BoJack Horseman delivers a jaw-dropping eulogy and once again raises the bar for concept episodes

At
this point in its life, BoJack
Horseman’s tendency
to experiment within the confines of television is well-established.
To name only a few examples, there’s the big swing of “Fish
Out Of Water,” the structural shuffling of “Stop
The Presses” and “After
The Party,” the futuristic fakeout of “Ruthie,”
the drug and dementia trips of “Downer
Ending” and “Time’s
Arrow.” BoJack plays so fast and
loose with what an episode is supposed to be that it’s almost easy to
take it for granted, to assume that the show’s so reliant on gimmicks
that you can see them coming a mile away. In another world you’d read
the description on Netflix, tilt your head back, and say “What is
this, a concept episode?”

That
would be the case, if it wasn’t for how fucking good BoJack
Horseman is at
playing those reveals. In the case of “Free Churro,” the opening
reveal that Beatrice Horseman has finally succumbed to old age and
dementia and BoJack is speaking at her funeral sets you up for a
conventional funeral episode framework, one the show followed a few
years ago in “Still
Broken.” The stage would be set for a fair share of gallows
humor, a celebrity mourner or two, and BoJack’s friends trying to see
exactly how he was taking the loss after he delivers a brief eulogy
for the woman who he resented more than anyone.

And
then he turns right back to the podium, and he keeps talking. And
keeps talking, and keeps talking, and keeps talking. And the camera
never stops following him. The perspective breaks from time to time
as his angle on the coffin shifts—and at one point escapes into a
brief shadowy memory of his mother showing a moment of grace—but it
never once pans over to face the rest of the audience. Not once does
anyone step up and try to cut him off, and not once does he move to
bring anyone else up on stage. “Free Churro” is The BoJack
Horseman Show (no, not that
one), and it is a complete masterstroke.

As
anyone could assume from BoJack after spending more than five minutes
in his company, it takes even less time than that for him to make the
whole eulogy about himself. This is about as captive of an audience
as BoJack’s had since his days warming up the crowd for Horsin’
Around, and as to be expected, he’s treating it the same way he’d
treat one of his comedy routines. He begins with an aside about going
to Jack In The Box right before the funeral, griping George
Carlin-style about the obligation a simple greeting puts on him: “If
I say I’m doing shitty, they say ‘what’s wrong’ and I have to be like
‘I dunno, all of it.’” There’s a few corny jokes about his mother
and death, complete with the organist able to offer a rimshot now and
then. (Like the jokes, they too are poorly timed.)

The
roast component of the evening can only last for so long though.
Season four truly pulled back the curtain on how much damage Bea did
to BoJack growing up, with her near-constant insults and judgments
forged out of her own unfortunate upbringing. Now, he’s replaced his
desire to truly convey how much he hates her with the freedom that
she can’t respond to anything he says, getting increasingly nasty
with the closed casket: “Knock
once if you’re proud of me.” “Knock once if you think I should
shut up.” “Knock once if you love me.” It’s gallows humor that
would be horrific without the context of this relationship, and even
with that context it’s a deeply discomforting thing to witness.

But it’s not all digs at
someone who can’t defend themselves, as the void Bea has left pushes
BoJack to a form of introspection. Looking back on a lifetime of
verbal abuse and depression, BoJack can identify that “born broken”
truth that Bea told him about long ago, the realization clear in the
blurriness of “Time’s Arrow” that none of their unhappiness
existed in a vacuum. Going back to those Supper Club parties where
his mother made him perform alongside the Lollipop Song, he recalls
the one moment of grace when Bea would take flight in a dance—and
where Butterscotch, emerging from his study with liquor in hand,
might recall that first night he saw her. It’s the same realization
that “Time’s Arrow” left the audience with, that feeling that
Butterscotch and Bea were horrid to the young BoJack but that their
own horrid lives left them without the tools to save either him or
themselves.

Speaking
of Butterscotch, the eulogy also lets BoJack offer his thoughts on
the other parent who’s no longer there, and whose death happened
off-screen in “Thoughts
And Prayers.” It turns out that said death was more abrupt than
expected. He offered an open challenge to duel anyone who didn’t like
his book, some kook in Montana took him up on it, and in the middle
of the ten paces he tripped and cracked his skull after a moment of
clarity that the kook probably never read it. (Neither has BoJack. In
his words: “Why would I give him that?”) Beyond the perfect
bleakness of it—in keeping with a horseman who had romantic
aspirations for his life that never came to anything—it’s a smart
structural move to provide closure to that mystery. Season four spent
plenty of time on BoJack’s complicated maternal relationships, they
don’t need to reinvent that wheel in a future season.

It’d
be easy to see an episode like this as an excuse to simply give Will
Arnett a showcase episode for an Outstanding Character Voice-Over
Performance Emmy. And if that was the case, mission accomplished,
because “Free Churro” goes right alongside “Stupid
Piece Of Sh*t” as proof that this is the role of his career. In
a season where the conscious grittiness of Philbert has him relying
largely on his
Batman voice, Arnett makes a meal out of BoJack’s emotional
roller coaster. You can hear every last bit of forced levity,
resentment, and genuine pain as BoJack tries to find some way to come
to terms with Bea’s death, and his feelings or lack thereof about the
matter.

