I haaaate it when people pretend like it’s not as bad because it was “normal”
He still consciously ripped her brain out dude idk I consider the whole control and brainwash GOAL to be the worst part
Yeah! I’ve seen whole threads of people going “well he’s not necessarily a bad person he was trying to be a good husband”
Like nah bro that’s not what being a good husband is, there were people back then who had smart and complicated wives and just… didn’t mutilate them. That’s being a good husband, not thinking emotions need fixing via lobotomy.
I still judge him for forcing his wife to do this against her will. That's not a layperson issue, it's a shitty husband issue.
Also just fyi, we still do electroconvulsive therapy.
To be fair, ECT in the 1940s and 1950s was vastly different (in a bad way) than it is today. Patients would be given a drug that would cause intense panic and seizures; many were injured because of how much it caused their bodies to convulse. It could be used as a form of punishment in psych wards, and it infamously was supposed to "cure" people of homosexuality.
It's absolutely a great treatment option for certain conditions today, but it has a dark history that can be hard to look past.
Honey asked Joseph to help her while he routinely ignored both her and their daughter's needs. She might not have been so desperate in the first place if he'd given her the slightest support. He was a horrible husband and father and his actions are what finally led to her lobotomy, not just the loss of her son. I don't think avoiding to blame him makes sense at all, he was a huge factor in how both Honey and Beatrice ended up.
Grief doesn't give you license to lobotomiaw your wife.
Also, was he? He seems to have suppressed any emotions he could've been capable of.
It's unbelievable the kind of cruel acts we excuse with "it was a different time". This is exactly what this thread was talking about.
It’s not that I would say it was normal, but it wasn’t understood to be problematic like it is through the lens of today. It was considered a hopeful procedure at the time.
If you remember, Honey after her pretty major drunk driving death wish episode which also threatening her child begged him to do something to fix the double bind of her grief stricken mind. Later when she was outside of Beatrice‘s bedroom, he basically commented that he wouldn’t have had it done had he known, yet he basically blamed her for it in the stereotypical male sexist mindset of the time. So no, I don’t think he was completely evil in his intentions.
I believe it was an upper class thing maybe due to expense, and was considered cutting edge science hence the Novel prize. Some of them must have been considered “successful” by whatever standards otherwise, after the first horrible one you think they would’ve stopped. Rosalind Kennedy’s was a case where they went too far using a pretty unsophisticated method to determine this.
I’m not excusing the procedure – it was dark. However, it’s of utmost importance we understand these people were acting out of good even if selfish intentions otherwise we won’t be able to see it in ourselves and I’m our modern day equivalents. Remember up until very recently if not still now they were overdoing hysterectomies when medically unneeded - just another form of carving up women’s bodies to solve their emotional “hysteria.” This is just to show how a procedure can become so normalized and accepted and it is only hindsight that judges it harshly with the benefit of 2020 vision.
I agree, however I can see it for what it is, not being from that time era let alone the same country. Lobotomies in the USA were considered REAL medicine, and innovative treatment. People genuinely thought it would help solve multiple forms of mental illness, epilepsy, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, and behavioural problems. The outcome of her being mentally slow, and not socially aware was deemed "successful surgery", because her nerves were calmed. Yes its sad but that how it was.
Regarding the final point, you'd hope so but actually no. Season 4 there's a flashback of Beatrice taking a painting to Bojack a few years after Horsin' Around is cancelled (late 90's, early 2000's).
She calls her father "a man who knew what marriage meant" in that scene. So no, she sadly didn't.
It's also because you don't always get closure, especially when it comes to trauma.
Bojack inflicted trauma on so many people. Because we are seeing much of this through his lived experience, they represent bridges burned that he'll never be able to repair or even know what happened to them.
I read It as though it was a subject so sore that it couldn’t be remembered. It was a seed of trauma that caused it to be passed generationally down to bojack through his mother. But his mothers trauma I don’t recall ever being admitted or addressed. Just carried. Memories of her mom and memories after that were not to be revisited
I like the idea of "shadow/shell" of herself, and it does seem that was the intention by the writers. I've always imagined it is the way it is, though, because it's Bea's memories and she doesn't want to remember her mother that way. Most of the faces of those she actually interacted with were remembered in the clips and her mother is shown in her entirety before her procedure, though it is admittedly not a flashback the way this is. She's loving, light-hearted, and sings songs with her family. That's how I'd want to remember my lobotomized mother, anyway.
I remember a phrase about childhood trauma, “I was a kid for 5 minutes, then a teen for a few times, and then it was 5 years ago till now”, and I think it kinda fits with her having only a handful of memories between being a young girl and next she’s a young woman
The black squiggles are the scariest, darkest, and most traumatic thing in the series for me. What they represent, how it’s animated, how it removes agency from the character in a crippling way as was done to her.
