Secretariat Never Looked Back, But BoJack Horseman Did, Eventually

In the 2010s, there was a very famous TV show, which captured The AV Clubimagination for six seasons. As BoJack Horseman celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, we’ll be revisiting this captivating animated comedy with a series of essays and interviews. BoJack Horseman Week.

It started early, the feeling that something was wrong. In the first season of BoJack Horsemanwe learn that nine-year-old BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett) wrote a letter to his hero, the record-breaking, history-making racehorse Secretariat, and said, “Sometimes I get sad. What do you do when you’re sad? How can you not be sad?” Secretariat (John Krasinski) spoke to BoJack via television The Dick Cavett Showlooked into the camera and said, “BoJack, when I was your age, I was sad. A lot. I don’t come from a great family, but one day I started running, and it made sense to me, so I kept running.” An inspiring story: Find what you’re good at. Focus on it. Bring joy to as many people as you can. Channel the struggles into something better, something good, something you can be proud of.

But Secretariat isn’t done with his advice to BoJack. He continued: “BoJack, when you’re sad, you run straight ahead, and… and you keep running forward, no matter what. There are people in your life who are going to try to hold you back, slow you down, but you don’t let them. Don’t stop running and don’t ever look back. There’s nothing behind you for you. All there is is what’s in front of you.”

In real life, Secretariat wore a headgear that limited the horse’s view of what was behind him when he ran. He finished 31 lengths ahead in the 1973 Belmont Stakes. He also won the Triple Crown with victories in the Preakness Stakes and the Kentucky Derby. And then he never raced again.

Even without the benefit of hindsight, of knowing what BoJack would become as an adult with his alcoholism, his addictions, and his maddening inability to stop screwing up his own life, there’s still something odd about Secretariat’s response to BoJack’s letter. Secretariat’s words are classically evasive; he’s not advising BoJack to run toward his goals, but to run away from his problems and never look back on his mistakes. BoJack was always running from something. His family—his absent and mean father, his cruelly apathetic mother. His fear of failure. Himself. It’s no surprise that he’d be drawn to a hero whose talent was being the best at running. And it was almost inevitable that BoJack’s life would play out almost exactly like Secretariat’s.

The real Secretariat was retired after his 1973 season because he was more valuable as a breeding stock. In the warped world of BoJack HorsemanSecretariat committed suicide after his 1973 season, consumed by guilt over his brother’s death and despair at being banished from the one thing he was good at: running. He didn’t know what to do when he couldn’t run from his problems anymore, so he just… stopped. Running. Living.

BoJack, at least as an adult, was well aware of Secretariat’s flaws, but that didn’t stop him from idolizing him. He saw the moment when Secretariat made a deal with President Richard Nixon to send his brother, Jeffretariat, to fight in Vietnam in his place as Secretariat’s turning point. “The Nixon scene is the heart of the whole movie. You see Secretariat being morally corrupt and looking into the true darkness of his soul,” BoJack tells his girlfriend Wanda (Lisa Kudrow) in Season 2, as he finally lives out his dream of starring in a movie about his hero. BoJack believes he too has an inflection point, a moment when he was morally corrupted and the darkness of his soul finally began to surface: the moment he passively allowed network executive Angela Diaz (Anjelica Huston) to fire Herb Kazzaz (Stanley Tucci) from the network. Acting the fool. Years later, in Season 6, when Angela told him she wouldn’t have fired Herb if BoJack had fought for him, he said, “Every stupid decision I’ve ever made, every bad thing that’s ever happened to me, it all started because of you.” Later that night, BoJack broke into his old house, got drunk, swallowed a bunch of pills, and nearly drowned in the pool.

BoJack’s mother, Beatrice (Wendie Malick), had a different take on why her son became who he became. “I know you want to be happy, but you’re not going to be happy, and I’m sorry. It’s not just you, you know. Your dad and I, we… well, you get it honestly, the ugliness in you. You were born broken. It’s your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects — your books and your movies and your girlfriends, but it’s not going to make you whole. You’re Bojack Horseman. There’s no cure for that,” she said after Diane’s book about her life as a failed sitcom star was published, One-trick ponycame out. In his eyes, BoJack had no chance.

It’s hard to say whether Kelsey Jannings (Maria Bamford), the original director of the show’s Secretariat biopic, felt the same way about Secretariat. In the incident that got her fired from the film, she and BoJack sneak into the Nixon Library because they need a set in the Oval Office to finish a final shot of the Nixon scene that Lenny Turteltaub (J.K. Simmons) demanded they cut from the film. But BoJack thinks that if Lenny could see the power of what they were trying to do, the emotion of what they were trying to convey, he might just let them keep it. So it’s Kelsey and BoJack, alone on set, and she’s trying to make him cry. He’s holding an American flag, folded into a triangle, his eyes down at his lap. “We just told you your brother died and it’s your fault. But this moment is bigger than that.” This is the moment when Secretariat stops running. “That’s when you realize that something inside you is broken and it can never be fixed,” she says. Her phrasing is ambiguous; perhaps she means that this is the moment Secretariat was broken. But the way her words so closely resemble Beatrice’s implies something deeper: she thinks Secretariat was born broken, too.

In the end, once all the damage is tallied up, it doesn’t matter anymore. “Grow up. You play these games, ‘If I hadn’t done this, if I wasn’t that,’ but you did and you were and here we are,” Angela responds after BoJack accuses her of being the reason he’s such a disaster. It’s weird to find yourself agreeing with a target villain, a reprehensible human being who somehow has the moral high ground over our protagonist at this point. Because she’s right: BoJack’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions, his inability to look back and reflect on his past mistakes, is what got him to this point. It doesn’t matter that he was born predisposed to mental health issues or that someone influenced him to make a bad decision. On the racetrack, Secretariat couldn’t look back, and he lived his entire life as if he couldn’t take that blinder off. When there was no more track to run, nothing in front of him, and no way to see behind him, he was trapped. We learn of Secretariat’s death and his advice to nine-year-old BoJack in the first season finale. For the next five seasons, we think we know how BoJack’s story is going to end. It’s not a particularly subtle foreshadowing, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen. It’s supposed to prepare us, to tell us that we’d better brace ourselves, because this story isn’t going to have a triumphant ending. But the show pulls off an elegant, unexpected ending, subverting what seemed destined all along.

Secretariat’s moment of truth happens internally. No one tells him, “You did this to yourself.” It’s a conclusion he comes to on his own. But BoJack is so unwilling to face that truth, even when Angela tells him so directly, that he keeps running. When Secretariat hit the water, it was because he had stopped running from his past and didn’t think he had anything to run to instead. When BoJack hit the water in “The View From Halfway Down,” it was because he was still running from his past and not thinking about his future. It’s that difference that saves BoJack. Even when he’s dreaming or hallucinating or in limbo or whatever in-between place you want to assign him in the penultimate episode of the series, he’s still running from his past and the endless nothingness beyond that door.

After his rescue, BoJack finally stops and looks back. In the series finale, he notes that he was convicted and sent to prison, officially, for “breaking and entering[his recently sold house]but I think it was a bit of everything.” And so he sheds the burden of Secretariat, his dead hero, of the compromised movie that featured a digital recreation of himself instead of his real work as an actor, of the burden of trying to improve himself and messing it up over and over again. He’s not quite ready to be his best self yet, but he’s at least realized that relying so heavily on others—on Secretariat for his hope and happiness, on people like Angela to blame them—is just another form of escape.