIS HAPPENED...
posted by Pendragon at 11:37 AM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]


Is this the only time BoJack has ended on an up note?

Well, not for Diane it didn’t.

I think this works well when considering the framing arc of the season in terms of “women”. Bojack’s ending is one we care most about because we’re heavily invested in the character. However, it’s very much something he lucked into. Brotherhood happened to him; it wasn’t something he caused. It’s fortunate that he's developed over the last few seasons to the point that he won't mess it up right off the bat, but that growth is inherently coincidental. Hollyhock could have come by at the start of Season One, and everything would have gone differently for Bojack. Indeed, given that Hollyhock did almost all of the critical work here, we could think of the ending as her choosing to have a brother, which feels like a chancier thing.

Diane and Mr. Peanut Butter’s relationship, in contrast with Bojack’s stumbling into a sister, is something that they’ve worked at cultivating. The scene between them also deliberately recapitulates Honey Sugarman’s crying to Joseph about not wanting to live now that Crackerjack has died. And it isn’t hard to see a bit of Joseph Sugarman in Mr. Peanut Butter. He wants to fix things. He wants to make the relationship perfect. Mr. Peanut Butter obviously doesn’t want to lobotomize Diane - but that is perhaps more due to our living in the present rather than in the past. (See the episode’s title.) The conditions are also a bit different - Diane has had mixed feelings and depression throughout the relationship, while Honey suffered one severe trauma. But then, in the Sugarman marriage there would surely have been other traumas, and perhaps one of them would have also been sufficient. Relationships are stressful, and when stressed we try to repair them or cut them off. We try to find closure and a static present, and the show is hell-bent on conveying that that is impossible.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:22 PM on September 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


I used to think the only way BoJack Horseman was going to end was in his suicide. Now, I'm not so sure.

I'm about 80% certain that this emotional roller coaster of a show is all a build up to the world's most drawn-out "why the long face?" gag.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 2:31 PM on September 24, 2017 [11 favorites]


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