Horseman Episode 10 Review

Featuring the social justice conspiracy.

09Index11

Why I watched it:

Welcome to the double digits. That means the horseman cometh.

Great, now I have to think of another horse pun for my bookends.

How it works:

Fast forward a few months and Bojack gets a movie made about him. And by him, I mean Mr. Peanut Butter, who Bojack is playing, as opposed to himself, who is being played by some guy with a fetish for unimaginative art. Diane is being played by some Australian cunt, and not herself, who happened to finish her book about Bojack and is shipping it off to the publishing house's Macintosh 128k, which has fantastic support for iOS devices.

It's a light story this time, in much smaller scope than the previous one (almost every scene takes place in Mr. Peanut Butter's house), and I didn't find it a spectacular or engrossing one. The movie, which teaches me to never watch Quincy Tarantula films, ends up being progressively worse and worse as it loses focus, eventually turning into a basket of snacks being shipped off to an unwilling population, a bit like fascism, or my comments on an independent games studio before they disable comments on their Neocities site.

Bojack has to contend with playing a progressively worse part in a progressively worse movie, as Todd is too stupid to realise he's ruining the entire production (same with Mr. Tarantula, whose fetish for asses ruins the set dressings), and has nobody to bitch to as everybody thinks he's crazy, except for that Australian cunt, who fake falls in bed with him as part of some twisted interpretation of Diane.

As the implication goes, she's in this episode, too. Bojack finally checks out the book, finds it reflects on him badly, Diane sends it to Buzzfeed, it gets popular, and Bojack fires her. Bojack goes all the way with his Zoey this episode, having to play the sane horse to a room full of Zeldas, who are not important seeing as the climax of this season already occured in episode 08 and it would be hard to top my personal favourite of episode 07. I could be wrong though.

What I felt:

I suppose I didn't make the plot seem very important. That's because I don't feel it is. Bojack hooks up and breaks up with somebody in the span of an episode, the whole book endeavour turns out as expected, the drama between Todd and Bojack is swiftly dumped without coming to a satisfying ending, Princess Caroline only gets three minutes of screen time (though the turtle was pretty cool), and what this episode establishes could have been established in the first three minutes of a better-paced one.

While this episode was fodder for comedy, I still feel that it conflicts with the dramatic storytelling of the series. Probably to its benefit, seeing as most of what this series is driving at could be established in half the time if they got a move on, and the other half would be filler between Mr. Peanut Butter and Bojack trying to show each other up (which would make a good mini-series).

It's hard to sum up what the overall message of these ten episodes are supposed to be. Don't be a dick? That's the first rule on almost every Internet forum you'll come across, so much so that fucking Wikimedia had it as a policy, until it got censored by the social justice conspiracy and was renamed to "don't be a jerk", which I find offensive to my nofap religion. Don't be a dick to your friends? I believe that's the moral of about nine billion anime, thanks. Don't make decisions that you know are bad and yet go through with anyway? Thanks for the hot tip, Quincy. Maybe next time you'll teach me to arrive on time to my appointments.

This may sound like my head is up my ass, though it might be rightfully so: am I too smart for this? Have I evolved as a human being to the point where everything that this show is trying to teach was stuff I already learned from experience, and that I find them so obvious that watching them is boring? It's not even a shitty moral like "piracy is bad", where you could talk about why it actually benefits everybody involved (though Lawrence Lessig did pretty well). These morals are solid dick, and should be expressed to everybody, and yet to somebody who's already learned them it's like jacking off for three hours. It stops being fun after the first five ten fifteen and the rest is redundant.

I asked Richard Stallman if he ever felt numb if he was reading something he already knew about, and he said all he felt was momentarily bored. Being knowledgeable about certain subjects, I have to agree - and the knowledge that Bojack Horseman is trying to teach me is boring. They are boring subjects that any man worth his maturity would have already learned about, and so perhaps us mature men are trying to eke some value out of its universally-welcome humour.

I'm having trouble talking about the morals, as expressed above, so maybe it's not trying to teach any more so that it's trying to show by example. Remember kids: don't be entitled to success, or you'll end up a miserable fifty-year-old horse past his prime. Don't be a scumbag who disrespects your family, or you'll end up in Boston in an abusive household. Above all else, don't feel entitled to your happiness. You earn that through mutual respect, amongst both yourself and others.

Think that last one was pretty good? Thanks, because I made it up myself. The show barely expands on that, because it's less interested in elaborating on these characters, and instead uses them to get charity laughs out of the audience. Any credibility we get from these characters is muddled because first and foremost, we're expected to laugh at them, and so anything we learn from them is taken with more salt than a Super Smash Brothers tournament.

And more astute readers will understand that I wrote in my episode 04 review about how half-assedly handing in a moral at the end of an episode detracts from the strengths of the show. Now that the morals aren't being appended but are instead passively applied, I have to add another criticism that the morals in general are really obvious, unless you're an inexperienced teenager or something.

Perhaps my affinity for episode 07 is because it didn't try to shoehorn in a moral. It just showcased the type of person you'll be like if you're being dishonest to yourself. It's a lesson that everyone can learn - don't play yourself, or all you'll end up is a player hater.

Yeah, kind of a silly way to put it, but it's still true.

What I learned:

Working for buzzfeed turned out to not be such a horrible choice if you have the opportunity to publish a horse-man's biography. So in this world, never.

The Implication - Froghand.

Today's page was updated on September 14, 2016!

The bookend pun is that there is no pun. I'm sorry. You lose.