Secretariat never looked back—but BoJack Horseman did, eventually

Back in the 2010s, there was a very famous TV show, one that captured The A.V. Club‘s imagination for six seasons. As BoJack Horseman turns 10 this week, we’ll be looking back at the engrossing animated comedy with a series of essays and interviews. This is BoJack Horseman Week.

It started early, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. In season one of BoJack Horseman, we learn that nine-year-old BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett) wrote a letter to his hero, the record-breaking, history-making racehorse Secretariat, and told him, “Sometimes, I get sad. What do you do when you get sad? How do you not be sad?” Secretariat (John Krasinski) spoke to BoJack through the TV on The Dick Cavett Show, looked into the camera and said, “BoJack, when I was your age, I got sad. A lot. I didn’t come from such a great home, but one day I started running, and that seemed to make sense, so then I just kept running.” An inspirational story: Find the thing you’re good at. Focus on it. Bring joy to as many people as you can. Channel the hardship into something better, something good, something you can be proud of.

But Secretariat wasn’t done with his advice to BoJack. He continued: “BoJack, when you get sad, you run straight ahead, and… and you keep running forward, no matter what. There are people in your life who are gonna try to hold you back, slow you down, but you don’t let them. Don’t you stop running and don’t you ever look behind you. There’s nothing for you behind you. All that exists is what’s ahead.” 

In real life, Secretariat wore a blinker hood—a head covering that limits a horse’s vision of what’s behind them—when he raced. He finished 31 lengths ahead at the Belmont Stakes in 1973. Took the Triple Crown because of his wins at the Preakness Stakes and the Kentucky Derby, too. And then he never ran again. 

Even without the benefit of hindsight, of knowing what BoJack will become as an adult with his alcoholism and addictions and infuriating inability to stop fucking up his own life, there’s still something off about Secretariat’s response to BoJack’s letter. Secretariat’s words are classically avoidant; he’s not advising BoJack to run towards his goals, but away from his problems, and to never look back at his mistakes. BoJack was always running from something. His family—his absent and mean father, his cruelly apathetic mother. His fear of failure. Himself. It’s no surprise he was drawn to a hero whose talent was being the best at running. And it was almost inevitable that BoJack’s life would play out nearly exactly like Secretariat’s.

The real Secretariat was retired after his 1973 season because he was more valuable as a breeding stud. In the warped world of BoJack Horseman, Secretariat died by suicide after his 1973 season, wracked with guilt about his brother’s death and despair over being banned from life from the only thing he was ever good at: Racing. He didn’t know what to do when he couldn’t run from his problems anymore, so he just… stopped. Running. Living.

BoJack, at least as an adult, was very aware of Secretariat’s flaws, but that didn’t stop him from idolizing him. He saw the moment when Secretariat made a deal with President Richard Nixon to send his brother, Jeffretariat, to fight in the Vietnam War in his place as Secretariat’s turning point. “The Nixon scene is the core of the whole movie. Where we see Secretariat be morally corrupted and look into the real darkness of his soul,” BoJack tells his girlfriend Wanda (Lisa Kudrow) in season two, as he’s finally living his dream of starring in a film about his hero. BoJack thinks he has an inflection point, too, a moment when he was morally corrupted and the darkness in his soul finally started to claw its way to the surface: the moment that he passively allowed network executive Angela Diaz (Anjelica Huston) to fire Herb Kazzaz (Stanley Tucci) from Horsin’ Around. Years later, in season six, when Angela told him that she wouldn’t have fired Herb if BoJack had gone to bat for him, he said, “Every stupid decision I made, every bad thing that has ever happened, it all started because of you.” Later that night, BoJack broke into his old house, got drunk, swallowed a bunch of pills, and nearly drowned in the swimming pool.

BoJack’s mother, Beatrice (Wendie Malick), had a different take on why her son turned out the way he did. “I know you want to be happy, but you won’t be, and—I’m sorry. It’s not just you, you know. Your father and I, we—well, you come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you. You were born broken. That’s your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects—your books and your movies and your little girlfriends, but it won’t make you whole. You’re Bojack Horseman. There’s no cure for that,” she said after Diane’s book about his life as a washed-up sitcom star, One Trick Pony, came out. In her eyes, BoJack never had a chance.

It’s hard to tell whether Kelsey Jannings (Maria Bamford), the original director of the Secretariat biopic in the show, thought the same of Secretariat. In the incident that got her kicked off the movie, she and BoJack sneak into the Nixon Library because they need an Oval Office set to finish one last shot for the Nixon scene that Lenny Turteltaub (J.K. Simmons) has demanded they cut from the movie. But BoJack believes that if Lenny can just see the power of what they were trying to do, the emotion of what they were trying to convey, he might just let them keep it. So, it’s Kelsey and BoJack, alone on the set, and she’s trying to get him to cry. He’s holding an American flag, folded into a triangle, looking down at his lap. “You’ve just been told your brother is dead and that it’s your fault. But this moment is bigger than that. This is the moment that Secretariat stops running. Because this is the moment you realize something inside you is broken, and it can never be fixed,” she says. Her phrasing is ambiguous; maybe she means that this is the moment that broke Secretariat. But the way her words mirror Beatrice’s so closely implies something deeper: She thinks Secretariat was born broken too.

In the end, after all the damage is tallied, it doesn’t matter. “Grow up. You play these games, ‘If I hadn’t done this, if I wasn’t so that,’ but you did and you were and here we are,” Angela responds after BoJack accuses her of being the reason why he’s such a mess. It’s weird to find yourself agreeing with an objective villain, a reprehensible human being who, somehow, has the moral high ground over our protagonist at this point. Because she’s right: BoJack’s unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions, his inability to look back and reflect on his past mistakes, is what got him to this point. It doesn’t matter if he was born predisposed to mental health issues, or if someone influenced him to make a bad decision. On the racetrack, Secretariat couldn’t look back, and he lived his whole life as though he couldn’t take off that blinker hood. When there was no more track to run, nothing left in front of him and no way to see behind, he was trapped. We learn about Secretariat’s death, and his advice to nine-year-old BoJack, in the last episode of season one. For the next five seasons after that, we think we know how BoJack’s story is going to end. It’s not particularly subtle foreshadowing, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to prepare us, to tell us that we better get ready, because this story won’t have a triumphant finish. But the show pulls off an elegant, unexpected ending, subverting what seemed destined from the start.

Secretariat’s moment of reckoning happens internally. No one tells him, “You did this to yourself.” It’s a conclusion he comes to on his own. But for BoJack, he’s so unwilling to face this truth, even when Angela says it directly to him, that he keeps running. When Secretariat hit the water, it was because he’d stopped running from his past and didn’t think he had anything to run toward instead. When BoJack hit the water in “The View From Halfway Down,” it was because he was still running from his past and not thinking about his future. That difference is what saved BoJack. Even when he’s dreaming or hallucinating or in limbo or whatever in-between place you’d like to ascribe in the series’ penultimate episode, he’s still running from his past and the unending nothingness beyond that door. 

After his rescue, BoJack finally stops and looks back. In the series finale, he notes he was convicted and sent to jail, officially, for “breaking and entering [into his recently sold home], but I think it was kind of for everything.” That’s him shaking off the weight of Secretariat, his hero that died, the compromised movie that starred a digital recreation of himself instead of his real acting work, the burden of trying to be better and fucking it up over and over. He’s still not quite ready to put his best foot forward yet, but he’s at least realized that relying so much on other people—on Secretariat for his hope and happiness, on people like Angela for blame—is just another form of running away.