After the all-too-obvious plot mechanics of ‘Stop the Presses’ , ‘Old Acquaintance’ flawlessly moves pieces around the board for the entire episode until things comes crashing down for pretty much everybody due to a few mistakes Princess Carolyn has made across her career. After the excellent cold open sets the scene of battle between Rabinowitz/Gecko and VIM, the rest of the episode tears down any notions of this being a battle of Good vs Evil and instead shows just how similar our hero in this battle is to her opponents. In the cuts across the two different scenes of the cold open, Gecko/Rabinowitz and Carolyn/Judah are literally saying the same words to each other. They aren’t binary opposites; they are different sides of the same coin. The only reason Princess Carolyn is our default ‘Good Guy’ here is because we know her better, and she has been no hero this season either, as we come to realise further in this episode.
Princess Carolyn has been portrayed sympathetically yet very honestly this season. She knows, as does the viewer, that to ensure the survival of her agency she will have to make some morally dubious decisions. We root for her in doing this because we understand how everything has been stacked against her and how much she has had to struggle to get to where she is. What works so well about this episode is that throughout it is reinforced to us that this doesn’t make her unique or special. Yes, we have had repeated reminders that the company is financially on the brink and she needs every bit of press and every hit for her clients that she can get. But Rabinowitz and Gecko are shown to be just as bad a situation as Carolyn, if not a worse one. Carolyn’s office is a palace compared to Gecko/Rabinowitz’s shabby, dimly lit room and Rabinowitz has a family on the way that will be depending on his success for survival. When the world is crashing down for all of our protagonists at the end of the episode, it doesn’t seem crazy or petty for Rabinowitz to remark upon how great it is to have a happy ending. He and Gecko earned their win and they didn’t do anything to achieve it that we couldn’t imagine Carolyn stooping to at this desperate point in her career.
Carolyn’s desperation, though, is what ultimately brings everybody down in this episode. Against Judah’s advice she overplays her hand in attempting to aggressively land BoJack two jobs at once and in doing so begins a chain of events that leads to calamity: Carolyn’s agency takes what could be the fatal blow to its finances; Diane loses her job (unbeknownst to her whilst she vacations with Mr Peanutbutter for the holidays) due to the budget cuts that will now need to take place at the agency; and BoJack loses the role that he specifically asked Carolyn to get for him (a job that should have been easy to secure, whilst also losing the trust and respect of Kelsey for the second, and presumably final, time) and loses the big marquee role that Carolyn also attempted to secure for him. BoJack losing this role could spell big trouble for his relationship with Carolyn, which was examined here for the first time since the flashback in ‘The BoJack Horseman Show’ at the beginning of the season.
When BoJack Horseman first began, BoJack and Princess Carolyn had a fairly standard sitcom style relationship: they were a on again-off again couple who bickered and fought and knew they were wrong for one another but kept drifting back together anyway. Since the end of the first season their relationship has been mostly professional and over time it has become strictly professional to the point where their personal relationship appears to be non-existent. During this time neither of them have had the awkward necessary conversation to re-evaluate the terms of their relationship. This exchange in Carolyn’s office was a fascinating glimpse into how their lack of clarity with one another might soon break their relationship:
BoJack: “I don’t want [to be a movie star] anymore I wanna do something real”
Princess Carolyn: “you realise how much money we’d be walking away from?”
BoJack: “This isn’t about money, that doesn’t matter to me.”
Princess Carolyn: “Yeah, it doesn’t matter to you”
BoJack: “yeah, so… what’s the problem?”
Ana interjects before Carolyn gets a chance to answer BoJack’s question but the answer is clear to the audience: the problem is that Carolyn needs BoJack to earn big money and doesn’t care about his personal preferences for his career. BoJack, probably rightfully, thinks that his agent’s role should be to secure the job that he wants, not the job his agent wants him to have.
It’s a conundrum most famously explored in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire: what exactly is the line between friend and business associate when it comes to agents and their clients? It works in everyone’s best interests up to a point for them to act friendly with one another but it can lead to awkward scenarios like this one if the relationship isn’t properly defined and the agent fails the client. Look at what happens between an agent and her client in this episode from a purely professional point of view and it is hard to see a future for BoJack and Princess Carolyn’s professional relationship: a client tells his agent to get him a role and that he doesn’t care about the money he may or may not get for it. The agent, who is worried about the state of her finances, ignores this and tries to get her client two roles in order to secure the most money possible for herself; an understandable yet dangerous and selfish move. The agent fails to get either role and both the client and the agent end up with nothing. If this is any normal client/agent relationship then the agent gets fired in a heartbeat. The only thing that is presumably stopping this outcome occurring is the personal relationship that BoJack and Carolyn have. But at this point it is fair to question if there is any personal relationship in place between them anymore. There hasn’t been a present day scene in a long time showing the pair of them as anything other than a frustrated client and an even more frustrated agent. If BoJack and Princess Carolyn aren’t lovers anymore and they aren’t shown to have any particular interest in being friends and Carolyn fails in her role as an agent then what exactly would stop BoJack firing her at this point? By not listening to BoJack’s wishes, Carolyn showed in this episode that she views BoJack as a client first and a friend second, which is fine, but it then means that she can have no complaints if BoJack now views their relationship in the exact same way and chooses to fire her over her failure.