“Free
Churro” isn’t that simple though. With a script credited to
showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, BoJack’s eulogy feels as much like a
mission statement for BoJack
Horseman itself as
it does a eulogy—right down to a point where he quotes his own
theme song. BoJack waxes poetic on the fact that in his household
television was the only thing that didn’t terrify him, and that he’s
internalized so much of it that it’s a placeholder for the
relationships he’s been unable to build. He uses a story from Maude in place of a story
he wished he had about his mother, and equates hoping their
relationship would get better to the reason he watched the full
series run of Becker. And he draws a
straight line to the ability of television to make everything right
with one grand gesture, and how that doesn’t apply to any of his own
situations: “You
can’t just screw up and then take
a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve
a mystery and fly to Kansas. You need to do it ever day. Which is
so hard.”

It’s
part and parcel for what we know about BoJack,
the sheer glee the series takes in deconstructing sitcom tropes and
turning them around for tragicomic purposes. But it’s also a clear
message to anyone watching the show (those who haven’t picked
up on it already, that is), that in its subversion of those
tropes it’s further distancing itself from the possibility of this
story ending well. BoJack’s become more self-aware as the show’s gone
on, and that self-awareness is only making the gulf between his
television-centric view and reality wider and wider: “You
never get a happy ending. Because there’s always more show. Until
there isn’t.” Season finale after season finale, I’ve asked the
question if BoJack can make the steps to happiness, and the message
Bob-Waksberg seems to be giving is “no.”

At
least it’s a better message than the one Bea left BoJack with, in a
truly merciless twist. Throughout his eulogy, BoJack is grappling
with the meaning of Bea’s final words to him, looking over his
shoulder to say “I see you.” It’s the sort of mystery that would
haunt anyone until their dying days, so it’s a simultaneous blessing
and curse that he solves it for himself. It’s just one last moment
where Bea failed to acknowledge her son, a moment that he can’t even
blame her for because dementia was wrapped so tightly around her
brain. Yet it’s also a moment that contains a grace as simple as the
one the Horseman family would share in Bea’s dance, the other major
point of BoJack Horseman’s message statement: in this
terrifying world, all we have are the connections we make.

Then,
the horrific punchline of opening the casket, doing a double-take,
and checking the funeral program. There’s no level that this joke
doesn’t work on, simultaneously sabotaging and amplifying every one
of “Free Churro’s” preceding 24 minutes. None of BoJack’s
resentments got answered, no completion of the grieving process or
the “Fuck you, mom!” he’d stored up for his entire life. Only a
group of stunned gecko mourners who didn’t dare to interrupt him,
whom he was too self-centered to realize before that point couldn’t
possibly be there for his mother. It’s the darkest of codas to an
episode that’s already a dark coda, a move that only further proves
that in terms of subverting expectations and pushing the envelope,
nothing on television can touch BoJack Horseman.

• Achievement
  in Voice Acting: Give
  Will Arnett an Emmy, please and thank you.
• Thumbs
  up to Jesse Novak for that organ version of the BoJack theme song.
• The cold open sets the tone
  for BoJack’s abandonment—and for the Will Arnett one-man
  showcase—as we borrow a flashback from BoJack’s awful childhood
  glimpsed in “Downer
  Ending” and expand it to Butterscotch pulling a “Brother
  From Another Planet” by abandoning his son after a soccer
  game. So much emphasis was spent on Bea’s corrosion, but it’s clear
  in between griping about his wife and his lost progress in writing
  (“I had this one really interesting sentence that kept going for
  pages”) how much damage Butterscotch wrought as well.
• BoJack throws back some of
  those pain pills he was prescribed last week and washes them down
  with his ever-present flask. He’s supposed to take them in the
  morning, but as “Planned Obsolescence” told us, endless night
  shoots mean he’s losing a grip on when morning is. I’m sure this
  won’t come back to cause any problems.
• The mention of Butterscotch’s
  novel, which we saw in Bea’s possessions in “What Time Is It Right
  Now,” is an opportunity for an addendum to that review. Thanks to
  BoJack’s Hidden Jokes for pointing
  out that the cover The
  Horse That Couldn’t Be Broken is
  a clear reference to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
  Man. And given that
  BoJack admitted to never reading the book, Bob-Waksberg maintains
  its future plot potential.
• “One time she smoked an
  entire cigarette in one long inhale! I watched her do it. Truly a
  remarkable woman.”
• “She was really good at
  dispensing life lessons that always seemed to come back around to
  everything being my fault.”
• “Only my mother would be
  lousy enough to swipe me with a moment of connection on your way
  out.”
• “The last thing that my
  stupid brain could come up with before I died was was ‘Won’t they be
  sorry.’ Cool thought, brain.”
• “But I guess it’s good to
  know. It’s good to know that there is no one looking out for me.
  That there never was, and there never will be. It is good to know I
  am the only one I can depend on. It’s good that I know that. So it’s
  good my mother’s dead.”
• Today
  in Hollywoo signs: ICU.