Bojack Horseman Season 4 episode 11 (Time’s Arrow) Review

This is easily the best episode of Bojack Horseman so far. We find that Beatrice’s schizophrenic illness was the reason she calls Bojack “Henrietta” and calls a doll her baby (in “Stupid piece of S**t”). She experiences figments from her past and the episode makes us dive deep into those figments and through those figments, it lets us understand the cause of Beatrice’s cynicism and neglect towards her son, the rift between her and Bojack.

Beatrice is the unknowing narrator of the episode and its protagonist. We see the complete arc from a sweet curious kid who loved her doll as her baby to a mother that loathes her child.

We had already seen glimpses of Beatrice’s family as a happy and wealthy family that is the owner of the Sugarman Sugercube fortune. Here, we delve into the darkness in the family. Her father, Joseph Sugarman, despite his cheery demeanor, had a weak conscience, almost to the point of sociopathy. He was extremely misogynistic and chided her mother, Honey Sugarman and her for their “womanly emotions”. After the loss of her son Crackjack, Honey went into a long never-ending spell of sobs and tears. Joseph got her lobotomized because, as he so nonchalantly said, did not know how to handle womanly emotions. This left Honey as walking dead flesh.

But the most harrowing event in Beatrice’s life (one that received the most callbacks in this and the earlier episodes) was when Joseph burned all her stuff including her doll. This was perhaps the seed of all the things to come.

Beatrice developed contempt towards her father and adopted a rebel stance on her father and aristocracy in general. She had sex with a common-man aspiring writer, Butterscotch mostly because “her father would not approve of it”, and got pregnant.

The harrowing image of her doll burning stood in the way of her getting an abortion. Married to Butterscotch, she always regretted the decision and felt that her son, Bojack, “was not worth it”. Both Beatrice and Butterscotch considered their son (and their marriage) as the cause of terrible sacrifices in their new lives. Butterscotch had extramarital affair with their maid and got her pregnant.

Beatrice could not let the maid make the same mistake that she made and forced the maid to give the child for adoption.

This is where we see an interesting parallel between Beatrice, her father and the maid. Just as Joseph had burned Beatrice’s doll, Beatrice is forcing the maid to let go of her child, closing Beatrice’s arc of life in terrible irony. Born out of contempt of her father, Beatrice has become her father.

I liked how the episode forced attention to certain characters by explicitly drawing blank faces on others. Particularly interesting was masking the maid’s face with a shaking overlay of scribbles. Initially I thought that was just another way to reduce the background. But it was the moment when Beatrice did not let the maid have her own kid, that I found a different purpose for the mask.

What the maid was before the incident does not matter. It is perhaps this incident that will redefine her personality and might eventually turn her into the same cynical personality as the old Beatrice. It was quite ingenious of the show to show Joseph and the maid as similar to Beatrice at different ends of her arc.

Episode also shows Bojack as having a similar childhood as his mother, with a dysfunctional family. And we see him turning into his mother.

Episode ends on a slightly better note. Bojack lets his mother enjoy a happy delusion, as if, he has finally forgiven her and accepted her as his mother.