6x12 Xerox of a Xerox

[8.0/10] I both like and hate what this episode’s doing.

I like and hate it at the same time because it’s yet another self-induced tragedy from BoJack. He does the softball interview with the flattering reporter. He admits to his most serious misdeeds in public, but couches them in enough talk of remorse and addiction that he comes off looking good, maybe even great.

He’s fawned over in public again. He’s waved at by adoring fans. He doesn't have to pay for coffee. In short, he’s receiving adoration and attention again, and being BoJack, he wants more. So he can’t leave well enough alone. He has to go back on the same show for a second night of admissions, and the implication is that it’s the beginning of his downfall. He just couldn’t leave well-enough alone. He had to grandstand, and it’s likely to destroy him.

It’s sad, because Bojack seemed so close to turning a corner. You’re happy for him in some ways that he’s getting a second chance to live a good life and be a good person. You hate that he shoots himself in the foot.

But there’s also a part of it that’s good. We like BoJack. We want him to succeed. He’s our protagonist and we understand him. He’s also done some terrible shit, shit that he deserves to face the music for. We know the causes of that terrible behavior are complex, but we also know that he’s hurt a lot of people, and seeing him be able to skate on by with the same “I’m sorry, I’ve changed” rhetoric that puts off Diane and Todd isn’t a good thing.

I kind of hate the way that the reporter treats Bojack. The episode sets up a Frost/Nixon-esque wake-up call from Paige to the softball reporter, to get her to play hardball, and it makes for a tense scene. Biscuits blindsides BoJack. She asks him the hardest questions one-after-another without him being able to think them through. She paints the most unflattering portrait she can. She takes certain events out of context. She picks the worst moments of his life and tries to connect them in ways that, at times, at least seem unfair. Emotionally, I hate seeing a protagonist whose struggle the audience has come to empathize with treated so brusquely.

I also hate the way BoJack responds to all of it. I hate the way he throws Sharona under the bus for Sarah Lynn’s first taste of alcohol. I hate the way he hurts Princess Carolyn by saying he never loved the women he’s been with so soon after she tells him she’s standing by him because he’s her great love. I hate the way he retreats to his old standards of minimizing and deflecting and blaming everyone but himself.

But most of all, I hate that Biscuits (and by extension, Paige) is right. It’s a stretch to say that, through the events we’ve seen at least, BoJack gets off on having power over the almost exclusively younger women he dates and pursues. It feels like revisionist history to say that’s what motivates him. And yet, it’s entirely fair to say that BoJack is someone who has power over people, many of them women, and who uses and abuses it without thinking. BoJack is not the deliberate monster that Biscuits’s interview technique paints him as, but he is, assuredly, an oblivious monster.

BoJack didn’t hurt Sarah Lynn or Princess Carolyn or Penny or Gina or others who possessed less power than he did intentionally. He did it selfishly, because he only cared about what he wanted, and didn’t consider whether and how that could override what they wanted, that however consensual some of those situations were, there we imbalances which cast a shadow over every choice he and they made, and it’s the type of imbalance that BoJack never paid heed to. The result is a score of people who’ve been hurt and broken in his wake, including the people closest to him.

BoJack seems to know, after PC’s admonition, that this is now something of a last meal for him, that the three hours before the story hits are his last chance to enjoy the admiration and respect that caused him to go back on camera before he becomes a pariah. So he goes to a comedy club where Kaz once set him up. A chance encounter lets him reflect on the joy he used to bring to people. And he goes up in front of people and makes them laugh, able to appear like this in public, unencumbered and even loved, for what may be the last time.

It’s a tough pill to swallow. But I like it for the same reason that Diane seems to. When presented with this list of misdeeds, this pattern of taking advantage of his power whether he knows it or not, of the outline of the person his actions have created, Biscuits asks if it fits him. BoJack says yes. For all his deflection, for all his ill-conceived, on-the-spot arguments to the contrary, for once he says that however much he may quibble with the details and claim that he’s turned the page, that picture she paints is assuredly of him.

There’s an irony there. The BoJack we see is, perhaps, truly different, willing to accept responsibility and capable of understanding the types of harms he’s caused to the point that he will internalize and publicly acknowledge them. Diane’s raised eyebrow signifies that this is a man (er, horse) who has genuinely changed, genuinely accepted what he’s done and more importantly, who he was and is. And yet, the thing that finally raises him in the esteem of one of his closest friends, may also be the thing that utterly sinks him as a public figure.

I love that and I hate it. I love it because it’s a marriage of true, hard-fought change emerging, with the attendant costs that make it earned. And I hate it because however Biscuits may caricature the picture in places, the one she sketches of BoJack is accurate, and it’s hard to look at, for BoJack and for us, however much he’s earned this comeuppance with bad decisions past and recent.