How Bojack’s Epic Jerk-Off Saved the Series: “Bojack Hates the Troops” Review

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Is Neal McBeal the navy seal a hero because he was given a weapon and trained to kill? The government would say yes, but a more alarmist view would be to call him the product of the kill bot factory bang bang. One who runs solely on muffins, orphan tears, and pure unbridled spite. So, it's up to our hometown homie BoJack 17 is legal in New Mexico horseman to step up and suplex the salty serviceman. And all the while Diane is desperately still trying to write Booboo's memoir and Todd is getting giga hacked by Japanese panty scammers, which is exactly what happened to me.

[00:00:33]And why I have to keep rolling the dice on this digital slot machine that we call YouTube. I specifically didn't ask and I'll thank you to respect my total lack of interest in your personal life.

[00:00:43]Ugh, that intro got a little too real.

[00:00:45]How about we start fresh, huh? Clean slate. After suffering through the disastrous half abortion that was the pilot episode, the fate of the BoJack Horseman show was going to be determined by how delectable the afterbirth of the second episode was. Were we going to see the series stick with the same bland, uninspired, auto-generated feeling scripts or could they pull these characters out of the fire and thrust them into soothing storylines before we saw them become charred husks that we all come to resent? Well, as it turns out, this second venture doesn't taste like burning at all, but instead sweet, sweet muffin tops. Ones that are made all the sweeter because they were stolen from a huge crybaby, one who got so mad about his weak ass dibs not being respected that he actually went all the way to a major news outlet to air his meaningless BoJack Horseman, from the '90s sitcom Horsin' Around, refused to respect my dibs. Have you no shame, BoJack Horseman, seen here sneezing at a Christmas party? Neal McBeal is really the equivalent of like a Tompa figure from Hunter Hunter or Snaz from Berserk or Jar Jar Binks. Just someone who is so inconsequential and powerless compared to future bad guys that it then becomes like funny to hype them up like they're some sort of big secret mastermind behind the real villains. Perhaps that reveals something truly wistful and inspirational about human beings that we, the little people who are also pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things and society, that we can look at guys like Neal, these pathetic losers, and say to ourselves, "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if one of us, the nobodies, was actually secretly really important?" Maybe that's the real reason why Neal gets so heated about the muffins thing because BoJack is one of the elites, the upper crust, a celebrity, the spiders. He's a Sith lord. He's Organization XIII. He's part of the God Hand themselves. Ah, the people who actually have influence over the world in a way that we can only dream of. When pitted against such an avatar of social power, someone who holds sway in ways that we can barely even imagine, who wouldn't say to themselves, "Get your damn hoof hands off my muffins.

[00:02:47]Don't you already have enough already?

[00:02:48]Why do you have to take this from me?

[00:02:50]Come on."

[00:02:51]>> BoJack Horseman thinks that because he was on TV, that makes him better than everybody. Well, guess what, BoJack? Now I'm on TV. So, now I'm better than everybody.

[00:02:59]>> That's right, Neal.

[00:03:01]>> It's all fun and games pretending to be crazy until you run into someone pretending to be sane. Despite my half-joking attempts to get us to sympathize a little bit with Neal, the reason why this episode is so fun is because he is such a raging [ __ ] that it is easy to get drawn onto BoJack's side and want to see Neal get completely curb-stomped. It's extremely engaging material because we can all relate to dealing with a jerk-ass general public at one point in our lives where someone got like surprisingly heated over a very minor conflict that really didn't need to explode in the way that it did. If you've never gotten into a fistfight with an octogenarian semi-orangutan man over a Bowser amiibo in Toys "R" Us or gotten wrist-deep into some bitch's perm and spun her around like a Beyblade because she cut in front of you at Sephora and you had to let that [ __ ] rip, then you don't know the struggle of being a 21st century schizoid man. This is fundamental caveman tribalism [ __ ] here. You tried to steal my delicious pig testicles and now I got to make you resticle in a receptacle. We're really tapping into the animalistic side of our brains, ironically for a show all about animal-human people, that scream at us to kill one another over resources even though there's already enough to go around for everybody and the illusion of scarcity is just in place to keep you showing up to that 9-to-5, Steven. Even better, this problem eventually necromorphs into a larger conversation about whether a person should receive special treatment just because they happen to have served in the military, which masterfully and naturally blends a petty personal dispute into a huge like systemic debate over the general public's conduct. This gives BoJack a concrete and very importantly an external rival to butt heads with, someone who allows him to get into like passionate and explosive rants instead of the nothing burger book project that he was successfully avoiding in the pilot. This is the difference between watching someone procrastinate in their room by flicking boogers at the ceiling versus seeing a city council meeting devolve into a WorldStar video.

