After last week’s groundbreaking episode focused solely on BoJack and his experience underwater this episode feels like a direct response with the sheer amount of storylines packed into the runtime. BoJack, Princess Carolyn, Todd and Diane all have prominent plot lines and the episode does a good job of setting up exactly where everybody is currently at in their lives so that new storylines for the second half of the season can begin in the upcoming episodes. Spreading the action out equally over all of these characters in three separate locations also hammers home the main theme of this episode: no matter how different each individual situation is for them; all of these people are incredibly lonely. This is not particularly new information about most of these characters; loneliness seems to permeate throughout this show at pretty much all times, particularly for Diane, Carolyn and BoJack. What this episode adds to BoJack for the first time, however, is a more serious look at how Todd’s arrested development has affected his personal life and is isolating him from his peers.
For a while now my biggest (and possibly only) personal complaint about this program has been about the underuse of Aaron Paul as Todd. A few weeks ago I wrote about how part of the reason BoJack likes to keep Todd around is because BoJack knows Todd will never outshine him and can be relied upon to make BoJack feel better about his own lack of progress in life. Due to his nature as a deadbeat Todd has always felt somewhat inconsequential with him being employed in diminishing sidekick roles for Mr Peanut Butter and as a punching bag for BoJack. Since the start of this – otherwise excellent – third season Todd has barely had anything to do and has pretty much remained in the corners of each episode that he has featured in. During the first two seasons the show gave Todd certain tasks that took up his time so that he wasn’t literally just sat on BoJack’s couch every single episode, but his personal life has never really been delved into much. In this episode we perhaps get our answer as to why that is: Todd has no personal life (and has probably never had sex) because his lack of personal development has led to crippling shyness around women and tonight he was essentially rendered into a man-child when thrust into a sexual situation with his high school girlfriend, Emily.
Back in high school Todd and Emily were at the same maturity level with them both wanting to have sex but naturally being nervous about taking the first step. Now that they have reconnected after nearly a decade apart their lives are thrown into complete contrast with Emily clearly maturing much more over the years than Todd has. Their respective behaviours at the bar that night highlights their different positions in life: Todd’s life consists of leeching off his rich ‘friend’ to get drunk for free, whilst Emily is attending the rehearsal dinner for her best friend’s wedding. Todd accidently stumbles across a great idea for a new business and when Emily immediately begins drawing up detailed plans for said business, Todd loses focus and begins to get drunk. When they get upstairs and Emily explicitly tells Todd that she wants to go and fool around with him, he gets scared and sends her away. The heartbreaking thing about this is that we know Todd doesn’t want to be that shy person but he can’t help it. There is no logical reason for him to flake out on hooking up with Emily but that doesn’t stop him doing it anyway. An irrational fear of rejection is presumably what leads to Todd’s purposeful ruining of the situation but the final image of him alone and devastated on the hotel bed is a worse predicament for him than anything that he was afraid of happening with Emily. It seems that years of isolation and refusal to leave his comfort zone have made that a more natural state for him to revert to than any other one. And sadly for Todd he may have missed his chance with Emily because her reaction to being rejected by him is to seek out Bojack, the other person in the bar who knows all about self hatred and loneliness. The two of them hooking up for one meaningless night will undoubtedly come to cause problems between them and Todd in upcoming episodes but at least it will push away the reality of their loneliness until the morning.
