[7.3/10] I’m not the kind of guy who tends to subscribe to wild fan theories or behind-the-scenes conspiracies. For the most part, I think artists give us what we need in the text, and that most “here’s what was really happening” explanations tends to be some combination of a stretch and wishful thinking. With that caveat in mind, let me throw out two baseless theories that, in my heart of hearts, I don’t really believe and have no strong evidence for, but find interesting nonetheless.
Theory #1 is that in actuality, BoJack really died at the end of the last episode, and “Nice While It Lasted” is just another dying dream where he has the chance to make peace with his closest friends. “The View from Halfway Down” was very impressionistic to let the audience know that this was all a delusion or at least something fanciful that BoJack experienced while he sat in the pool, but maybe the series finale is actually just another form of BoJack’s brain “giving him what he needs” to be at peace. Maybe the prior episode is him grappling with his feelings about the people he’s lost, and the current one is about him grappling with the people who’ll survive him. Maybe he just wants to reassure himself that they’ll all be okay.
Theory #2 is that Raphael Bob-Waksberg and the rest of the creative time at BoJack Horseman wanted to kill BoJack off at the end of “The View from Halfway Down”, but Netflix said no, either because they thought it was too dark or too alienating or just wanted to leave the door open to revive the show in some form someday. So maybe this is a compromise, where Bob-Waksberg and company got to do their thing in the penultimate episode, and then fulfilled the necessity for a studio-mandated dose of take-backsies in the finale where BoJack survives, but “dies” in the sense that he’s not going to be in these people’s lives anymore.
There’s a lot of problems with these theories. As my wife pointed out, a big issue with Theory #1 is the fact that if BoJack’s brain was trying to let him make peace with everyone in his life, it would have included him reconciling with Hollyhock, whose absence is still noteworthy here. What’s more, I have no actual evidence for Theory #2, and it’s just a wild guess based on the sort of abrupt transition between the prior episode in this one. If anything a few creators have boasted about the lack of interference from studio execs.
But I spin these theories not because I truly believe them, but because I want to believe them. Let me be frank. BoJack Horseman chickened out here. It would be a bold move, one not seen with such force since The Sopranos, to show your main character coming so close to getting better, only to sink back into old habits and (at least implicitly) die.
And yet it wouldn’t be as dark as David Chase’s landmark series was, because one of BoJack’s last good acts was to help improve the lives of those closest to him. There’s poignance in the idea that BoJack couldn’t fix himself, but could at least help repair the harm he’d done to so many people who had supported him, and help set them all on brighter paths.
“Nice While It Lasted” feels like a fingers-crossed version of that same idea. It still has some weight to see BoJack effectively excised from the lives of Todd, Princess Carloyn, and Diane (or at least minimized). There’s melancholy beauty in the notion that BoJack’s dearest friends have become new people, people who have changed for the better thanks in part to knowing him, but that those changes mean he doesn't really have a place in their lives anymore.
But it’s weakened by the way that the series finale kind of undoes the consequences that the whole season (or at least half-season) built up to in the span of a two-minute opening montage. BoJack’s past misdeeds didn’t come back to destroy him. His hubris in wanting to do another interview didn’t send him on a downward spiral that leads to being a pariah, relapsing, and eventually recklessly causing an end to his life in his depressed self-loathing.
Instead, he’s physically fine, seemingly having suffered no ill-effects from his face down excursion to the pool. Sure, he has to go to jail for fourteen months, but that’s just given him a chance to get sober. And what’s more, he even has a career to look forward to afterward if he wants it, since “Horny Unicorn” is tracking to be a hit. On BoJack Horseman’s account, Hollywood and people in general have short memories, meaning he can pick up where he left things more or less if he wants to.
That development has a certain cynical charm to it, in the idea that even someone who gets jeered at on the street can, with enough time, just make his comeback once something else has become the cause celebre. And yet, transporting a lack of consequences in real life to a lack of consequences in your story, without making it the focus, makes this ending feel emptier than it should.
Despite that, there’s a good deal to admire about “Nice While It Lasted.” While the show shys away from killing off its title character, it does suggest there’s at least some cost to BoJack’s choices over the past season and longer, in that it’s prompted his enablers and those hurt by him to take a step back from his life. Rather than going for some big, grand guignol final frame, the show laudably goes for something low-key, just a series of conversations among friends. And those exchanges are pleasant, put buttons on some of the show’s running gags, and are all-around well-written.
Mr. Peanutbutter is still his cheerful, friendly self, but one who’s grown from his usual co-dependency and is recognizing some of his own patterns for the better. He seems like the one person who’s still likely to be in BoJack’s life on a regular basis (he jokingly sentences BoJack to a life filled with his friendship), and there’s an irony to the fact that he’s probably the person in BoJack’s circle whom he liked the least.
