As is typical for BoJack Horseman, the episode is surreal in its presentation but more literal in its message, as it goes on to condemn Hollywood’s perverse eagerness to forgive abusive men. If the show had continued to follow Vance’s return to the spotlight, it might’ve made for a timely arc. But it wouldn’t have been particularly daring. After all, BoJack Horseman is already about a messed-up, middle-aged actor waging a comeback, a man who’s spent much of his adult life using, mistreating, and hurting women. In Season 2, he nearly had sex with his friend’s teenage daughter. In Season 3, he coaxed a young woman, who saw him as a father figure, out of sobriety and into a month-long bender that killed her.

BoJack Horseman, of course, knows all of that. So this year, the show turns its lens on itself, asking what society gains and loses when artists tell relatable stories about men who do terrible things. For years, the show has been a master class in empathetic TV. When the series takes its ensemble, especially BoJack, to morally alienating places, it does so with nuance, seeking the humanity beneath its characters’ acts of selfishness or cruelty. But in Season 5, the show refuses to take for granted that empathy is a good thing. It also knows better than to hinge a story line about redemption on someone that viewers don’t care about. Which is why, seven episodes after leading a crowd in a chant about not choking women, it is BoJack himself who is captured on camera, strangling his co-star and girlfriend in a drug-fueled rage.

BoJack Horseman is as much an incisive satire about Hollywood as it is a colorful, wordplay-obsessed sitcom filled with human-animal hybrids. So it’s unsurprising that much of Season 5 seems to resonate with the biggest story of the entertainment industry in the last year: the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein and the resulting rise of the #MeToo movement (both of which, coincidentally, unfolded after the new BoJack season had already been plotted out). Hollywood has since seen a slew of powerful men—whether top executives such as Weinstein and CBS’s Les Moonves or performers such as Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K.—lose their jobs or fall out of the spotlight following extensive reports of inappropriate or violent behavior. There’s also been a growing awareness of the way sexism, sexual misconduct, and misogyny is systematically perpetuated at every level of the industry (and, indeed, across industries).

Lately, the broader discussion around the #MeToo movement has converged on the subject of “redemption”: what it looks like, who deserves it, and whether it’s possible. As a theme, redemption has always been central to BoJack Horseman. The show ends each season by asking, implicitly or explicitly, whether there’s hope for its troubled protagonist to change his ways. In the penultimate episode of Season 1, BoJack pleads with his friend Diane (Alison Brie): “I know that I can be selfish and narcissistic and self-destructive, but underneath all that, deep down, I’m a good person, and I need you to tell me that I’m good.” Crushingly, the scene cuts to black; BoJack gets no easy reassurance (and neither do viewers). It wasn’t until the end of Season 4 that the show offered a genuinely optimistic answer. After confronting his family’s history of mental illness and emotional abuse, BoJack started to form a real bond with his new half-sister, Hollyhock. He also agreed to help his manager and ex-girlfriend, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), after years of taking her for granted, by agreeing to star in a new TV show she’s producing called Philbert.