The End of BoJack Revisited

I finished the series again. The first time through, I focused more on the second to last episode, The View from Halfway Down, because it's the showstopper. In the episode, BoJack has a meal and entertainment with people in his life who have died. Some of the people were just deaths he witnessed and couldn't shake. Others were people who were significant in his life. One, his uncle Crackerjack, died before he was born. However, the fallout from Crackerjack's death shaped a massive amount of what happened in BoJack's childhood and his relationship with his mother. 

I could talk about that episode for a long time, but instead, I want to talk about the final episode, It Was Nice While it Lasted. The episode takes place almost a year after the events of the episode before. BoJack is in prison but allowed a day out to go to Princess Carolyn's wedding reception. During the episode, he speaks with all four of the other major characters in the show. 

Mister Peanutbutter picks him up from the prison and drives him to the wedding. Their interactions all take place before the wedding. PB buys BoJack a suit for the wedding, takes him to lunch, buys him a different suit after he gets stains on the first one, and talks to him about his life. PB has made peace with being single and is trying to work through his issues with codependence in relationships. They really had the least amount of relationship work to do because PB is so in the moment, he never really stays mad at anyone and tends to be pretty delusional about his relationship with BoJack anyway. Overall, however, he seems to be in a good place.

BoJack then spends some time with Todd. Todd, in a lot of ways, has grown the most as a character, even if he did so while retaining so much of his own strange way of thinking. When we first meet Todd, he's unemployed and has been living on BoJack's couch for five years. By the end of the show, he has his own daycare business and his own apartment with his girlfriend Maud. They exist in happy asexual bliss and love each other. Unlike PB, Todd doesn't let BoJack fall back on his usual patterns of destruction. when BoJack worries that he'll just start drinking again once he's out of prison, Todd tells him that if he does, he'll just find a way to get sober again. He uses the song The HokeyPokey as a way of looking at addiction or any kind of backsliding. You do the hokeypokey and you turn yourself around and that's what it's all about. 

Todd says that it isn't 'doing the hokey pokey' that it's all about. It's the 'turning yourself around' that it's all about. No matter how much you mess up, the idea that you can stop doing that and begin to walk in a better direction is always an option. For BoJack, who stays in a headspace of 'it never gets better,' this is a revelation. 

When we see Princess Carolyn, she's in her wedding dress. She's married to Judah now and in a good place in her life. Like Todd, she's grown so much through the show. The most marked sign of her growth does come in this episode. From the beginning, she's always been unable to cut her ties professionally with BoJack. She could end their romantic relationship, but never their working one. Even when he fires her, she still begs him not to and as soon as he wants to work with her again, she lets him. 

Earlier in the season, BoJack remarked bitterly that maybe Princess Carolyn letting go of him would be her happy ending. She disagrees, but when he screws up his life after doing an interview she told him not to do, you see how she's reached this place where she really can't work with him again. In this final episode, she still feels that way, and doesn't slip back into the same destructive pattern. When he remarks that he'll need representation when he gets out of prison, instead of taking him back as a client, she tells him that she knows some good people he could work with instead. Letting go of the stress and hell of being BoJack's agent/manager really is part of the happy ending for PC.

Diane's last conversation with BoJack is the one I'm still not as happy with. It's no secret that this season was rushed to finish and Diane's storylines felt like they suffered the most from this rushing. There was so much that got glossed over and wedged into place just to conclude things for her. I'm not sure it works as well. Todd and PC feel more organic. Diane's stuff just doesn't.

Maybe that's because of our typical expectations of how shows and stories should work. In a more conventional show, Diane and BoJack would have ended up together. There were points where it seemed like this would happen and certainly points when they both wanted it to happen. Thankfully, this show isn't conventional. Diane and BoJack together would have been horrible. Neither of them would have gotten better. Even though they would occasionally call each other out on their shit, for the most part, they indulged each other and made each other worse. 

When they see each other for the last time, it's uncomfortable. They fight and talk over each other. And even though they finally come to a kind of peace, it's a shaky one. Diane's life is better. She's married. She's writing a successful series of books. She's moved to Texas. She's on meds to help handle her depression. But it's very clear that unlike the other three, she's not settled in how she feels about BoJack. She thanks him for the role he played in her life, but it doesn't feel as peaceful as Todd or PC did. The wounds are still open and you get a sense that if BoJack gets out of prison and ends up messing up someone's life, it will be Diane's. 

Of course, we'll never know.