5x11 The Showstopper

[6.5/10] Color me underwhelmed. I always look forward to BoJack*s penultimate episodes, because they tend to be as bold and ambitious as they are devastating. But for once, this felt rote. This has been a season where *BoJack is both spoofing but also embracing the tropes of the prestige drama, particularly of the “difficult man” variety. And maybe it’s just because I was a big fan of House M.D. back in the day, but “Showstopper” plays the trope of the guy on pain pills, having convincing hallucinations, and having trouble discerning reality from fantasy pretty damn straight without much of an interesting wrinkle to it.

Sure, it’s a neat enough concept to leave the audience just as confused as BoJack is, blending in the bits from Philbert and the normal bits from the show at the same time BoJack himself is getting mixed up. And sure, while House M.D. even did the symbolic musical number bit as well, there’s some clever lyrics and foreboding imagery in Gina’s song and dance about mortality and identity and some metatextual reflection on how BoJack Horseman has to keep going because BoJack Horseman has to keep going. That means more suffering, more compartmentalizing the horrors of his past, more reckoning with the fact that he can never truly get better because if he does, the show gets boring.

It’s an interesting concept, but the whole “blurring the T.V. show with my real life due to pain pill-induced paranoia” schtick wears thin quickly. Frankly, the episode is at it’s best when it’s just being amusing, poking fun at the ridiculous prestige drama clichés and dialogue, and having Todd flounder when he realize he hasn’t actually sold any ads.

But when the show tries to get serious with all of this, it kind of lost me in the familiarity of it. Sure, there’s some effective symbolism in the big floating horse balloon that’s lost its moorings, and the big bright staircase to an uncertain place. But when things are supposed to get real, when BoJack is blurring his attacks on Sasse as Philbert and his attacks on Gina as BoJack, it becomes too much, too calculated, without enough truth or novelty to make it feel like something more than a ploy from the show.

That’s kind of the problem here. A big theme this season has been how depicting this kind of bad behavior normalizes it, which is both a critique of modern gritty dramas, but also a bit of self-reflection from BoJack Horseman itself. But the star of the show going too far and actually choking his co-star, something that’s supposed to signify how far gone and messed up BoJack is, doesn't feel like the shocking level our hero has sunk to. It feels like the same kind of cheap move any bargain basement prestige drama this show is making fun of would make.

So I appreciate the attempt here, and there’s a few bits of visual creativity that stand out and help evoke a certain mood. But as penultimate BoJack episode goes, this one pales in comparison to those that have preceded it. But maybe that’s the standard seasonal rot, the need to escalate things, that cause Philbert-like dramas to get more and more wild and intense in their scenes and stories. I can only hope that BoJack the show manages to fare better.