[00:04:53]WorldStar! WorldStar! Jerry! Jerry!

[00:04:58]This story format doesn't allow BoJack to just lean back and take on a more passive role, but instead forces him to actually take active steps to do some damage control. Best of all, there's an awesome extra factor going on here that I was totally unaware of until it was recently pointed out by the channel Late Night Saturday Morning, which is a great channel, by the way, go check it out.

[00:05:18]There's some very smart rhetorical work being done over there about all different kinds of shows. Big fan of what they're doing over there. Uh, but the thing that they recently pointed out was that both Neal and BoJack are pridefully doubling down in their positions with each man exhibiting the same level of stiff-neck pettiness that honestly would still work even if their positions were reversed. Had BoJack been the one to put the muffins down to go to the bathroom really quick, only to come back and see that someone had taken them, then he certainly would have tried to leverage his celebrity status to get his way and get the muffins back as Neal tries to do with his service record here. They're essentially two sides of the same coin, only BoJack happens to be on the right side this time where the audience can understand his logic more than Neal's. As was also pointed out by Late Night Saturday Morning, it's fascinating to see that BoJack isn't going to be the kind of flawed main character that is always in the wrong.

[00:06:07]Sometimes his thought process, as messed up as it can be, does occasionally line up with more common sense perspectives, which is far more engaging for the audience because we can't just recline into the easy stance of knowing that he's always going to be wrong. Haha, he's the flawed one in every scenario, so it just becomes easy to dismiss what he's saying. But no, actually there can be times where he is surprisingly intelligent and insightful, meaning that we aren't permitted to just like, "Oh, shake our fists at him every time he's on screen. Grr, I hate him. He's always wrong.

[00:06:35]But instead we have to weigh the individual scenes within their own context, which is a task that the brilliant enjoy and the lazy lament. Do you think Israel has a right to defend herself?

[00:06:46]>> Uh >> And what part should the US play as an ally?

[00:06:49]Ugh.

[00:06:51]Uh It's a shame that Arafat walked away from the table in 2000. I mean, obviously there's no panacea, but a two-state solution with an emphasis on human rights feels like a place to begin. That's still a pretty big nothing burger of an answer, one that sidesteps the question and definitely wouldn't be satisfactory in the current age where things have escalated from oppression to outright genocide, but it does show that BoJack is capable of being like mildly aware of global events and he knows how to zero in on the human interest side of things where nobody could really argue against him that a focus on humanitarian aid would be a bad thing. It's a far more nuanced take from him than you might expect where I would imagine him saying something like, "Well, I'm a 1,200 lb drunk that wakes up at 5:00 p.m. and you're asking me how to resolve the freaking Palestinian crisis?

[00:07:33]>> [laughter] >> That's too much, man." Thinking about a little bit more, BoJack is really like a weird hybrid of like Frasier Crane, Al Bundy, and a dash of Walter White where he is like prideful and stubborn enough to get into big problems that could be solved with a simple apology, but he is also too slovenly to just take the easy path and say I'm sorry and instead ironically goes his own way that ends up being far more trouble than it's worth.