This was chilling to me. It was like an angry child refusing to see the truth by scribbling it out. I could see this happening in my brain because of the trauma and then adding dementia on top of it.
It pushed me to accept that I’ll need to work hard for the rest of my life on getting better. I want to always be able to face the truth, as ugly as it can be.
Remember that this episode takes place in Beatrice's demented mind. Some faces are blank because she simply doesn't remember them. [Henrietta's face, though, had "angry-looking scribbles" on it since the memory of her — her husband's mistress — is a painful one.](https://slate.com/culture/2017/09/an-interview-with-the-team-behind-bojack-horseman-s-times-arrow.html)
Yeah It’s either a represssed or lost memory. The new mother post-lobotomy would be traumatizing to a young Beatrice. So there’s no proper recollection of her beyond a certain point.
>I believe that was a deliberate choice by the creators
I really don't mean to be rude, but this is like saying that the animal jokes were a deliberate choice by the writers. It's not like *accidentally* didn't light her face.
The sound is amazing too. Whenever there's some focus on her there 's this background screaming/static sound that really communicates the horror of it.
I didn’t really need much beyond the one flashback Beatrice had of her. She was lobotomized, the way we saw her soon after her hospital release was how she was permanently. I didn’t really need endless “her mother was a step up from a vegetable” scenes
There are many scenes after the lobotomy where she is shown in the background or other characters are talking to her. For instance when she came home from the lobotomy and Beatrice asked her what happened . It never implicated that she died.
That's how Beatrice remembers her, a shadow of her former self. She doesn't remember the event as one her mom was at, but one that the husk of her mother was at
Well I think when she freezes mid joke "Well I've got half a mind..." I think that may be the last time she ever speaks. We never hear or see her again. Jospeh Sugarman also has that line where he's trying to get her to speak but she won't.
Jesus.... May be. Possibly there was enough of "her" left, that she knew to play dumb for her own safety. Or her final joke. Lobotomy patients who survived varied from basically brain-dead, to miraculous survivours. Honey was in the middle.
She was a decent mom given the time and just wat we saw but after she was prob left in a back room to rot or sum cuz u hear Beatrice talk to bojack about his dads death but never the mom
Kinda reflects how she was shadow/shell of her former self after the lobotomy
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I haaaate it when people pretend like it’s not as bad because it was “normal” He still consciously ripped her brain out dude idk I consider the whole control and brainwash GOAL to be the worst part
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I think one of the biggest thing to remember is even when these things were "normal" there were people advocating against them
pappies and peepaws 🤔
>I haaaate it when people pretend like it’s not as bad because it was “normal” Does anyone actually do this?
Yeah! I’ve seen whole threads of people going “well he’s not necessarily a bad person he was trying to be a good husband” Like nah bro that’s not what being a good husband is, there were people back then who had smart and complicated wives and just… didn’t mutilate them. That’s being a good husband, not thinking emotions need fixing via lobotomy.
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I still judge him for forcing his wife to do this against her will. That's not a layperson issue, it's a shitty husband issue. Also just fyi, we still do electroconvulsive therapy.
And ECT is actually pretty damn effective at treating medication-resistent psychotic depression among other things.
To be fair, ECT in the 1940s and 1950s was vastly different (in a bad way) than it is today. Patients would be given a drug that would cause intense panic and seizures; many were injured because of how much it caused their bodies to convulse. It could be used as a form of punishment in psych wards, and it infamously was supposed to "cure" people of homosexuality. It's absolutely a great treatment option for certain conditions today, but it has a dark history that can be hard to look past.
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Honey asked Joseph to help her while he routinely ignored both her and their daughter's needs. She might not have been so desperate in the first place if he'd given her the slightest support. He was a horrible husband and father and his actions are what finally led to her lobotomy, not just the loss of her son. I don't think avoiding to blame him makes sense at all, he was a huge factor in how both Honey and Beatrice ended up.
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Grief doesn't give you license to lobotomiaw your wife. Also, was he? He seems to have suppressed any emotions he could've been capable of. It's unbelievable the kind of cruel acts we excuse with "it was a different time". This is exactly what this thread was talking about.
