“I’ve heard of being at the end of my rope, but this is ridiculous,” BoJack Horseman says twice on the new season of his titular Netflix hit. In both instances, the cartoon horse in question is talking about a young girl scaling down a building using tied-together bedsheets. I couldn’t help but read it as a nod to the show’s current state of affairs as it enters its final season. (The show is—follow along with me here—being pushed out of Netflix’s window with no tied-together-bedsheets lifeline to hang onto.) Because this first batch of episodes—the season’s second half will drop on the streaming service in January 2020—does what BoJack Horseman has been building to over the years: It peels back from its titular horse.

For much of its six-season run, BoJack Horseman has followed the antihero template—laid out by groundbreaking shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men—in ways that have made the Will Arnett–voiced horse a figure viewers could (mostly) still root for. One of the most affecting scenes in its run comes at the end of season 4, when BoJack cracks a beatific smile after Hollyhock calls him her brother. (I love it when my Large Adult Cartoon Horse shows emotional growth!) The smile looked like a turning point; one simple facial expression signaled the start of BoJack’s journey to a happy ending.

BoJack Horseman, Season 6Courtesy of Netflix

Instead, though, the following season swung violently back to the show’s more familiar (read: agonizing) beats. BoJack becomes addicted to pain pills. He strangles a fellow actor, Gina Cazador, on the set of the show’s True Detective parody, Philber, during a drug-induced blackout. Bad horse.

BoJack’s crimes have similarly piled up into an unavoidable mountain in recent years: that aforementioned assault, plus his influential role in the death of his former child co-star, Sarah Lynn, and his getting into bed with a teenaged Penny. BoJack is suddenly no longer on the right side of the can-I-root-for-this-character? fence. So it simply follows that the showrunner, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, has wrested control of the narrative from BoJack’s sodden hooves, steering it instead toward the series’ ensemble.

While the most recent season starts with BoJack checking into rehab, its next three episodes focus on, respectively, Princess Carolyn, Diane, and Mr. Peanutbutter. New mom (!!) Princess Carolyn gets this year’s experimental episode—think season 3's beloved underwater set piece, “Fish Out of Water”—in an episode that captures the maddening trying-to-have-it-all lifestyle she’s chasing. Dozens of shadow Carolyns start to spring up all around her, clattering noisily, filling the screen with the frenetic activity required of a woman balancing a bustling career and single motherhood. The effect is not unlike, say, riding a jackhammer to work.

BoJack Horseman, Season 6Courtesy of Netflix

In the next two episodes, Diane finds a little bit of bliss riding around the country with her cameraman/boyfriend, Guy (voiced by Lakeith Stanfield), and filming Girl Croosh segments that turn the lights on in capitalism’s cockroach-infested rooms. (One subject running a sex ring literally scurries off.) Labrador Mr. Peanutbutter gets his own capsule episode with his pug fiancée, Pickles. For most of the show’s run, Mr. Peanutbutter served as its soft, gooey center: a not-so-smart but completely harmless character that bounced easily off everyone else’s negativity. He was, for a time, the spaghetti-strainer-wielding hero we needed. But in BoJack’s world, no one is unflawed. Even the loyal Labrador retriever is an unfaithful asshole.

This season’s penultimate episode finds BoJack on an apology tour of sorts, helping out the people who have propped him up over the years. A newly sober and gray-haired protagonist recommends that a Cinnabunny (BoJack’s version of Cinnabon) worker—one he thinks he has figured out—join Todd’s asexual dating app, It's All About That Ace; offers a hand to a spiraling Diane; finally has that very special crossover episode with Mr. Peanutbutter; and gives Hollyhock a long-overdue hug. It ends with BoJack in a church in a Colonial Williamsburg–esque historical reenactment site with a plaintive look on his face, a moment of satisfaction we haven’t seen since that final, fateful season 4 shot.

Of course, this is BoJack Horseman—happy moments are just peaks before the valleys. The show immediately splinters off and reveals precisely how BoJack’s actions have had long-lasting effects on the characters who have come and gone from his life.

Gina Cazador, for one, is so haunted by what he did to her on the set of Philber that she lashes out while filming an action movie centered around ballroom dancing (Balls to the Wall). The nasty reputation that follows her subsequently loses her the leading role in a big-budget superhero movie. Even Peter, who went by Re-Pete in high school and attended prom with BoJack, makes a re-appearance. The story of prom night, it turns out, sounds much different from his perspective: “Some shitty dude,” he says, went to the dance with him and his girlfriend, plied them with bourbon, and then abandoned them at a hospital after the girlfriend got alcohol poisoning. The night traumatized him. And those are just the ancillary characters BoJack has burned over the past couple years.


Three seasons ago, BoJack assessed his effect on others. “I’m poison, I come from poison, I have poison inside of me, and I destroy everything I touch,” he said prophetically. After Netflix released season Fi5ve last fall, Bob-Waksberg discussed how he and the show’s writers approached making BoJack in the midst of the #MeToo movement. “I take very seriously, and we have a lot of conversations in the room like, ‘What are we saying about BoJack, and how can we be sure that we’re not glamorizing him?’ ” he told Variety. “Even though you might feel for him or pity him, you’re aware of the damage that he’s causing.” The latest installment of episodes seems to make sure of that.

Bojack Horseman, Season 6Everett Collection / Courtesy of Netflix

Because even as BoJack finds a greater sense of inner peace than we’ve seen before, the people he’s climbed over to reach this peak are still reeling from his actions. That strikes me as a very true reflection of what’s happening in the world, as horrific men like Harvey Weinstein are defended at parties and Matt Lauer lounges comfortably in the Hamptons and Donald Trump is our president.

As BoJack sits satisfied in a church after an episode’s worth of good deeds, around him—unbeknownst to him—an actress loses a job, a mom and a pair of crack detectives attempt to find out why a former child star overdosed in a planetarium, and Hollyhock is about to uncover a darker side of her brother. How much does change for the better absolve a person of their previous sins? One of BoJack’s recurring questions asks how much someone can really change. Are we all really just doomed to fall back into bad habits forever? Now the show is grappling with the idea that the stains of the past live on, even when old skin is shed. As detectives close in on BoJack, it’s clear he’ll be forced to face his past dead on.

So even though this isn’t fully BoJack’s show anymore, its inhabitants still seem to be pulled into his current. Season 6 seems to suggest that in spite of that, they’re all just figuring out how to stay afloat—an apt metaphor for our modern times.

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