BoJack Horseman Review: The Great Spiral Down (Season 5 Episodes 9-12)
The final four episodes of BoJack Horseman Season 5 are perhaps some of the most perfect encapsulations of what it looks like to spiral out beyond your control.
It’s a very clear theme within this season’s third act: BoJack’s emerging addiction.
It’s not purely about addiction, though, as it feeds so heavily into BoJack’s emotional journey that we’ve seen so much of throughout the series already. It’s a plot that’s about his addiction and also not. It’s a variation on the same theme that we’ve seen so many times before.
The addiction is just another way at driving towards the notion that BoJack is broken and he doesn’t know why or how to fix it, if he even wants to at all.
It’s obvious to anyone on the outside that someone like BoJack, who has suffered so long with self-destructive depression and a tendency to binge drinking, should not in any way have access to vast amounts of potentially addictive pain medications.
His pill addiction is wonderfully juxtaposed on BoJack Horseman Season 5 Episode 9, “Ancient History,” where he explains that he’s been rationing the amount of alcohol he drinks now. It’s a graceful reminder as the episode carries on with him looking over the city for more pills and the kind of numbing that he thinks he needs on some level.
The best thing that these episodes — and the series at large — does is to refrain from shying away from the lows that inhabit BoJack. He’s depressed, broken, and an addict, but he’s also someone who has done awful things and the show doesn’t back down from that or ever forget.
That’s the important thing that the series remembers, especially in the final moments of BoJack Horseman Season 5 Episode 12, “The Stopped Show.” BoJack might find a way to manage his addiction and his depression, but that won’t necessarily make him a good person.
People who suffer from those often behave in ways that even they don’t understand, but when you’re on the other side, you might find that was just you to begin with.
It’s not meant to be comforting; it’s meant to be realistic. If nothing else, BoJack Horseman always strove for a portrayal that feels authentic, even in a Hollywoo(d) world filled with anthropomorphized people acting in bizarre ways. The core of itself is always true.
On another note, BoJack Horseman Season 5 is perhaps the season that we realize, once and for all, that BoJack is never going to get better, at least not fully. Each season up to this point has been a ride of BoJack trying to be a better version of himself, failing, and then trying again the next season.
After five seasons, maybe it’s time to accept, like so many of the people in BoJack’s life do, that he just is who he is at this point and maybe there’s no changing that. If that truly is the ending of this show, that would be profoundly upsetting and nothing would be more in keeping with the rest of the show than that.
If nothing else, BoJack Horseman continues to find new and emotionally complex ways to talk about depression and most of them aren’t pretty, that being the larger point of the series.
What did you think of this episode of BoJack Horseman? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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BoJack Horseman is streaming now on Netflix.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.