In the end it is an old, previously forgotten misdeed of Carolyn’s that brings the plot to this disastrous point. Rabinowitz finds an old email where Carolyn blocked the attempt of previous employee Laura (who now works for Pegasus director David Pincher) at a promotion so that she could keep Laura at her own desk and this causes Laura to withdraw her support for BoJack’s attempt at landing the leading role in Pegasus. The way this all threads together is brilliantly done. Princess Carolyn complained all the way back in season one about how all the good assistants leave too soon so it is not out of character for her to have written this email in order to stop herself working with an incompetent assistant, despite how unforgiveable it is to halt a good worker’s career like that.
Throughout this season Princess Carolyn’s old boss’s warning in ‘The BoJack Horseman Show’ about how lonely this business will prove to be for her has been correct again and again. Princess Carolyn arguably needed to risk attempting to get BoJack both roles in order to have her business survive. She arguably needed to have a good assistant in order to be better at her old job. But when she treats these people as pawns for her own advancement she has to accept it if and when they later refuse loyalty to her, as Laura does here.
This is where the flawed concept of seeing our protagonists as the Good Guys becomes most obvious. The respective fortunes of our favourite characters turn upon Princess Carolyn acting like a bully and on the resurfacing of her unfairly punishing an underling at work for being too good. Due to this, it’s hard to see how the ending of Rabinowitz and Gecko believing the ‘Good Guys’ have won is even ironic. To be fair to Carolyn, after an initial blow-up at Judah, she does accept responsibility for how this has all fallen apart with a heartbreaking admittance that “everybody’s perfect except me”. We know Princess Carolyn is basically a good person and means well but with her actions leading to job losses and uncertain futures ahead for BoJack and Diane, it remains to be seen if this acceptance of blame will be enough for them to salvage their relationships with her, both professional and personal.
Other Thoughts
So Cabracadabra is off to a flier and is having a great holiday season (Todd: “Turns out there’s a huge demand for a safe space for women. Who knew!?”
Mr Peanut Butter: “Honestly, never would have crossed my mind”). Todd, however, plans to increase their business even further by making their safe space for women also a safe space for men. This plot is definitely funny in concept and I’m always here for shenanigans between Todd and Mr Peanut Butter, but it is honestly a fairly good look at how quickly an idea that is meant to be helpful to an at-risk group can turn sour without input from said group. Somehow the safe space for women descends into a company with strippers driving men around so that the men don’t feel uncomfortable with having to rate unattractive female drivers lower than attractive ones. Todd desperately needs Emily to return to this company as soon as possible before this all blows up in his face.
Another point on Todd – Let’s assume that Emily does return and Cabracadabra is able to be saved before Todd runs it into the ground. This will mean that Todd has a chance to become financially independent for the first time in his life at a time when it appears as though his relationship with BoJack may be at breaking point. Will Todd finally leave BoJack behind and have his own place by the end of this season? Several episodes ago I wrote about how part of the reason BoJack enjoys Todd’s company so much is because Todd has never outgrown BoJack and BoJack can always have someone to look down on and feel superior to. If Todd becomes successful and explicitly tells BoJack off for ruining their relationship before leaving it could be seriously damaging for BoJack to take.
After neither BoJack or Princess Carolyn have the guts to break it to Brad that BoJack doesn’t want to do Ethan Around, Ana has no problem destroying Ethan’s dreams to his face. If BoJack does fire Carolyn it seems like Ana is connected enough and powerful enough to replace Carolyn’s role in BoJack’s life. If this does happen it will mean that BoJack and Ana really will have their whole lives in each other’s hands. This jump in their relationship has came along scarily quickly and it seems like a ripe opportunity for BoJack to mess everything up. And if he does so it will really mess everything up for both of them.
After writing in this section of the previous episode’s review about whether Judah would ever get the spotlight into his life to reveal his human side we get a glimpse of it here with him somewhat hurtfully telling Princess Carolyn that he is a human being, not a robot in response to her insulting him. This was a great moment for him and seemed to have brought Princess Carolyn back down to earth after her explosion of anger. Judah seems robotic because he is a perfect employee (how could somebody with that perfect hair and beard combination be a robot anyway!?) and he reminds Carolyn here that this isn’t something that he should be punished for.
