At what point does one become a failure? When is the moment that not achieving your goals and dreams goes from being an unlucky set of circumstances to being the product of your own malaise and lack of effort? This episode of BoJack Horseman takes us back to 2007 and we perhaps find out the answer to this question for our equine leading man.
The episode is set nine years after the end of Horsin’ Around and opens on the morning after BoJack and Princess Carolyn sleep together for the first time. Throughout the episode both characters make efforts to move their personal lives and careers forward with varying levels of success. The audience knows, however, that despite some career enhancement (particularly on Princess Carolyn’s part) nothing that happens in this episode will lead to any sustained happiness for either of these characters in the present day. The BoJack of 2007 is already showing symptoms of the issues that we know will develop over the years and plague him to the present day. Bojack’s alcoholism, refusal to commit to work and his self doubt and loathing are already on display in this flashback episode. Princess Carolyn achieves significant career advancement in this episode but doesn’t heed the warning that her retiring boss gives her about life as an agent will lead to nothing but unhappiness and loneliness. It is understandable why a younger Carolyn would ignore this warning, as many young people tend to ignore the advice of older generations warning them about the pitfalls of achieving their dreams, but the audience know that he will be proven correct about his prediction for Carolyn’s life, at least up until the point in the narrative that we are currently at. Despite Carolyn’s assertion to BoJack that their relationship cannot continue beyond this point we already know that they will extend this unsatisfying union for years to come in an attempt to feel less isolated and broken, despite their incompatibility and the inevitable waste of time and heartbreak that this will lead to.
The real tragedy of this episode is that it highlights that if BoJack was able to accept love and praise he would realise that it has been all around him this whole time. One thing that has appealed to BoJack so far throughout these opening episodes of season 3 has been the idea of his ‘legacy’. He is obsessed with being remembered for something but isn’t satisfied with the fact that he is already remembered as being ‘the horse from Horsin’ Around’. However, as Princess Carolyn tells him at the end of this episode, everybody always loved ‘the horse from Horsin’ Around’. Bojack has always rejected this love because of his own self loathing and his feeling that his work on Horsin’ Around is not good enough to warrant the love of others. He wants to be remembered as ‘BoJack Horseman: respected actor’, but as Jill Pill pointed out in the last episode, that won’t be enough for him either. BoJack resents his fans for liking him because he feels he isn’t worthy of love, therefore gaining the love and respect of others for his new work won’t mean as much to him as he thinks it will. Similarly for Princess Carolyn, her career advances throughout the years have not given her the contentedness and feeling of fulfilment that she believed they would back in 2007. It is only in brief flashes of epiphany that she acknowledges just how much she has achieved before reverting back to feelings of self doubt and insecurity the rest of the time.
Until I watched this flashback episode I had genuinely never considered the possibility that BoJack had already attempted and failed at reinventing his career since the end of Horsin’ Around. The knowledge that BoJack has experienced a very public rejection of his work makes his subsequent isolation and self-destructive behaviour completely unsurprising in regard to similar previous behavioural patterns that he has displayed. As we learned in season 2’s ‘Escape from L.A.’, BoJack lashes out at the world in response to rejection as a preventative coping mechanism: he pushes everyone else away and hurts them as much as possible before they can hurt him first. So when BoJack spends years after ‘The BoJack Horseman Show’ wasting away and rejecting the world, it is recognisable behaviour to viewers who saw him confess his love to Charlotte then use her rejection of him as an opportunity to do the worst possible thing available to him at that moment (take advantage of her daughter) in an attempt to hide his pain. Bojack always resorts to temporary fixes (alcohol, drugs, sex etc) rather than face up to why rejection hurts him so much. In this light, even BoJack’s choice of making Todd his new roommate sometime soon after the time period of this episode is typical of this kind of behaviour. Despite how loveable Todd is to the audience, he is just as much of a slacker as BoJack is. BoJack is attracted to people as similarly self destructive as he is because those people won’t outgrow or outshine him. This also explains his continued relationship with Princess Carolyn. BoJack and Carolyn chose to keep each other around because it was the easy option to remain in stasis with somebody else’s continuing presence being enough of a factor to endorse their own failures.
And so this brings us back to my opening question: at what moment in his life does BoJack truly become a failure? I would argue that this episode shows us that it is not in making a terrible career move, as he does here, but rather in the aftermath of that when he decides that he shouldn’t bother attempting anything worthwhile with his life anymore. It is impossible for BoJack to succeed or improve his life if he won’t even give himself the chance to do so. It is the easiest option for BoJack to run away from his problems into his money and his mansion when times get hard and, as we have repeatedly witnessed, it is the option that he chooses again and again.