At the end of last episode’s review I said that for any of BoJack’s emotional advances to mean anything they would need to take hold whilst he is at home in ‘Hollywoo’ and surrounded by all of the creature comforts of his life. The decision by the writers to make Secretariat a bona fide hit movie in the very next episode is obviously designed to show just how little progress BoJack is still capable of making when he is feeling successful and surrounded by alcohol and hangers-on. BoJack feels on top of the world at the beginning of this episode and to celebrate he decides he wants to get his face out in public and accept all of the free drinks and schmoozing that he can while it lasts. For BoJack, who only thinks in short term goals, this seems like a sure fire path to a great night of partying and celebration. But for the audience it is a big red flag that his night is destined to end the same as they always do when alcohol is involved: alone and desperate. BoJack’s insecurities are on display from the moment he and Todd enter the bar. His decision to crash the rehearsal dinner idicates how afraid he is of his own success. If he crashes somebody else’s big moment and then ends the night feeling terrible about himself he can justify it in his own head by blaming it on the wedding party not being good enough for him. If he tries to just enjoy his own success with a quiet night with friends and still feels terrible and alone at the end of the night then he really is in trouble. BoJack fears this outcome occurring so much that he will keep pushing it further and further away by focusing on drinking and partying every time he has a celebration at hand rather than ever risk enjoying something on its own terms and have it not be enough for him. If BoJack ever finds that happening then he will have to ask himself the question that Jill Pill asked him at the beginning of this season: “And then what?” and clearly BoJack still does not have any answers to that question.
Princess Carolyn, on the other hand, doesn’t have any of the self hatred that BoJack has regarding her personal life, but she is just as tired of being alone and having such little time outside of work to focus on herself. The show has always done a good job of showing how hard it is for a female character to rise to the top of her profession and maintain a healthy work/life balance. Carolyn rightfully enjoys her career success and has worked hard to get to where she is. The show never veers into tacky clichés about her being a mess who can’t hold down a man due to her work obsession. More simply, they show her problems to be the same as those of her former (male) boss who warned her that she would have to give up her life to this business in order to succeed. In the end, Carolyn seems to be willing to do this if it means being successful but whilst she can she is still willing to take what little time she has available to try and find somebody who would make her life feel that little bit less lonely than it currently does. One personal ray of sunshine seems to have appeared at work for her in the form of Judah, her assistant who is just as workaholic as she is, running errands until nightfall without even noticing that it had gone dark. It will be interesting to see if Judah gets developed any more as a character as time goes on, and if he does, whether his robotic workaholism has left him as lonely in his personal life as it appears. Regardless, he and Carolyn share a nice moment together, united in their isolation, when Carolyn returns to the office after her dates.
Interestingly, Diane already has the personal life that Princess Carolyn wants and it hasn’t done anything to make her feel more complete or less alone. She has a husband who adores her and, as we found out tonight, she has a baby on the way too. A few weeks ago I wrote about how Diane seemed to be on the verge of a big change in her life and now that change is upon her. Granted, this is not the change that I, or she, envisioned for herself but it presents an interesting conundrum that she and Mr Peanut Butter will have to work through together, despite their evident relationship issues. Hopefully their decision regarding the baby will bring them closer together again with them reassessing what exactly they both want and expect from the relationship. If they decide to keep the baby then perhaps having the extra person around will give Mr Peanut Butter another outlet to shower with love, as his abundance of affection is just a bit too much for Diane to bear most of the time. Although, with this show being as dark as it sometimes can be, it could go the other way and the baby could force Diane into staying in a relationship that she is not happy in leading to her resenting Mr Peanut Butter (and the baby) more than ever before. The one thing that is clear is that they need something more than love alone to fix their relationship. When Diane comes home from her drug fuelled party and confesses her love to Mr Peanut Butter it doesn’t take him by surprise; he knows that she loves him but he needs more than that from her to make the relationship work.
The threads that this episode open for all of the main players sets up plenty of avenues for where the middle and back end of the season can start to go. The women of the show hopefully have better times to look forward to: Princess Carolyn’s successful date with Ralph Stilton (along with her budding work relationship with Judah) leaves plenty of room for expansion over the coming episodes and hopefully can lead to the fulfilment in her personal life that she craves. Diane’s surprise pregnancy has taken her by surprised but hopefully won’t grow into the depressing storyline that is has the potential to. The men, on the other hand, may have some difficult times ahead. Todd has some major growing up to do, and he and BoJack will surely have to reassess their relationship yet again after BoJack’s presumed betrayal with Emily. After BoJack and Todd begin the episode acting as the best of friends BoJack ends it by potentially proving just how little personal relationships mean to him in comparison to achieving his own pleasure, as always. For the characters of BoJack Horseman loneliness is such a drag.
