Bojack Horseman’s Ending Left Me Full of Emptiness
What happened on Bojack Horseman’s finale? What was in Hollyhock’s letter?
Yet another “Bojack Horseman Ending Explained” article. But this one is worth reading. Maybe.
Bojack Horseman’s series finale was overwhelming. It left me completely alone in front of the screen of my iPad. No explaining, no sense of closure, no resolution. Only doubts and guessing and no answers at all. Just as in boring real life. So now I have a need. The need to explain/rewiew/recap the Bojack Horseman series finale, to fill the vacuum of doubts with my personal speculations.
So yes, I’m writing a “Bojack Horseman finale explained” article. But I’m doing it to explain the Bojack Horseman finale to myself.
And my fist question was “What was in Hollyhock’s letter?”
We don’t know. At all.
But we can imagine that the content was something like “Bojack, piss off”. After all, Hollyhock decided to cut ties with her brother, she stopped answering the phone and even changed her number. Hollyhock was the person who kept Bojack sober, and right after reading the letter, the horse gets drunk again. It is one of the key concepts of the final dialogue between Bojack and Diane, in the very last episode: even the ones that really count for us can stop being part of our lives. But they still remain important. Bojack starts again from this, and in the end accepts the decision of his sister. There are no unrsesolved issues, unlike with the figure of their father.
Speaking of that…
Why is Butterscotch Horseman portrayed by Secretariat in “The View from Halfway Down”?
When Bojack and Butterscotch/Secretariat go out for a smoke, they finally share a honest dialogue about their ties. Butterscotch desperately — hopelessly — wanted to earn the respect of his wife and son. He built walls between his true self and them, playing a twisted version of hide and seek in order to bury his weaknesses. Bojack feels regret for this, for the bond with his father he could not have. If only they had this conversation in real life… Even years after the death of Butterscotch, to Bojack his father is some sort of taboo. In the previous dreams in the mansion, Butterscotch never came. YEt this time he appears in disguise. Secretariat is in fact the ideal adult for the little Bojack, a model to follow for inspiration. Bojack smoked his first cigarette right after seeing Secretariat doing the same, and here they finally manage to share one. Probably in this overlap there is even some fear, the fear of becoming exactly like Butterscotch was.
“You are Secretariat”. Secretariat is your father. You are your father.
What are the guests in the manor eating?
They are eating the cause of their deaths. Herb, for instance, is eating peanuts, the very thing which in the end finished him even after defeating cancer. Corduroy died making the funky spiderman, and so his plate contains lemons. And Bojack?
Bojack is drinking pool water (he complaints about the clorine taste of it) and he’s eating pills. The same things that led him to near death in his former swimming pool. The horse figures this out one moment too late, once the void has absorbed everything and the end is near. The only thing left is the voice of Diane. The same last face we will see at the end of the show.
Do Bojack and Diane really meet one last time at Princess Carolyn’s wedding?
And here comes the emptiness. Bojack Horseman’s ending feels incomplete, lacking a proper television-fashioned closure. An open and unfinished finale. We don’t get to have a proper resolution, we don’t get to—
Bullshit.
The essence of the show is exactly there, in front of our eyes. That awkward, anticlimactic and anti-television silence. Bojack and Diane are embarrassed, and after all they went through there is nothing else to say. So they simply leave us that way, with that sense of emptiness and awkwardness typical of a real-life big talk.
A void that leaves us whole, in a certain way.
