The View from Halfway Down

Plot

A young Beatrice Horseman welcomes her son BoJack and a child-aged Sarah Lynn to a dinner party attended by Herb Kazzaz, Crackerjack Sugarman, Corduroy Jackson-Jackson, and Zach Braff, all of whom had died earlier in the series. The guests take turns discussing their lives and deaths over dinner, while a mysterious black liquid drips onto BoJack from the ceiling. Towards the end of the dinner, BoJack vomits the liquid onto the table. The guests are eventually joined by BoJack's father Butterscotch, who has assumed the form of BoJack's childhood idol Secretariat.

Beatrice invites the guests to an after-dinner show, which BoJack recognizes as the point at which he always wakes up from this recurring dream. This time, however, the dream does not end; he enters the theater next door, where Herb hosts a talent show. Each guest performs a routine reflecting their views on life, then disappears through a white door in the center of the stage. As they perform, BoJack begins to remember details of his drinking binge from the previous episode, including a call to Diane.

Outside, Butterscotch and BoJack smoke together and achieve a form of closure. BoJack sees the outline of his body floating face-down in the swimming pool of his Los Angeles mansion. He maintains that he climbed out of the pool and called Diane during his drinking binge, and thus cannot be drowning. Butterscotch performs a poem titled "The View from Halfway Down", in which he (as Secretariat) recalls his suicide and expresses the panicked regret he felt as he jumped from a bridge, while the white door moves incrementally closer.

BoJack is unable to leave the theater, and Herb tells him that he cannot save himself now, as this is all happening in his mind. Eventually, only BoJack and Herb remain. The black liquid begins emerging from the door and envelops Herb, who tells BoJack that there is no "other side". Horrified, BoJack flees from the black liquid and finds a landline phone in the kitchen.

He calls Diane, who responds that she left Los Angeles for Chicago and cannot help him. BoJack remembers that the call he made to Diane actually went to voicemail, and he subsequently went back into the pool. Diane agrees to stay on the phone until the black liquid consumes BoJack.

Production

Alison Tafel, who had previously written episodes like "Stupid Piece of Sh*t," "INT. SUB," and "Feel-Good Story," wrote this episode. Amy Winfrey directed it, marking her twenty-first episode across the show's six seasons. Before the sixth season went into production, series creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg had wanted to create an episode featuring a dinner party with every character who had died. As development continued, the core idea shifted from a dream sequence to an examination of limbo, a change that Tafel said made the episode "burst open." Bob-Waksberg named the 1979 film All That Jazz as his main inspiration; in that movie, the protagonist experiences elaborate dream sequences with people from his past after going on life support. Other influences included Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls, where the main character hosts a dinner party with historical women, and Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, in which three versions of the same woman reflect on her life. Production designer Lisa Hanawalt created the Victorian house where the episode takes place. For the kitchen, Winfrey drew inspiration from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, using many distorted angles; the room itself combined elements from BoJack's childhood kitchen, the kitchen in his own house, and the set from his early acting role on Horsin' Around. During the dining-room scene, each character was given a different storyboard artist, with assistant director Chris Nance handling BoJack. While Tafel wrote short descriptions of each talent-show performance in the script, Winfrey and the animators had considerable freedom to design the specific details of those acts themselves.

Reception

Critics widely praised "The View from Halfway Down," the penultimate episode of BoJack Horseman's final season. Ed Cumming of The Independent called it a "tour-de-force," Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone deemed it "amazing," and Emily VanDerWerff of Vox described it, somewhat cryptically, as "something else." Dave Trumbor of Collider singled it out as the season's best episode overall, while Dan Di Placido of Forbes labeled it the highlight of the final season.

Taryn Allen of Chicago Reader went further, calling it one of the best—potentially the best—episode of the entire series. Most reviews focused on how the episode served as a culmination of BoJack's story. Les Chapell of The A.V. Club gave it an "A" grade, noting that it "slots firmly in the pantheon of A-grade BoJack Horseman penultimate installments" and continues the show's tradition of finding an even darker place for its second-to-last episodes, taking BoJack along with it.

Erin Qualey of Slate praised the episode for showing that harboring unresolved trauma can be deadly, bringing viewers to the dark yet somehow hopeful place that has long defined the series.

Not all reactions were glowing. Ben Travers of IndieWire offered a more critical take, arguing that the episode did not sufficiently move the series forward and that its summation felt like a poor use of the little time remaining. Several reviews of the second half of season six, which dropped on Netflix on January 31, compared this episode to the lighter finale, "Nice While It Lasted." Travers himself described episode 15 as "BoJack Horseman: The Drama" and the start of episode 16 as "BoJack Horseman: The Sitcom."

Tara Ariano of Vanity Fair called the episode "destined-to-be-divisive." Joshua Rivera of The Verge contrasted how BoJack's guilt is only hinted at in the finale but is explicitly confronted in "The View from Halfway Down." VanDerWerff noted that she was "sure some will wish the series had let BoJack stay dead," while Jake Kleinman of Inverse declared the penultimate episode "a pitch-perfect ending," adding that if it had been the last episode, it would have given the show a perfect, haunting farewell.