[00:07:55]And I mentioned Mr. White because much like Walt, we are kept so close to BoJack's perspective that your like first watch of the series will have you looking at the events of the series through his eyes alone versus when you rewatch the show and are able to evaluate his decision-making abilities with like a more godlike omniscience and be able to identify where his small bad choices like explode into big ones and aren't simply as like cut and dry as they first seemed. But even with all that grim foreknowledge on hand, enough to fill a dire 17 minutes of painful reflection, it would be too reductionist to say that BoJack was always a vile person or that he didn't occasionally do a good or even noble thing. This is really that most haunting of realizations, ones that we don't know how to like properly contextualize, that someone who does outright evil or horrific things time and time again and hurts people or even gets people killed can still exhibit traits that we would otherwise value in others or even ourselves. But we're not quite there yet in our discussion as this second episode still has us firmly in BoJack's camp where the worst thing we can say about him is that he's somehow ate all those muffins in a single setting. Doggy doggy, what now? Yeah, there were exactly 12. I ate 12 muffins and I didn't even want one. There's your goddamn news story. Anybody who has ever been lazily eating through those Utz's cheese balls in that big container while rewatching Exorcist III for the 15th time, only to discover in horror that the container is suddenly halfway empty, will have felt the same sucking feeling of shame of having like heedlessly indulged in something so unhealthy.

[00:09:26]How's that for a view from halfway down, [ __ ] I may not know what it's like to be at the center of a media circus, but we have all been saturated in fat at one time or another to our dismay or pleasure. And it's because this second episode focuses on these more familiar petty disputes and subtle signs of depression that it makes it feel so much more potent than the lackluster pilot that actually a surprising amount of people in my comments said they really liked. And don't get me wrong, I still feel like there's some lingering issues with the side characters in the second story who get virtually nothing to do in the whole thing, but this feels more excusable here because the BoJack plot line is so energetic and takes up so much emotional like real estate that Todd and Diane taking a backseat to everything feels perfectly fine. Who cares? They're they're good. And Mr. Peanutbutter, hallelujah and praise Jesus, has completely turned away from his initial snarky butthole portrayal, instead becoming someone who is chasing after a goal that he barely has a handle on. What a goof. We are calling it Peanutbutter and Jelly. Get it?

[00:10:26]Because I'm Mr. Peanutbutter. It's wordplay. You may have too forgiving a definition of the word wordplay.

[00:10:31]>> Well, it's a working title.

[00:10:32]>> Well, it could be working harder. And that's wordplay. The whole Peanutbutter and Jelly TV idea that he has has a super cute payoff where he just so happens to meet up with someone named Jelly and gets all excited about it. Oh my goodness, realizing that he's walked into the perfect setup that he's been like dreaming to find.

[00:10:48]>> Well, my real name's Angela, but my friends call me Jelly. What? Oh my god.

[00:10:53]Did we get that? Please tell me we got that. Oh my god, yes. That's so much better. Thank you. There is no feeling of him being like a mean tease or that he's only interested in himself. He's actually coming off as a guy who has survived like wholly off of his incredible dumb luck. That's exactly how you need to write him. Wow, beautiful.

[00:11:12]And that's actually kind of sad for a dude in his early to mid-50s who seems have had everything handed to him on a golden platter without him needing to develop his personage beyond that of like the mindset of a 23-year-old. No wonder he eventually becomes the face of depression because the poor guy can't handle anything more complicated than just signing papers that someone puts in front of him. Everyone just tells him to do all these little tricks. Oh, cry.

[00:11:35]Host this TV show. Run for governor. And frack me like one of your French girls.

[00:11:39]Uh. Frack me, Mr. Peanutbutter.

[00:11:42]Frack me.

