Episode 84: BoJack Horseman

At face value, “Free Churro” sounds like a great way to make my day. Churros are delicious, and free is free, but there’s more to it than that. “Free Churro” is the name for the sixth episode of the fifth season of BoJack Horseman, a show I’ve wanted to feature on this podcast for quite a while. Which should not be so surprising given the nature of this show. A nature you can see in pretty much every comment section of every YouTube video about BoJack Horseman. They all will have some variation of the comment, “Imagine, the most human show on television is about an anthropomorphic horse,” and that comment will have a lot of upvotes or thumbs up or whatever Youtube is calling it.

It’s not a copypasta. The comments are so brief and inconsistent. Rather, it’s a shared observation across the fanbase. 

Now, I’m going to talk about the entirety of the show with little to no thought as to what may or may not be a spoiler. So if you have not watched this Netflix original yet, I’d recommend going ahead and doing that before you listen to this episode. Now, fair warning, it’s the sort of show that can be dark at places. Many places. But not in a gratuitous way. BoJack Horseman is just a show about the moments of our lives that we don’t otherwise talk about. And in that realness, it’s made its mark on its fanbase.

And “Free Churro” in many ways exemplified that. In this episode, and seriously if you haven’t watched this show yet, I’d recommend that you’d go and do that before listening to this episode, BoJack is giving the eulogy for his mother whom we as an audience have seen as the major destructive force in his life. So many of the fears and inadequacies that plague him in his adulthood and make the conflicts of the show were seeds sown in his childhood by her abuse and neglect. 

But we’ve also seen the events that scarred Beatrice Horseman. Her older brother died in WWII while Beatrice was still a child. The event understandably rattled the family, but especially BoJack’s grandmother Honey Sugarman whose grief so deeply unrattled her husband Joseph… Or really just made him uncomfortable that he had her lobotomized, and in her altered state, Honey makes her daughter promise to never like anyone like Honey loved CrackerJack, or like a mother loves her son.

Now “Free Churro” is not the full redemption you might think it is. Beatrice never gets one, and rightfully so. Despite her childhood, she still made her choices, and she perpetuated the cycle of misery by passing it onto her son. And while her death could have shifted the narrative, it could have been this grand gesture to at least give BoJack closure like he was expecting it to be, it wasn’t. In the end her dementia related death in the intensive care unit was gruesome and chaotic. She did not know where she was or who was around her, only that something was wrong, and in that sea of the unknown, she was stricken by fear and could only say what sounded like, “I see you” to BoJack before she died screaming. 

And her funeral, BoJack delivers the eulogy, as her son, even if she never fully treated him like one. And really, that’s most of what “Free Churro” is. There’s an opening sequence where BoJack’s dad Butterscotch is ranting to BoJack about Beatrice not picking him up from soccer practice, but it’s somewhat of a prelude to this eulogy. 

Seriously, this episode is essentially two monologues, and that’s it. That’s over twenty minutes of talking. And only talking. For a visual medium, this was a daring choice. Across many of its episodes, the show has pushed the boundaries of its medium of choice. Sometimes in more obvious ways like having a twenty minute monologue be your episode or having an episode with no dialogue at all.

But even beyond those more superficial choices, “Free Churro” made a daring choice. It did not make this eulogy about closure or about redeeming Beatrice or offering her forgiveness for all of her failings as a mother. Instead, BoJack spends it trying to parse out her last words. “I see you.” And in that journey is the narrative backbone of the episode. 

Eulogies, though, aren’t typically about the speaker going on some sort of journey. And this is me speaking from experience. I’ve given two, and one of them was for the dad that frequently comes up on this podcast. The one that died when I was thirteen. 

As his daughter, I had this obligation to string together a eulogy despite how young I was. And you know, even though BoJack seemed to adlib most of his mother’s eulogy, that sort of approach doesn’t typically work out. At the bare minimum, you should probably have some sort of outline. But preferably, you would write out a draft, which means any sort of emotional processing should be done or would be done privately. 

I remember using a sort of weird box method of outlining we learned in English class that year, but then I never used it again. That’s how valuable it was. Honestly, it was so annoying that I think I only wrote half the draft and improvised the rest, and there was a noticeable quality difference between the first and second half.

