I'm not crying, you're crying!
why does this show like to hurt me emotionally
Well, this was depressing as hell
Wtf do you want me to say?
TECHNICAL & ENJOYMENT SCORE: 9/10
A series that never seems to stop surprising me both in it's darkness, it's humour and often it's ability to give an emotional response.
For various reasons that would be more suited to an episode of Fraiser, this one hit home and hit home hard.
Many people think animation generally isn't for adults. But if it's for children why did this episode bring a tear or two to the eye?
OMG, That was a twist! Best episode EVER.
Ugh, This ruined me forever.
Obviously this episode was coming for a while. Another look at Beatrice's sad life to try to make her look more sympathetic than the monster she was.
However, that does not really work for me. Yes, the real monster of the story is her father, no doubt about it, though even if it's seems so horrible now, his line of thought was probably pretty mainstream at the time (except for the lobotomy part obviously, and maybe not even that obviously ? It's been done). So sure, what happened to her mother was a real trauma, but we already saw that earlier. Apart from that, what ? And her father was an asshole trying to mould her in the family values of the time ? He burned her doll ? She got bullied by another girl at school ? That's it.
After that she clearly got over it while growing up, got educated, understood her father's action for what it was and rebelled against that.
And then ? She just goes with a guy because he said that her father wouldn't like that. Has unprotected sex in a car (though the times might not have been big on protection), wants to keep the baby (because of her burnt doll ??) and escape with this random loser. She's her own woman at this point, making these choices.
Then basically the only horrible thing that happens is that the baby cries and she can't sleep ??? Well boo hoo, that's what babies do ! Next time we see her she's already a heartless mother in an unhappy marriage. I still don't think it justifies nor is enough to explain her attitude toward child Bojack.
That being said, the storytelling of this episode is incredible. The way the sequences flow and blur into each other, mixing the timeline, dropping in some of her lines from previous episodes to put them into her mind's context, that's just wow. This is a superb depiction of what it must be like in her mind, how lost and confused her sickness has made her. This is not without parallel with Bojack's drug/alcohol bender with Sarah Lynn.
Now that Hollyhock is actually Bojack's half sister is a very clever turn of events (which I think should have been revealed immediately by the DNA test, but hey). This explains the whole Henrietta gimmick. We also get why Beatrice was so attached to that doll a few episodes ago.
As for the ending, it's cute but it kinda makes no sense. We just saw the sad life of Beatrice, which if it does not excuse her actions at least gives us a little sympathy for her and for her current state of mind. But Bojack did not. For him, she's the same woman he dropped in this dump a minute ago, she's the same woman that just poisoned and sent his daughter to the hospital. It's very touching that he tries to make her more comfortable, but its is 100% incompatible with Bojack (even if he changed thanks to Hollyhock). It's 100% incompatible with what he was doing 30 seconds before. It's 100% incompatible with his current state. Remember, she just poisoned his daughter and he's been told he'll never see her again, all because of her.
This episode is really dense and sad.
Best episode this season, by a long shot!
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2017-09-21T22:10:00Z
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.