[00:11:44]She's dead. I suppose, like all pampered pets out there, P Doggy Dog has lost the ability to survive on his own and is entirely relying on the unconditional love and affection that the universe just showers upon him, which is a theme that we're starting to see come into focus when the perfect setup for his show just happens to land right in his lap. To counterbalance this, BoJack bumbles into an inherently hostile problem, one where a show of ego causes an explosion of pettiness, creating two sides that absolutely refuse to budge or negotiate. And like all great debates, neither side of this argument feels wholly in the wrong. Do people who've served in the military deserve respect and certain societal perks? Sure, why not? They had to sit in a nuclear submarine with their finger over the button waiting to blow up the world for 10 months. Give them five bucks off admission to Disneyland. [ __ ] it, who cares? But is everybody who's been in the military a hero and should be regarded as something a bit better than the rest of us? Well, without wanting to get too grim, we've got people like Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman who got up to truly horrific like Cannibal Holocaust level [ __ ] in Baghdad back in the early 2000s. So, trusting that members of the US military are always the good guys and did nothing wrong isn't something that we should necessarily do. And we could hand-wave these away and say, "Eh, just a few bad muffins shouldn't spoil the pack." But the fact that there are such cases out there demonstrates that certain awful people, even if they are extremely rare ones, do exist, proving that unquestioning faith in the military is an extremely flawed notion. I am not deeply ambivalent about a seemingly mandated celebration of our military by a nation that claims to value peace, telling our children that violence [music] is never the answer while refusing to hold our own government to the same standard. Anyway, how is your sex life? For me, I've just been around the block too many times and seen people from all walks of life do horrible things, so it doesn't matter to me what your job is. Be that firefighter, clergyman, teacher, New York financier, cannibal cartoonist, whatever. Everybody has the capacity to do evil and granting someone the like intrinsic belief that they're a wonderful person just because of their career path is utter nonsense.

[00:13:49]And for Neal McBeal, the fact that he was willing to escalate this minor conflict into a national news story, especially since BoJack obviously didn't have a clue what Neal's job even was since he wasn't even in his dress uniform at the grocery store, reveals a disturbing level of spitefulness that is perfect for this kind of story. The societal pressure placed on BoJack to humble himself by apologizing and admitting that he was wrong confused as to why the [ __ ] a box of muffins would be on an apple pie and that Neal is in fact a hero, that feels unfair to us, the viewers, because we've been made aware of how trite the original conflict was. But to the people in universe who are just seeing the headline that a washed-up celebrity horseface stole a delicious treat from someone in the military. Oh my god. That creates a media frenzy that is so easy to get swept up in and is so delightful to watch. BoJack Horseman makes me sick. He voiced his opinion even though it was unpopular, and that's the most cowardly thing a person could do. After we made love, he covered himself in sheets like an Arab. Oh my god. Woo, that is so out of pocket. That quick little nasty swipe at the Middle East is such a product of its time. My god. Can you imagine what it was like living back then to have America stuck in what like felt like a never-ending conflict in the Middle East without any clue of how to get our collective dick out of the piano wire?

[00:15:06]Thank god we're all past that now. And real quick, I feel that that hit it and quit it girl specifically is really important for us to focus on because I feel that she perfectly embodies how much of the general public views BoJack at this point in time. She is well aware that he's a washed-up has-been from the '90s and even goes so far as to call her friends, her nasty little friends, to point and laugh at him. Haha. [laughter] But once she like engages with him on a person-to-person level, we see that there's still enough of like a weird charm around him that they end up sleeping together.