And maybe that’s why I’ve spent so much of the rest of my life engaging in a performative eulogy, this non- stop grieving. Then again, you might be thinking, I may rightfully never get over the loss of a parent, especially when that happened to me at such a young age, but I don’t think it’s  quite like that. I do think there’s a part of me that never got closure.

I think I was expecting… Well not quite a grand gesture. I was just expecting more theatrics at his funeral. His friends didn’t come, or none that I knew about. And we really didn’t know any. It was me, my mom, and his mom and pretty much a bunch of people who came to support us. And that was it. The eulogy I gave was about how good of a dad he was to me, and I still stand by that statement, but the rest of his life is just a mystery. And pieces can come out that might inspire some confidence in me about who he was. Like him getting fired when he refused to screw over a coworker. But that was a story I was told, and there was no coworker in question at his funeral.

We sent out notifications and invitations the best we could. But that did not mean that anyone came.

And when I think back to that lack of attendance, I just get confused. I mean, I’m not a social butterfly, and I have constant fears about being in places when no one wants me to be in those places, but I still manage to go to funerals if the family has asked me to be there. So why did no one else come? Oh and then when I was going through my dad’s laptop trying to find scans or records of important and official-esque documents, I found… Well, I found reasons to believe that the man I had always admired was in a similar space I was in: unsure about how much admiring I should be doing. 

And that’s a pretty bold statement to make, right? I mean, particularly for me who has often outwardly acted like I have this vision of my dad as a perfect saint, and maybe that’s what a daughter is supposed to think about her father. 

As a parent, I should say, I think that vision holds. Or at least, he was better than a lot of other dads I knew, some of my friends had, but was he a good person? Like, in an objective sense. Sometimes I feel like I don’t know. And it’s like he did not know either. 

This isn’t just based on the lack of guests at his funeral. That might not be a fair metric. It’s also based in the fact that even though he knew he was dying for maybe a year or more, he made no attempt to get his affairs in order, knowing that his immigrant wife and young daughter would have to pick up the pieces. It’s the fact that three marriages signals a certain… problem with maintaining a commitment that isn’t necessarily erased by your last marriage lasting 15 years. It’s the fact that I don’t know how he would have felt about me going to an out of state college. I mean, maybe he would have been fine with it, but the existence of this doubt is still somewhat telling, right? I mean, he would never let me go ice skating with my friends. 

I still think about that birthday party even though I shouldn’t because it was just such a weird thing for him to forbid out of the blue, and I’ve never really understood that. I mean, maybe if he had a friend that had a freak ice accident, but I don’t know any of his friends. Maybe I don’t even know him.

In the eleventh episode of season one called “Downer Ending,” BoJack asks his memoirist Diane, who at that point has to know him better than anyone, if he’s a good person. And Diane doesn’t know what to say like the audience doesn’t know. 

But is he a good person, he begs. He can be narcissistic and self-destructive, but he wants to be considered a good person, and he wants Diane to tell him that he's good.

She can’t answer that, and really neither can the audience. But instead someone from the crowd answers with a different question, specifically a frequent one that actually gets to the heart of who he is. “Aren’t you that horse from Horsin’ Around?” And cue credits. 

That’s how everyone who doesn’t actually know him sees him. 

Diane, in the next episode and long after the fact, answers him by disregarding his premise. She doesn’t believe that there is a deep down diagnostic tool for determining who is and who isn’t a good person. Really, it’s someone’s external self, specifically their actions, that really speaks to who they are, which is a problem for BoJack because he doesn’t quite know how to care for other people. What he does know is that he needs the care of others to fill this void in his life and he is constantly seeking the validation that he thinks will fix him. 

When I started playing BoJack Horseman on Netflix, it was just that: playing it in the background while I did other stuff. For that purpose, normally, I use ShowTime’s The Tudors, but I have a feeling if I keep playing that show, it’s going to raise some sort of red flag at Netflix headquarters, which is not something I want to deal with. But regardless, in that moment, when BoJack is begging Diane to tell him that he is a good person, I thought I saw a new way to understand my father: not merely for the actions I may or may not know about but a desire to be seen as a good person.

