12 Small Details You Only Notice Rewatching Bojack Horseman

BoJack Horseman is due to come to an end in January, in what will no doubt be one of the darkest and most heartbreaking season finales ever. It’s the ideal time then to gear up for a complete series rewatch, and there’s plenty of background details to keep you entertained if you do.

BoJack is such a vibrant show, one teeming with extra flourishes of world building and humour. Perfectly mixing clever satire, dark comedy and outright goofiness, it’s almost overloaded with jokes at times. Not that that’s a bad thing; it just means there’s no way you’d catch all of these on the first watch.

There’s two main reasons for this. Firstly, the gags might be so small and in the background that you’d miss them when watching for the plot. Other gags are foreshadowed and it’s not until a rewatch that you realise it had been in motion the entire time.

These aren’t all jokes, necessarily, with some acting more as funny callbacks in context. Well known running gags like Princess Carolyn’s tongue twisters or ‘Erica!’ don’t count either, as most people catch them the first time around anyway.

Starting off with a more recent one, as plenty of dedicated BoJack fans will have already rewatched the earlier series multiple times. This visual joke comes from BoJack’s time in rehab in the first part of Season Six, although it’s set up in Season Two.

The openings of Season Two and Season Six do share some similarities. Six begins with him in rehab, while Two has him listening to self help tapes after being cast in Secretariat.

The self help tapes allow him to smooth over the cracks for a while, before his mother shatters them open again. In Season Six, he initially rejects rehab and fails at all the tasks laid out for him, until he genuinely commits to self improvement.

One of these tasks is climbing a mountain, which a sign in the background informs us is called Metaphor Mountain. Quite a strange name for a mountain, and it’s one which is set up in Season Two.

The self help tapes BoJack listens to are a parody of the usual empty nonsense of self help tapes, including telling BoJack that the mountain he’s climbing is ‘a metaphor’ and that ‘everything is a metaphor’.