[00:15:37]>> [snorts] >> Gee, it sure is boring around here. My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for. I just [music] wonder what Gannon's up to. Not into the pit. It Despite all the horrible things that we will eventually learn about BoJack's past and his poor decision-making abilities, it is important for us to recognize that he really isn't similar to other depressed characters that we see on TV like Bill from King of the Hill, Squidward, or Dr. House. I mean, let's really think about this. Mr. Horseman is able-bodied, wealthy, is able to charm people into sleeping with him at like the drop of a hat, has several deeply loyal friends that are willing to look past his harsh and selfish attitude, and he still maintains a decent celebrity status where people on the street still come up to him and ask like, "Hey, aren't you the horse from Horsin' Around?" I think it's easy for us to understand depression and personal anguish when it comes from like a tangible source, be that poverty, an inability to get dates, a dead-end career, physical trauma, or just like a lack of friends who actually care about you. There's a natural logic to being unhappy when those factors are screwing with you, but what does a body do if none of those problems are holding you back, but you still feel like a piece of [ __ ] all the same? How can you dare to feel sad living in heaven when there are people who are able to find joy living in hell? Wouldn't that feel like the most selfish thing that you could ever do? What the [ __ ] wrong with you? Why do you feel bad? Just feel better, stupid. And that's the truly horrible thing about depression. It rarely matters how good our lives actually are because we all know that there's someone out there who has it worse than us, so like turning a mental illness into the misery Olympics only deepens a person's sense of isolation and discourages us from seeking help because it's like you start to think to yourself, "How can I cry when there's people out there who have so much less than I do? How can I like afford to feel bad when technically I shouldn't?" Which then makes me feel even worse that I'm feeling bad because I know I shouldn't. However, even then, BoJack isn't just someone who needs to get some outside help and then there you go, everything's fixed. There does need to be a strong enough like desire from within him to change his own actions and his perspectives on things, and that's what the show is busy exploring. Does he have enough willpower to truly change?

[00:17:43]Following someone with seemingly so few external problems means that, as Diane pointed out in the first episode, BoJack is entirely responsible for his own happiness or misery. And oh, sure, there are definitely things in his childhood that screwed up his mindset, but that's too easy of an answer that oversimplifies the issue. There are countless millions of people out there who've had traumatic, awful things happen to them as children, but they still grew up to be good people. And there's also folks out there who've had like truly blessed lives that turned out to be awful. I don't believe that there's any one broad stroke rule that tells us definitively how someone's going to turn out, meaning that every person comes with their own unique mix of personal responsibilities and contextual history or baggage that made them who they are today, which is something that BoJack as a show deals with quite a lot. And I think that's a very frightening thing for us to deal with because our brains naturally try to see patterns in things, so we try to draw connection between like, "Oh, you have a shitty childhood, so that means you grew up to be a shitty adult." But the longer that you live, the more you understand that general trends mean very little when you're dealing with a single individual because you can't just apply like a huge sample size of data down to just one person. For example, BoJack's mother makes her first appearance in this story through a very well-utilized flashback, and she is initially presented as like, "Oh, a jaded, unfeeling, resentful figure." One who perfectly embodies like the sort of hostile environment that little Jack Bo grew up in. Here's your omelet. I'm sorry it's not as good as the omelets your secretary makes, but then you're not married to your secretary, are you?

[00:19:11]>> Well, maybe if my secretary also refused to get an abortion, I would be.

[00:19:16]Mommy, can I have an omelet? You're the birthday boy. Oh my god, she's so toxic, but I don't care. Can I just say how much I adore the energy that Wendie Malick brings to the Beatrice role? She is so beautifully snarky and catty that you just hang on her every word, ready to hear what kind of new and creative insult that she's got locked and loaded.

[00:19:37]Like with most sitcoms, we're initially seeing her as a very like archetypal character, the uncaring mother who holds a great deal of resentment for her unwanted child, but as we'll come to see, even someone as seemingly flat and like easy to understand as her actually has a tremendous amount of like her own issues that she's been dealing with throughout her whole lifetime. Issues that don't excuse how she treated her son, but do demonstrate to us how her mindset came to be. We're initially only given the super fast and shallow look at the Horseman history, meaning that in just the span of a few seconds we've already solidified the basics of Jacko's parents, especially his father who has a scene that is both like wonderfully nasty and so overblown that it becomes too goofy for us to take seriously. You take a boat from here to New York.

[00:20:20]You're going to go around the horn like a gentleman or cut through the Panama Canal like some kind of Democrat? Um, the canal? You go around the horn the way God intended.