I saw that on his laptop. Dad wanted to be good or he wanted to seen as good. He just didn’t always have the best outlets for it. Despite all the setbacks, despite all the bad things he had done, and despite the damage his health or lack thereof was going to cause me, he wanted to be seen as good.

Dad did not go to all of my band concerts, which did bother me. And I had to quit ballet because the school moved too far away, and there was no way for my mom to reliably ferry me there and back, and the school moving happened around the time of Dad’s second heart attack, so he couldn’t help her, assuming she couldn’t leave him alone for as long as the whole process would take. 

I mean, I still had martial arts, just not the competitive side of it my instructor was always encouraging me to get into. But I can see that none of that in any way was my dad’s fault. He couldn’t help that he was born bearing every single disease that ran in the family line. Or that the treatments that were popular when he was younger were actually kind of terrible and only created further problems down the line. Maybe he could somewhat have helped that I was a later in life child, but he met my mother when he did. And that part can’t be helped.

In the case of my dad, most of his life after I was born was remarkably mundane when it wasn’t being defined by a prolonged illness. This “before” time that might have been a better indicator of the kind of person he was because he had the ability to be a full person, all of that is unknown to me. He never talked about it, and I was too young to really ask. 

But in a eulogy, you’re supposed to explain why you’re mourning this person, and when you put it that way, the whole thing is this really weird exercise. At no other time do you have to justify your sadness so publically. But even though every person in that room knows why you’re sad and cares enough about you to take you at your word, you have to go up there and say exactly why you’re sad and what you’re going to miss about that person and what they should miss too. But that’s a hard argument to make when so much of their life is unknown to you.

But that’s my problem. BoJack was faced with a different dilemma. Because the main thing he lost when his mother died was the hope that things between them were ever going to get better. That she’d come around or at least he’d at least be able to tell her off. But that never happened. And his only hope lies in her last words “I see you.”

He kept his distance from his mother towards the end, and we as an audience did not see her in the hospital when she died. In theory, she could have still been at the point where she would have moments of clarity where she could, in theory, have literally or physically seen her son in the room, and she was just telling him. Or maybe--and this is a bit more farfetched--in that moment, with the dementia have consumed all the worst parts of her, all the parts of her that made her treat BoJack with the venom that she did, Beatrice was able to “see” the hurt that BoJack not only carried but had largely defined his life. 

But ultimately, true or not, the conclusion BoJack comes to is that his mother was reading a sign. That “I see you.” was not a sentence with noun, verb, direct object but a series of letters I.C.U. Intensive Care Unit. And even though he can’t know for sure one way or another, that conclusion confirms his fears: that he’ll never really get the closure from his mother that he had hoped for. 

For whatever it may be worth, when my father was in the I.C.U. dying, there was no signage around or not one within sight of his bed, so I don’t know how well-founded BoJack’s conclusion is. Was there a sign to see? Well, I don’t know. This is a world with anthropomorphic animals, who knows what other differences there are in this parallel universe. Never mind that my dad did not die in California, and maybe in California, hospitals are more heavy handed with their signage. 

For me, well, I’ll never know what my dad’s last words were. His death was somewhat sudden in that he went from being alert and talking to unconscious for two days and then gone. But from what the doctors were saying, his last words were about his end of life treatment. And hey, it’s great that he finally thought to get that thing sorted out, but statements like that aren’t so legally binding. And once he was unconscious that was enough of a change for his words to mean… Not quite nothing, legally speaking. They did help guide our family’s decisions, but they weren’t closure. 

I mean, I was thirteen when he died, though, so what could I have known about closure. Thirteen is pretty young when you think about it. I was just about to start the phase of my life where I finally had the responsibility of determining whether or not my dad was a good person. I was finally able to somewhat see him through a more objective lens, but then he was gone. And at first, I was angry that he was gone, that he didn’t take better care of himself. But then I found out that the staff at his doctor’s office made scheduling appointments needlessly difficult, so once again, not entirely his fault. He could have found a new doctor, but insurance complications. 

There was always something. And the more I think about it, the more I just-- I want to be mad. Really, but then I realize that there’s something. And maybe it really couldn’t have been helped.

