Welcome to What Horse Is He Right Now Dot Com, a collection of stories by The Dot and Line about BoJack Horseman Season 5. Spoilers for Season 5 follow.
“…My life is a mess right now, and I compulsively take care of other people when I don’t know how to take care of myself.”
This quote from Princess Carolyn in Season 2, Episode 12, not only sums up PC’s main struggle throughout the series — and is relatable as hell for many of us. I mean, who hasn’t tried to escape their own problems by trying to fix those of their family and friends?
PC is one of the few competent, functional characters on the show, and her compulsive caretaking plays into that. It’s not an entirely selfless trait — she is an agent-turned-manager-turned-producer, after all, and her own success depends on the success of her clients and projects. She gives her job, which consists of managing occasionally unmanageable entertainers, everything she has — often to the detriment of her personal life.
If you’ve known anyone who’s worked as an agent or in talent management, you know that it can be very easy for the job to consume your life without the right amount of balance. This isn’t unique to careers in representation, but in the entertainment industry, the lines between the personal and professional can get pretty blurry. Of course, the talent-rep relationship isn’t inherently one-sided — when the client succeeds, so does the rep — but the amount of emotional labor involved in maintaining that relationship can get to be a bit much.
When it comes to Princess Carolyn’s relationship with BoJack Horseman, the line between the personal and professional doesn’t really exist. They’ve been sleeping together on and off for almost all of PC’s career, and PC has spent the entirety of the series cleaning up his messes. But in Season 5, Episode 5, we really see just how codependent PC’s relationship with BoJack really is, and how she’s struggled with codependency since she was a kitten.
In this episode, PC returns to her North Carolina hometown to meet the mother of a baby she hopes to adopt. While there, she reflects on her childhood growing up with an alcoholic mother in an apartment above the garage of the wealthy family she worked for. She loved movies (despite only owning one video tape of an Amelia Earhart biopic) and dreamt of going to college in Los Angeles. As her mother’s drinking problem grew worse and her siblings bailed, she found herself stuck with the responsibility of making sure she and her mom didn’t lose everything.
One could argue that PC took care of her mom as a survival tactic, which is true: Without her mom’s job, they’d be out on the street. But her (many) siblings didn’t clearly didn’t feel the same way, and left what they recognized to be a toxic environment for presumably greener pastures. Additionally, PC doesn’t really do anything to get her mom to stop drinking. Instead, she does her mom’s job for her when she gets too drunk — and ends up “managing” her cute neighbor into a position as first-string quarterback while she’s at it. This checks off two of the six hallmarks of codependence, according to Psychology Today — an excessive and unhealthy tendency to rescue and take responsibility for other people, and a pattern of engaging in well-intentioned but ultimately unproductive unhealthy helping behaviors, such as enabling.
When PC gets pregnant, her mom sees her daughter’s predicament as an opportunity: she can marry rich, stay in North Carolina, and continue to take care of everyone around her. If this plan had gone through, it would’ve allowed her mom to sink further into her alcoholism and avoid responsibility, further enmeshing PC in an unhealthy relationship. Instead, PC has a miscarriage. While her mom initially guilts PC for losing the baby, she eventually comes around and allows her to go to UCLA — before begging her to stay as the plane is about to take off.
PC takes a huge step towards independence by leaving her mom and going to California — only to take a step back when she gets sucked into another codependent relationship with BoJack a few years later. Her relationship with BoJack looks a lot like her relationship with her mom: Though she encourages both of them to change, their problems are far beyond her ability to fix them. She works hard to make sure that they both still have jobs, both for her own survival and as a way to boost her self-esteem. And she is always there when they, or the people in their orbit, call.
In fact, this is ultimately what keeps the birth mother from trusting PC with her baby. After spending a few days with PC, she comes to see her as too focused on her own life to care for a child. In reality, she’s just busy taking care of someone else: BoJack. Every one of the many calls she takes during her trip is from someone in BoJack’s orbit, or from BoJack himself. The relationship has cost her nearly everything — romantic relationships, other clients, and now a potential baby — while it’s cost BoJack next to nothing. Despite its name, codependency is almost always one-sided, with one person putting a ton of energy into the other for little in return. Sure, she gets 10 percent of BoJack’s paychecks, but if we’re being honest, is that really worth it?
Any manager worth their neatly-embossed business cards would’ve dropped BoJack years ago, especially someone as prominent as Princess Carolyn. For her sake, we can hope that someone points her in the direction of a good therapist or support group. But for the sake of the show, maybe they shouldn’t.
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