[00:20:30]With these fundamental facts established, the show can later challenge our presumptions and do a deeper dive into how there is a greater sense of nuance to these people beyond what we're just initially shown. Well, okay, aside from BoJack's dad who remains a pretty big piece of [ __ ] in every version of him that we get to see, but uh I'm sure he's got a tragic backstory, too. We just didn't get to see it because the [ __ ] you. My point is up until this stage in his life BoJack has been living in a state of suspended animation, arrested development if you will, where he can [ __ ] our wives and drink our blood because he didn't do anything meaningful after Horsin' Around, leaving him chasing trite pleasures and without anything meaningful to strive for. So, why shouldn't he just get into a stupid argument with a guy like Neal, someone who doesn't matter and is so obviously in the wrong that doing an epic dunk on him is just another minor thrill along the road to the grave. But as BoJack is about to discover, his tragic passive years are over. Much as he underestimated the stink that Neal would kick up, there are now people in his life, Todd and Diane specifically, that are not going to let him stay in this heavenly purgatory, which is why the events of the show begin with him trying to write his memoirs and with him meeting Diane. This is because Todd and Carolyn are quite unlike Mr. Peanutbutter and Princess Carolyn, who have been extremely passive and permissive friends who don't actually try to complicate or challenge BoJack's status quo. And this is because they themselves really benefit from BoJack living in stasis. Princess Carolyn is allowed to maintain the very faint hope that BoJack will eventually age out of his apathy and discover that he actually does love her. Oh my god, surprise, surprise. Deep down she knows that he doesn't feel that way, but hope is the most powerful driving force in the world, something that makes us believe that the impossible can actually come true even if it's extremely unlikely.

[00:22:17]And uh brief note before we keep moving on, if I had one criticism about this episode, it's that the gag with Princess Carolyn's like hold music gets real old real fast, just like her ovaries. When you're walking alone, because jellicles are angelicals, too. Jellicles too. When you're walking alone, because jellicles are angelicals, too.

[00:22:48]BoJack. I actually had no freaking idea what the heck a jellicle even was supposed to be and just assumed it was the like breed of cat that Princess Carolyn is, but actually she's a female Persian and jellicles are the name of the fictional cats from the Cats musical, which is uh eh pretty low-hanging fruit as far as cat jokes go. And yes, I suppose all the animal humor in here is going to feel that way to some degree, you know, slightly obvious and indulgently referential. You get it? BoJack has apples on his pajamas because horses sure love apples, woo.

[00:23:18]But there's being like cutesy-poo with it and then there's just being annoying and this phone gag definitely falls into the latter category because it happens like three times and it just really starts to feel obnoxious. That's one of those intentionally annoying joke formulas that you typically want to avoid as a writer unless you're like trying to purposely fill time, which you really shouldn't need to do if your plot is smartly paced. But moving beyond that whole discussion, Mr. Peanutbutter also refuses to push against BoJack because Mr. Mister lives in a big fantasy world where just everything works out for him every time, so his friend having these big emotional problems doesn't really matter because he knows that they'll reach a happy ending eventually, so who cares about the conflicts of right now when it'll just like all work out in the end? How do I care about it when I know the conclusion already? Who cares about the struggles that we're having right now? They don't matter. But I realized something today when my brother called from the hospital and I think it's going to make you feel a lot better.

[00:24:10]>> What? What is it? None of this matters.

[00:24:14]Okay, I'll see you later, buddy.