Season 6B of BoJack Horseman was his reckoning. He has to come to terms with every bad thing he’s ever done, including a couple things the audience does not know about. For us as the audience, it’s something of our reckoning too. By sheer virtue of him being the protagonist we’ve been inclined to root for him. We want to see the good in him. And we want to believe that he is a good person or he can become one if he can just get a second or third or eighth chance. And even when we can’t see the good in him, we know how he got here. We know his grandfather’s decision to lobotomize BoJack's grandmother created a family legacy of pain and misery, but we still have to see BoJack’s choices and the extent of them. All the damage he has caused. And that’s just it, we as the audience might want to say BoJack’s self-destruction or general destruction of those around him, is the product of Joseph Sugarman’s choice. But BoJack is capable of much the same ripple effect. 

So you think I might have regretted that connection, regretted realizing that this fictional horse-man parallels my dad, but honestly, I don’t. BoJack’s reckoning came from the actions of other people, deserved or not. And ultimately to me, it drilled a point that came up in the episode “Fish Put of Water” another boundary-pushing episode in which BoJack travels to an international film festival in a city underwater, where he can’t speak or read the language or operate his helmet properly. Despite all that literal or figurative silence, there’s one line of text, one message that manages to break through, “Kelsey, in this terrifying world, all we have are the connections that we make.”

For BoJack, these connections have helped and hurt him, and sometimes he hurts those on the other end, but we as the audience are connected to him too, despite him being a fictional character. We’ve been on this ride with him, and seeing him face the consequences, i.e., universal scorn and a jail sentence for a breaking and entry or--as he says--a jail sentence for everything, that we know he technically deserves it, but it’s still difficult because what does it say about us that we’ve been so invested in a redemption that was never going to come. BoJack wasn’t going to fully commit to this new version of himself when the perceived alternative looked so glorious. He was always going to pursue the glamour of Hollywoo and that perceived universal love because those needs that he thought he dealt with in rehab never fully go away.

Maybe, you will be quick to say, that our connections to fictional characters are irrelevant. But the same game we play with the people in our lives who have sides to them that we don’t see. Your best friend could still be someone’s sworn enemy in a feud that does not have a clear right and wrong, and that can be seen as a best case scenario compared to some alternative. We as the audience loved him as a character who was living through some of the same things that plague us, but even though we would never sabotage a friend’s rock opera, we can’t deny that BoJack did that. Or him stealing the D off of what had been the Hollywood sign is technically harmless, but led to a helicopter being shot down. 

Despite all of that, to us, he’s still BoJack. In other stories, our friend is still our friend. We can’t fault ourselves for not knowing every single detail of their lives. We can’t. We can’t get caught up in this inventory of who is or who is not a good person deep down. Because we can’t know their deep down. We can only know when it’s time to move on.

And maybe we can’t even know our own deep down. We can only know not just our actions but our present as a whole.

Or “in this terrifying world, all we have are the connections that we make.” In this terrifying world, the connections that we make are our closest guide to who we really are: good or bad.

My dad’s eulogy was entirely about him as a dad because that’s all I knew him to be. I knew he worked in computers, and I always thought his exact title was a computer consultant, but I’m sure the terminology in that field evolved quickly. And yeah, he had problems historically as a partner, but Mom never complained about him. And she won’t even consider remarrying because she misses him so much. And as for my grandmother, he was the son who took her into his home instead of sending her to the retirement home that she feared so much. 

In some regards, we really were the only connections he had left. Dad’s congestive heart failure did not kill him quickly, even if the medical care he was getting from his doctor was kind of shoddy. But it did leave him homebound rather quickly. And even before that, we moved to the American Southwest for his job when I was still a baby, and he came straight home from work every day to help with me. And then when Mom started taking night classes, well he had to be home to support her. Then Grandma came to live with us, and for a while, her health was touch and go, too. At the end, we were really the only ones that he had left. We were the connections that endured in the face of all these small sacrifices he had made.

For whatever it’s worth, in the end, in the connections he had left, Dad was a good person, and I wish I could have told him that while he was still here. For whatever comfort it might have given him. 

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with this end song from Sounds like an Earful, and yes, we tried something a little different this week. Thanks for listening. Follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on all of our projects.

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