BoJack Horseman review: Final episodes subvert expectation and reveal conservative heart

For all the trouble BoJack Horseman has taken to present a range of perspectives, over five and half years and 76 episodes, the question of how it ought to end is inseparable from the fate of its star. Although Diane (Alison Brie), Todd (Aaron Paul), Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) and Mr Peanutbutter (Paul F Tompkins) have been given full storylines and emotional lives of their own, especially the women, at the start of the final eight episodes BoJack (Will Arnett) remains the vortex around which they all circle. His whims, moods and benders can still scuttle their attempts at happiness.

Worse fates have befallen those who’ve come too close to him. The creator of Horsin’ Around, Herb Kazzaz (Stanley Tucci), who BoJack abandoned in pursuit of fame and money when Herb was diagnosed with cancer. Corduroy Jackson Jackson (Brandon T Jackson), his Secretariat co-star, who asphyxiated himself. Above all, Sarah Lynn (Kristen Schaal), his child co-star on Horsin’ Around. It was BoJack who provided her first taste of alcohol, the start of a short, tragic lifetime of substance abuse. When she was older, he slept with her. He supplied the heroin that killed her and was present when she died. BoJack earns a seat next to Tony Soprano and Walter White at the toxic-but-sympathetic table, which raises the question that looms over the second half of the split sixth season: how badly does a character have to behave before the writers are obliged to kill him off?

One argument is that a redemptive death is the only plausible end for a character who has caused so much damage to more innocent people around him. But the show’s writers have always subverted expectations, not least in turning a garish cartoon about a horse-man into television’s most effective excoriation of Hollywood and one of its most sophisticated explorations of addiction. BoJack’s death could offer too neat a conclusion to a series that has gone to lengths to show such things rarely exist.

As season 6.2 opens, he is sober and has found purpose in teaching drama to college students. Diane is living in Chicago with her bison boyfriend, Guy (Lakeith Stanfield), and Todd has a lop-eared rabbit girlfriend, Maude (Echo Gillette), who he met on an asexual dating website. The dream of moving on from BoJack’s trail of destruction looks to be within reach, not least for BoJack himself. But the celebrity that gave him a position to abuse has its reverse side: he is a target for eccentric investigative journalist Paige Sinclair (Paget Brewster), a His Girl Friday caper-comedy character whose exhausting locution and bridal wear cannot disguise her role as his reckoning. She will find out the truth about Sarah Lynn, who can never move on, and BoJack will have to face it, too. Powerful horse-men don’t usually get their comeuppance, but this one might.

He does, sort of, first by being cancelled, and then in a tour-de-force penultimate episode in which BoJack confronts a room full of his worst memories. By this point, the comedy is incidental to the drama, with the odd sight gag or throwaway quip breaking up all the bitterness and recrimination. In a valedictory review it’s remiss not to mention the voice performances, each of which has grown with its character. It’s a career-defining role for Arnett, but all the leads have found sensitivity and nuance amid the gags.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the programme’s creator, has said he originally planned the final 18 episodes to be two whole seasons, and at times it feels rushed, especially the opening sequence of the finale. I suspect some will feel disappointed by the denouement, which lets BoJack reconcile with each of his main accomplices without taking the time to establish how they’ve got there. Although Todd, Diane, Princess Carolyn and Mr Peanutbutter are all making steps towards happier futures, once you forget they’re animals you realise they are mainly approaching it through heterosexual monogamy. For all its virtuosic experimentation, in its final moments BoJack Horseman reveals a conservative, even Christian, heart in which the world’s hardships are best met with old virtues: kindness, moderation, hope. In 2020, it is a radical thought. The closing scene finds our anti-hero in awkward silence. In Hollywoo, as in TV, carrying on can be even harder than drawing things to a dignified conclusion.