[00:24:18]This is one of those classic textbook nihilistic viewpoints where you're able to wash away your sense of personal responsibility to others because you just go eh everybody's going to die eventually, so why bother feeling bad at all? No one's going to remember this in 200 years, which might be liberating for some, but it does have the risk of making it so that you turn away from anyone and anything that makes you feel bad or challenges you in any way because those downer factors are taking up your precious limited time on Earth, so you think that anything that doesn't make you feel good should just be immediately left behind. We don't often get to see characters who exhibit this level of toxic positivity, but Mr. Peanutbutter is a great example of it because he lacks the emotional tools to deal with anything truly challenging or upsetting, relying wholly on his can-do attitude to carry the day, which to be fair, it often does, but when it doesn't, he either gets like super frustrated or pretends that there isn't a problem at all, which is kind of what he's been doing with BoJack. However, with the appearance of Todd and Diane, these are people who are naturally hostile to a flawed status quo and who are trying to seek out greater degrees of personal satisfaction in their lives and aren't just going to leave their friend to slowly decay into nothingness. Todd himself is actually a really weird victim of BoJack's sucking apathy as the very next episode tells us that he's been living on BoJack's couch for five freaking years and when it looks like Todd might finally actually start to move on to bigger and better things with his life, BoJack then sabotages him in order to preserve that same sort of stagnation because misery really loves company. On a similar note, uh I actually recently rewatched Shaun of the Dead of all things, which is currently free on YouTube, by the way, so definitely go check it out after this video and after this ad break, blur, jump scare, uh uh.

[00:25:56]>> [laughter] >> Uh but I actually never appreciated how Shaun and Ed's relationship is very similar to something we might see in BoJack Horseman, where one of them is like too stupid or lazy to actually do anything important with his life and the other friend just enjoys being with someone who doesn't try to push him out of his comfort zone. It literally takes something as extreme and violent as a zombie freaking apocalypse to finally like shock Shaun awake and make him come alive and actually become a more complete person and I thought there was something surprisingly and supremely profound in that message. And in a very real way, Diane herself kind of serves as BoJack's zombie outbreak because she takes on the role of a judge, a lifetime accounting for BoJack. She is a person who is smart enough to look at the events of his life with an objective eye and either condemn him for being terrible or offer him the sweet release of knowing that all the things that are wrong with him aren't actually his fault. Perhaps the most important exchange of the entire first season or maybe even the whole series comes when BoJack finds her alone on the roof with only the uncaring stars looking down upon them. You're not going to make me look like an [ __ ] are you? I don't know. Are you an [ __ ] And that right there, folks, that is the name of the game. Is BoJack Horseman an [ __ ] And if so, is there anything that he can do to change or make up for it? Is hope for a better future still possible at this late point in his life or has he sunken so far that nothing he does even matters because he's already messed things up so bad that there is no hope for a Red Dead Redemption. Get it?

[00:27:25]Cuz it's a game with horses in it. To serve as a somewhat ironic answer to this, the conflict with Neal ends with BoJack giving a genuine apology that he really does feel, but one that becomes entangled with a larger rant, which itself then gets overlooked because of something really silly happening. Where am I? Can someone tell me where I am?

[00:27:43]>> Hey, where'd he get that bucket from?

[00:27:45]Who gave him a bucket?

[00:27:48]>> [laughter] >> Yes, sir. For as much as we can gnash our teeth about morality and personal responsibility and how other people see us, there does come a point where the absurdity of life and the inevitability of death kind of renders all of that moot. This is likely why BoJack drinks so much and drives people away and does drugs and prefers to live in the unchallenging world of Horsin' Around that he can put on a loop and that he knows all the answers to and that he's seen before and so he knows that everything's going to work out. That's so much better than the real world because there's too much stuff like within him and in his personal life and in his past that he needs to work through and why bother doing all of that when you can instead retreat into yourself and fall into a numbing cocoon and embrace a different kind of slow death. Well, most of us don't fall into that nihilistic self-destructive attitude because we're also accountable to other people who both make life worth living and who can make us feel totally miserable if we hurt that relationship.

[00:28:40]That's the risks we take on being social animals and why self-improvement is so important, not just for our own sake and our own mental health, but so that we can help other people and then be helped in turn. We're talking about community here, folks. That's really what's at the heart of this show, community and friends and enemies and all that stuff.

