With the start of the new year, I started watching a new show. Or rather, an old one, it’s just new to me. Bojack Horseman premiered in 2014, almost a decade ago, yet I’m just now discovering its greatness. There is a lot to love about the series that combines subtle humorous moments with a rather tragic overarching story of a horse desperately searching for happiness in life.
However, today I want to talk about one particular episode, that hit me different. “Fish out of Water” is the fourth episode of season three. Plotwise it might not be the most crucial episode, since not a lot happens. Bojack has to travel to an underwater city to promote his new movie that premieres at a film festival. He gets distressed when he learns that the director with whom he started to movie first, but then got fired is also on the same festival. He tries to avoid her first, then tries to tell her sorry. But he gets side-tracked by a seahorse birth and later by his quest to bring one of the lost seahorse babies back to his dad. At the end, as it is often the case with Bojack, he fails to deliver his apology to the director.
Narratively speaking it’s not a very special episode. Yet what I find so alluring of it, is the style it’s written in. You see, since it’s underwater, Bojack has to wear a diving bowl on his head. Which is established to prevent him from speaking. All you hear throughout the most of the episode is the gibberish of the fish language and music. There is no real dialogue. The storytelling happens completely visual with musical support.
The music of Jesse Novak is insane in this episode. As soon as Bojack enters the underwater world calm, soothing, I wanna say jazzy music kicks in, almost adding some meditative feeling to the experience. Yet the tracks adapt to the situations in the episode. Some of them represent the locations, like mechanical sounds in a factory or lounge music in the hotel lobby. Other tracks seem to represent accentuate Bojack’s mood, like when he gets scared whenever he comes across the director or when he gets stressed out at the seahorse birth. The composition of sounds also is perfectly synchronized with the visuals creating a soothing and calming experience for the watcher.
Now such a different approach is already great for a TV show to attempt. But what’s even greater is the style is intertwined with the message of the story. There is a short joke at the beginning, when Bojack arrives in his hotel room. He gets reminded that his old director is also at the festival, so he immediately reaches for his alcohol. But he can’t drink it because of his helmet. Then he reaches again for a cigarette, which of course doesn’t work underwater at all. Towards the end of the episode, when Bojack arrives at the afterparty of his movie’s premiere, he gets handed nicotine patches which he quickly plasters all over his arm, and an alcohol-cone, which he’s supposed to stick up his butt to get drunk. Immediately he returns to his former addicted self.
Luckily, I’m not dependent on alcohol, nicotine or other drugs, but I do know the desire to escape reality, which I satisfy with screentime, a.k.a. games or movies or just useless stupid Youtube videos. They act as a distraction from the difficulties of life and often one gets lost in these distractions and doesn’t bother to deal with life’s issues. We seek white noise to drown out the silence within us. This Episode “Fish out of Water” is a moment of clarity. The white noise is gone, the distractions away and we, Bojack and us, are forced to deal with our life. There is also this scene where Bojack takes a couple of tries to write an apology to the former director, but all his attempts are quite bad. Later in the episode, when the moment of clarity took long enough, he starts the final version with “In this terrifying world all we have are the connections we make.” In that brief moment, before he finally gets access to drugs again, he finds out what is important to him.
To end this article on a higher note let me point out some other stuff I love in this episode, although, these points are apparent in the rest of the series also. There is always something going on in the background. Most of the jokes I genuinely have to laugh at are quite easily missable. There are always the “worldbuilding” jokes, that point out the absurdity of a world where humanoid animals live. For example, in the bus in the underwater world, the fish hold on to fishing hooks. Or there is also the whole “thumbs up”-sidestory. In a phone call at the beginning of the episode his Oscar-agent asks Bojack if he knew what the thumbs-up to the fish means. Later Bojack gives some reporters the thumbs up. Then we see some of the people Bojack means angrily showing him the thumbs up. One time in the background on a television they are talking about Bojack giving the thumbs up. Another time he even is on a cover of a newspaper with a thumbs up. It never really gets resolved in the episode, but it’s just a very consistent running gag. Lastly, some efficient storytelling: An episode before “A Fish out of Water”, we hear that Mr. Peanutbutter makes an advertisement for milk for seahorse babies, without knowing what it is. It’s played as a joke. At the beginning of this episode, Bojack notices the ad on TV – it’s a joke again. But then, when he’s got to take care of the seahorse baby he remembers the ad, to which he paid attention, because Mr. Peanutbutter is in it, and knows what to give the baby. It’s still a joke, but it also serves a purpose to advance the plot, which is just delightful.
Title Image by Kalen Chock