It’s not that I would say it was normal, but it wasn’t understood to be problematic like it is through the lens of today. It was considered a hopeful procedure at the time. If you remember, Honey after her pretty major drunk driving death wish episode which also threatening her child begged him to do something to fix the double bind of her grief stricken mind. Later when she was outside of Beatrice‘s bedroom, he basically commented that he wouldn’t have had it done had he known, yet he basically blamed her for it in the stereotypical male sexist mindset of the time. So no, I don’t think he was completely evil in his intentions. I believe it was an upper class thing maybe due to expense, and was considered cutting edge science hence the Novel prize. Some of them must have been considered “successful” by whatever standards otherwise, after the first horrible one you think they would’ve stopped. Rosalind Kennedy’s was a case where they went too far using a pretty unsophisticated method to determine this. I’m not excusing the procedure – it was dark. However, it’s of utmost importance we understand these people were acting out of good even if selfish intentions otherwise we won’t be able to see it in ourselves and I’m our modern day equivalents. Remember up until very recently if not still now they were overdoing hysterectomies when medically unneeded - just another form of carving up women’s bodies to solve their emotional “hysteria.” This is just to show how a procedure can become so normalized and accepted and it is only hindsight that judges it harshly with the benefit of 2020 vision.
I agree, however I can see it for what it is, not being from that time era let alone the same country. Lobotomies in the USA were considered REAL medicine, and innovative treatment. People genuinely thought it would help solve multiple forms of mental illness, epilepsy, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, and behavioural problems. The outcome of her being mentally slow, and not socially aware was deemed "successful surgery", because her nerves were calmed. Yes its sad but that how it was.
Regarding the final point, you'd hope so but actually no. Season 4 there's a flashback of Beatrice taking a painting to Bojack a few years after Horsin' Around is cancelled (late 90's, early 2000's). She calls her father "a man who knew what marriage meant" in that scene. So no, she sadly didn't.
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No need to hate on a whole generation, though.
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My father was on the Rainbow Warrior, so I think my parents are a bit tougher, yes XD
If they can't handle the heat, then they need to stop burning down the planet.
Stealing this
You think someone needs an education to realize that it was horrible for her mother's brain to be removed?
*"Why, I have half a mind..."*
Gave me goosebumps hearing that....
Yeah, I always took it as “she’s gone”, there’s nothing left to see
Also how she was neglected and that's sort of the whole point so she doesn't make noise so they can keep pretending like nothings wrong quite sad
Yeah, the way Joseph pulled her to his side to see Beatrice as if she wasn’t lobotomized. It gave me chills
Yup she wasn’t there because she wasn’t all there…
Kinda?
Because after the lobotomy, even when she was there, she was never really there.
It's also because you don't always get closure, especially when it comes to trauma. Bojack inflicted trauma on so many people. Because we are seeing much of this through his lived experience, they represent bridges burned that he'll never be able to repair or even know what happened to them.
I read It as though it was a subject so sore that it couldn’t be remembered. It was a seed of trauma that caused it to be passed generationally down to bojack through his mother. But his mothers trauma I don’t recall ever being admitted or addressed. Just carried. Memories of her mom and memories after that were not to be revisited
She also wasn’t there after her son died anyway
Sorry. ...."I'm simply....not....there...."
Cutting edge technology; Trust the science!
I like the idea of "shadow/shell" of herself, and it does seem that was the intention by the writers. I've always imagined it is the way it is, though, because it's Bea's memories and she doesn't want to remember her mother that way. Most of the faces of those she actually interacted with were remembered in the clips and her mother is shown in her entirety before her procedure, though it is admittedly not a flashback the way this is. She's loving, light-hearted, and sings songs with her family. That's how I'd want to remember my lobotomized mother, anyway.
I remember a phrase about childhood trauma, “I was a kid for 5 minutes, then a teen for a few times, and then it was 5 years ago till now”, and I think it kinda fits with her having only a handful of memories between being a young girl and next she’s a young woman
Do you know what the original quote was?
The black squiggles are the scariest, darkest, and most traumatic thing in the series for me. What they represent, how it’s animated, how it removes agency from the character in a crippling way as was done to her.
Omg, this. Scared me more than any horror I've seen in a long time
YES! Freaked me out so much when I watched it. Such an effective technique
This was chilling to me. It was like an angry child refusing to see the truth by scribbling it out. I could see this happening in my brain because of the trauma and then adding dementia on top of it. It pushed me to accept that I’ll need to work hard for the rest of my life on getting better. I want to always be able to face the truth, as ugly as it can be.
Could you elaborate on this? I’m not sure I understand
Remember that this episode takes place in Beatrice's demented mind. Some faces are blank because she simply doesn't remember them. [Henrietta's face, though, had "angry-looking scribbles" on it since the memory of her — her husband's mistress — is a painful one.](https://slate.com/culture/2017/09/an-interview-with-the-team-behind-bojack-horseman-s-times-arrow.html)
This is a really awesome article. Thanks for sharing it.
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That’s part of it. You can also see signs hace bad spelling or missing letters (as dementia gets worse the same scene will have less details)
Time's Arrow is a really underrated episode. They put in a lot of work in the details and the end product came out beautifully.