[00:28:58]It is the people that we share our lives with and how we hurt and help each other. People like Neal McBeal the Navy SEAL will hate us for minor slights against their person. People like Princess Carolyn will love us unconditionally even if we fall below their expectations, but then there's friends like Diane and Todd who will want to stand by us, but do have their limits. The answer to BoJack's fatal narcissism and apathy is for him to try to earn the love and respect of people who aren't going to automatically stand by him no matter what, but who also aren't just going to hate him no matter what the same way that his mom did, where even when he became rich and successful, it was never enough and she always just sort of like got on his case. There needs to be the hope of ascension, but the possibility of failure because otherwise there's no reason to grow at all if we already know how the story is going to end. And as we go through this series, we We see where those efforts go right, go wrong, and ultimately discuss whether the place we land is actually good or not. It is this second episode, BoJack Hates the Troops, that really made me start to fall in love with this show because it actually gave us a solid starting point for the whole cast, an organic problem that saw everybody involve themselves in the conflict with their own unique personalities, and was genuinely very funny and in ways that I rarely saw coming. Princess Carolyn was allowed to be supportive but still very business-like. Todd's incompetence made him immune to something that otherwise would be very bad for most people to get entangled with. Mr. Peanutbutter was a good boy. Diane's scenes were allowed to have a greater sense of weight to them that actually made her feel like the important character that she is. And BoJack himself was deliciously indulgent in all the right ways. But I ate the muffins. I know. We got another box.

[00:30:32]It's in the cupboard. Oh, you were saving those? I ate those, too. We've been here for 10 minutes! This was so much freaking better than the pilot. Oh my god. And in a manner that I am barely able to articulate, everything just clicked audibly into a place where the balance finally felt right and nothing felt unpleasant or tiresome. Well, besides that one thing.

[00:31:01]Sure, yes, I suppose if you want to be a stickler, the Todd stuff did feel a little bit random, but that was more goofy silly than deadly silly. Where him falling for a scam and the scam artist being really pissed off that he barely has any money, uh, that actually felt fun and more in line with what a guy in Todd's situation would do. I mean, he's bumming it BoJack's. He's looking for companionship. And he's doing it all in a Skype call with no pants on, just like how everyone does but is too afraid to admit it. For example, am I even wearing pants right now? Uh, that's between me and the empty containers of muffins stacked up like cardboard corpses that fill the dingy living space that I call an office. Oh, and a small rant before we go. But why the [ __ ] did Costco change their muffin structures, those stingy bastards? Uh, you used to get these giant diabetic-inducing pastries that were far too big and would go stale in just a few days before you had a chance to eat them all, but now they've been replaced by these little butler-looking polite boys that look like they're about to give me an audit.

[00:31:53]Uh, uh, what an awful, terrible change that is. It's this kind of shrinkflation that really annoys me. And dare I even say, those muffins make me prickly.

[00:32:05]>> [music] [music] >> Oh, god. Uh, I don't think there's an unsexier term for your crotch than prickly muffin.

[00:32:19]Jesus Christ, Sarah Lynn. What you doing, girl? Or rather, who you doing?

[00:32:24]Yuck. Uh, I guess we'll get to have that deeply uncomfortable conversation in the next video. God help me. But until then, we can say that this episode of BoJack Horseman, titled BoJack Hates the Troops, has indeed been reviewed to death. An enormous, goopy, pastry-flavored thank you has to go out to Hazel and Andrew M for being $20 Patreons and for encouraging me to keep doing these very fun videos. Another, but more reasonably proportioned muffin thank you goes out to Undermine Crimp, Dominic O, Obsidian Moon Fox, Marsha B, Valerie Vomit, and Mr. Seagull 16, all of whom would resist the temptation to go on TV over such a trite matter. And of course, I got to appreciate my $5 Patreons and YouTube channel members who got access to this video a week early.

[00:33:10]Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next review.

[00:33:18]Then I think you fell asleep on the keyboard because it just says the letter B 27 times. That does sound like me.