Chris Barker

Bojack Horseman’s final season feels like a turning point for modern animation. The show is one of the highlights of the current golden age of TV, but despite critical acclaim hasn’t been taken quite as seriously as live action dramas like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and The Wire. By bringing it to such a successful conclusion, the showrunners may create a new inflection point in respect for both comedy and cartoons.

Season 6 is the culmination of Bojack’s past catching up with him. The first half sets the stage and is more widely focussed, setting up the character arcs for Princess Carolyn, Diane, Todd and the rest of the supporting cast. Bojack makes it through rehab and begins a new life, seeming to genuinely be improving himself.

The show moves into its darkest territory yet in the second half as focus shrinks down to Bojack and his misdeeds are finally exposed to the public. Bojack’s attempts to move on from his past behaviour turn out to be similar to Mr Peanutbutter’s cheating subplot- trying to atone for it doesn’t undo it, and eventually just makes things worse.

The penultimate episode, ‘The View from Halfway Down,’ is the most intense of the entire series as Bojack enters a dying dream and wrestles with mortality, the past and his mind breaking down. The episode is especially powerful because it offers no comfort- it’s made clear that the famous horse faces oblivion rather than the afterlife. As one of the characters puts it ‘there is no place, it’s just your brain going through what it feels it has to go through.’

The fact that something this artistic and existentially terrifying can appear in a Netflix cartoon shouldn’t be surprising by now, with other recent shows like The Midnight Gospel, but it does show how far that TV has come since the streaming revolution. Adult animation as serious art is no longer a cult phenomenon but mainstream. Serialized animated comedy shows, even well-written ones like Rick and Morty, now feel to some extent like a product of another era.

Bojack ends the show changed both physically and mentally and having faced some retribution for the harm he’s done, coming close to dying and serving time in prison. Whether he has atoned for the bad things he’s done, or whether that’s even a meaningful concept in this universe, is left up to the viewer. The show has always rejected the simplistic idea of people being fundamentally good and bad, and indeed the whole series shows that people can change significantly over time.

Princess Carolyn, for example, manages to finally achieve a balance between her insane work schedule and being a parent by marrying the only person efficient enough to help her keep up with both. Few people saw her and Judah coming but it’s a pairing which makes sense in retrospect. Todd also manages to find a job which he is actually good at and which allows him to stop coach-hopping, whilst Diane works through her generational trauma by writing upbeat children’s books.

The show avoided a Hollywoo ending for Bojack, but it’s nevertheless nice to see the other characters get what passes for a realistic happy ending with all of their arcs completed in a satisfying way. Whilst it’s sad that some of the relationships Bojack has developed, such as with Hollyhock, have been permanently destroyed, it also feels true to the spirit of the show. The ending offers hope that, just as honeydew melon isn’t so bad once you give it a go, the characters can also move on and try new things.

Despite generally good writing the second half of season 6 has a slightly unsatisfying plot, which at first teases that Bojack’s encounter with Penny at the end of the second season will be the thing which brings him down. However, the real main storyline involves retconning the circumstances of Sarah Lynn’s death in season 3 in a way which feels somewhat contrived. While Bojack has committed several terrible acts, negligent homicide is a step beyond anything we’ve seen before.

The world of Bojack Horseman is a comedic dystopia where sentient chickens are raised for meat and billionaires can legally kill their employees if they take too many bathroom breaks. There’s always been an undercurrent of political commentary but season 6 brings it to the surface more than ever, with one of Diane’s subplots featuring her taking the WhiteWhale corporation, a symbol of oligarchical capitalism which predictably turns out to be an unstoppable force. Bojack also suffers more financial damage from mentioning the Xerox corporation in an interview than from his involvement in Sarah Lynn’s death.

The running jokes in season 6 are also fun. I really enjoyed new characters Paige and Max, journalists who spew puns and behave like refugees from a 1940s screwball comedy (at one point Paige’s exasperated sister says ‘why do you talk like that? We’re from Fresno’). Mr Peanutbutter is also a consistent source of comic relief, partially because he’s the broadest character still left in the cast. The ending of his and Pickles’ subplot is delivered with one line and it’s sheer casualness made me snort-laugh out loud.

Bojack Horseman going away feels like the end of an era. It remains to be seen whether anything will come along which can equal it, but it’s been nice while it lasted.