Like Mad Men and Breaking Bad before it, Bojack Horseman has decided to split its final season into two parts. As a result, season 6 part one feels more like a preamble: it’s a roller-coaster slowly climbing to its peak, building up to the fall that’s surely coming.
Season five ended with Bojack checking into rehab. Season 6 starts with Bojack getting used to this new reality. At first, the work begins to tire him. He sleeps through yoga classes and refuses to hike up a mountain. Slowly but surely, however, he starts to get better, especially when he sees a picture of his former protegé Sarah Lynn at the center. He soon reaches a point where he gets used to the routine at Pastiches rehab center and starts extending his stay, to the extent that he ends up spending six months there.
As Bojack goes through rehab, the rest of the cast go through a variety of changes. Princess Carolyn is constantly exhausted as she tries to balance her job and new role as a mother. Todd finds joy in his new role as a nanny, and Dianne rediscovers herself in Chicago as a video journalist. Mr. Peanutbutter, on the other hand, is feeling guilty about keeping his cheating secret from Pickles, which leads to a huge blowup later that ends in the two deciding that Pickles should ‘get even’ to make the cheating alright.
These eight episodes play things relatively straight. There aren’t as many experimental flourishes such as the funeral episode or the one with the seahorse, but it sets the stage for the latter half of the season pretty well. The humor is on point as ever, tackling social media, oligopolies and unionizing in ways that straddle the line between satire and indignation. During negotiations, for instance, when asked what her group wants, an assistant says, “We’d like to not be treated like garbage.” “I’m afraid we’re at an impasse,” says Lenny Turtletaub (J.K. Simmons) in response.
In fact, while these episodes, as a whole, seem more upbeat than usual, it does make good strides in rehabilitating Bojack’s character.
One of the long-standing complaints about the series is that it often gets caught up in a vicious cycle of Bojack screwing things up and then feeling sorry for himself, a fact that’s even been called out by Todd in a previous season. In one episode, Bojack refuses to return home, trying to stay in the comfort of the rehab center. When he does go home, he is reminded of all the awful things he did there. Like he says in an earlier episode, “I am sober. I remember everything.”
Despite being more “safe” compared to previous seasons, there are still some visual flourishes, such as where a swarm of reminders follow Princess Carolyn everywhere she goes, reminding her about her still unnamed baby and all the things she has to do to care for her.
The best thing about season 6 part I is that it makes it seem that lasting change is possible. However, a series of developments in the last episode suggest that assumption is about to be thoroughly tested. Bojack’s past mistakes are about to catch up to him: will he break and go on a downward spiral again or deal with his problems as well as he can?
If past seasons are any evidence, it’s likely that Bojack will tumble a long way down the rabbit hole before he can dig his way up.
We have to wait for these answers till January. In the meanwhile, you can rewatch the series and reflect on what made it so compelling in the first place. Bojack Horseman remains one of the most compelling pieces of television you can watch today. Let’s hope it also ends on a good note.