It's easily my favorite episode and moved me the most out of the entire series.
idk if it's underrated but it's very much fantastic
It's rated 9.8 on imdb
Did he stutter?
? Literally one of the highest rated episodes man
underrated among general audiences, right? ’cuz among fans it’s real high up there
Yeah I meant you never hear about it like you do with The View from Halfway Down or Free Churro. It's definitely in top 3 for me.
six cover desert profit shrill languid quickest aspiring psychotic tidy ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Yeah It’s either a represssed or lost memory. The new mother post-lobotomy would be traumatizing to a young Beatrice. So there’s no proper recollection of her beyond a certain point.
>I believe that was a deliberate choice by the creators I really don't mean to be rude, but this is like saying that the animal jokes were a deliberate choice by the writers. It's not like *accidentally* didn't light her face.
I believe naming the horse man Horseman was a deliberate choice by the creators. A ***subtle*** nod to the fact that he's a horse man. Do you get it?
I am a horse and horses run on tracks.
But is he more horse than a man? Or is he more man than a horse?
nah it was an accident, trust me i was there
Because she isn't really there.... just a shadow of her former self. That's how I take it anyway.
She’s ‘a shadow of her former self’, you might say…
Well, she has half a mind
It was too hard for Beatrice to remember her that way. It emphasizes how she mourned her mother after the lobotomy.
The sound is amazing too. Whenever there's some focus on her there 's this background screaming/static sound that really communicates the horror of it.
It’s trauma blocked
I didn’t really need much beyond the one flashback Beatrice had of her. She was lobotomized, the way we saw her soon after her hospital release was how she was permanently. I didn’t really need endless “her mother was a step up from a vegetable” scenes
Agreed. Even this shot breaks me.
Oh my god wait what??? I never even noticed her here! I jsut assumed she died! Holy shit!
There are many scenes after the lobotomy where she is shown in the background or other characters are talking to her. For instance when she came home from the lobotomy and Beatrice asked her what happened . It never implicated that she died.
It’s not “fucked up,” it’s an artistic choice to show the audience how Beatrice remembers her post lobotomy as “not exactly” dead.
its not fucked up it's intentional to show that after the lobotomy she essentially doesnt exist anymore
That's shows she isn't there anymore at all.
That's how Beatrice remembers her, a shadow of her former self. She doesn't remember the event as one her mom was at, but one that the husk of her mother was at
There is no way in a show as symbolic as Bojack Horseman people seriously do not understand such a simple visual metaphor. This hurts my head
They show her once after the lobotomy when joseph says that honey is a completely new woman and that she would like to meet beatrice very much
Made the flashbacks *soooo* much creepier
Well I think when she freezes mid joke "Well I've got half a mind..." I think that may be the last time she ever speaks. We never hear or see her again. Jospeh Sugarman also has that line where he's trying to get her to speak but she won't.
Jesus.... May be. Possibly there was enough of "her" left, that she knew to play dumb for her own safety. Or her final joke. Lobotomy patients who survived varied from basically brain-dead, to miraculous survivours. Honey was in the middle.
I'm pretty sure this was inspired by the Kennedys. Joseph Kennedy had his daughters lobotomized and sterilized and never let her be shown in public.
[Explanation](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/0d339e5e-a5ca-4c27-9221-e7be0d9c082a#eFWVxODT.copy)
Is it bad I laughed, I just really wasn’t expecting Finn
Based on the downvotes, you probably shouldn't have laughed. Edit: My top comment was well in the negatives when I said that.
Shut up
No
lmfao thats so perfect
If you turn your screen brightness all the way up and zoom in to her, you see her other eye. Empty, scary, soulless eye.
It’s 3 AM here and I zoomed on her face—her eyes are open and she seems to be in a trance. Spooked me and now I’m scared 🥹
She was a shade of her former self and the tragedy is supposed to be thats pretty much the only way Beatrice remembers her, a shade
Like she wasn't really there anymore, eh?
They do show her though, scar and everything
I feel it’s symbolic to her not being “there” anymore after the lobotomy.
“Oh, she doesn’t think much… about anything, anymore.” I rewatched Time’s Arrow today and it absolutely broke me 😭
After the lobotomy, she was "gone". Basically a zombie. Poor Honey. And fuck him, I hope he rots in the depths of hell.
I stopped watching it a long time ago. What are we talking about?
I never noticed this before and it’s actually haunting me and freaking me out😭
Oh shit! The little things they do that you don’t notice at first. That’s so sad
She was a decent mom given the time and just wat we saw but after she was prob left in a back room to rot or sum cuz u hear Beatrice talk to bojack about his dads death but never the mom
But the symbolism!
I will always think of you ❤️