Bojack Horseman season 5, episode 5 recap: The Amelia Earhart Story

Bojack Horseman heads to North Carolina as we visit Princess Carolyn’s past.

Bojack Horseman finally dives deeper into Princess Carolyn’s past and helps us understand what shaped this mysterious character into who she is today. She isn’t exactly homesick but rather she’s visiting because she wants to meet a pregnant girl in her hometown to decide whether or not she wants to be a mother.

As the episode proceeds, we are treated to a series of flashbacks to Princess Carolyn’s younger days when she still had a Southern accent and lived in a congested household with her family. They live with a family of rich foxes and were hired on as the help.

Throughout her life, Princess Carolyn would often default to watching one of her favorite movies, The Story of Amelia Earhart, where she would be whisked away from her tragic surroundings and into a place of dreams and inspiration.

She became weary and exhausted from living with her siblings and drunk mother and dreamt of a life away from the mundane repetitiveness of her daily life. In the present, Princess Carolyn is doing her utmost best to impress the young lady from whom she may be adopting a baby.

Credit: Netflix

As a young Princess Carolyn is busy making dreams about attending college, her mother blows her aspirations to smithereens by saying she should just let life figure itself out. And in typical Bojack Horseman fashion, things take a dramatic turn when Princess Carolyn learns she is pregnant.

Who is her baby daddy? The son of the fox family that they live with and her mother couldn’t be more excited about Princess Carolyn trapping him with the pregnancy. Listening to the fox’s dad talk about what Princess Carolyn’s future as socialite looks like becomes overwhelming to listen to and makes us sympathize with her.

But she is okay with this plan and fully intends on getting married, that is until she has a miscarriage. And in the present, she gets another blow when the young girl’s boyfriend calls and proposes to her thus changing her mind about giving up the baby. Poor Princess Carolyn.

At the end of the episode, young Princess Carolyn is saying goodbye to her mother as she boards a plane to California, leaving her old life behind her despite her mother’s sudden affection for her. But as we ponder about Princess Carolyn’s entire life being spent in the service of others, it seems like nothing has really changed.

She’s still living in the servitude of others and doesn’t do much for herself, in fact, Bojack and her other clients become the source of her attention. Will she ever learn to put herself and her needs first? We sure hope so.