His mini-escape with Todd is a pleasant one, mixing amusing gags about the existentialist lyricism of the “Hokey Pokey” with the notion that the future is unknown and with that comes possibilities that are unexpected but encouraging. After all his shenanigans and struggles, Todd ended up meeting someone he could settle down with and reconnecting, in some tentative way at least, with his estranged mom. It’s a nice place to leave him.
It’s a nice place to leave Princess Carolyn too. Her and BoJack’s conversation about his imagined “go to him” scene at her wedding is the best in the episode, one that nicely invokes the “difference between real life and television” theme that has been with the show for a long time. It’s heartening to see PC still carrying her bits of apprehension, but also having achieved the life she wants, with a child, a supportive partner, and success on her own terms. Most importantly, she no longer feels bound to clean up BoJack’s messes or prop him up.
There’s a similar tack to the showpiece of the episode, which comes in BoJack’s closing conversation with Diane. It nicely addresses the emotional burden he put on her with his near-death phone call, the way it nearly toppled her life into disarray once more, and nicely reveals her subsequent righting of the ship, move, and marriage. It explicates the way their friendship changed each for the better, while not erasing the people each were before, but also putting their lives in different places now, literally and figuratively. It’s a little too cute and writerly in places, but their conversation works, and does a nice job of vindicating what it is arguably the core relationship of the series.
With that, the finale takes to put a bow on BoJack’s relationship with each of the series’s main characters, in commendably unadorned ways. If this is the direction the show decided (or hey, maybe was forced) to go with where we leave Bojack, the approach isn’t bad. It’s a good, not great ending.
There is something warm and wistful about all of the show’s supporting characters being in a happier, more stable, more fulfilled place than we left them, while leading lives that BoJack will mainly see from the outside in. There’s a Moses-esque bittersweetness to the way he sees his closest friends entering a promised land of joy and satisfaction that he himself cannot enter. It’s just a flinch from the stronger message, the bolder stroke, that the series seemed willing to make in the lead-up to this one.
But BoJack Horseman still ends its run as an adventurous, hilarious, and often harrowing series that constantly took chances and went places that a silly animal show, and plenty of serious dramas, wouldn’t take or go. Its final season touched on so many things that needed to be addressed, tying off the loose ends of so many characters and developments and ideas. It leaves the airwaves gently, with a lot of talk and a sweet but sad goodbye, and an indie song to set the mood.
I can’t help but wish it had gone one step further, but it’s hard to look askance after the boundaries this show pushed over the course of six seasons. As the title portends, the series was nice while it lasted. In the final tally, it gave a real life audience reason to see BoJack and the lives he touched in the complicated but comprehending way he seemed to crave so desperately within the show, and to remember him. Don’t act like you don’t know.
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@andrewbloom after credits rolled, my first reaction was "the previous episode was more powerful". But the more I think and compare two last episodes, the more I agree with the writer's choice. Death would be forgiveness in this case.
And the "real situation" is way more complicated than that. Bojack as character could only kill himself and don't get "easy way out" treatment if we would never see reaction of his friends and colleges to his death. But you would need some sort of conformation or else it would be "Inception" ending allover again. So what you gonna do? End on headline? Gravestone? I feel like suicide plot doesn't live a room for anything but the next shoe to drop - derailing Diane's life for no good reason (in the finale part of the season). Plus death itself isn't new or shocking concept for the show. It was important part of the series, it was properly explored before even the suicide.
I agree with @prithvirajmank what they got instead is more tragic when you stop and think about it. He is alive, and even somewhat well. But for the most important people in his life he is already a ghost. And he will has to live with that, and really faced it after "vacation" in prison. And will pretty much guaranteed and up being another Hollywood's Mel Gibson (I can't remember character name) rince and repeat.
But I think what particularly brilliant about his storyline is that I believe that he changed, just not enough or too late.
Also: but succumbing and spiraling out of control when the ghosts of past misdeeds finally catch up with him
Ghosts of past misdeeds didn't catch up to him through) Poetic justice indeed. The way his spiralling out of control was framed was truly perfect - it was on him alone. Even Prince Caroline didn't wanted to do it.
And that's such a Bojack move - to simultaneously sincerely apologies, getting away with it and ruined it himself.
TL;DR The ending showed us something new - deadman, upclose. The person that simultaneously changed alot and didn't changed enough. He didn't suffered severe repercussions for his actions: social status, wealth, career, health, all intact. And yet lost everyone. Yes, everyone. Because Mr. Peanutbutter, who literally saved Bojack life at one point, evolved but not really. His friendship as superficial as it was before. cue the "Erica!" gag
