The most god-awful thing we’ve heard BoJack’s mother tell him might just be: “I’m punishing you for being alive.” It’s been more than four decades since she reprimanded him for stealing a cigarette, and you get the sense BoJack still feels like he’s constantly punished for being alive.
But this episode isn’t really about him feeling victimized and moping around about the cards he’s been dealt. It’s about the opportunities he and the other characters can seize to shirk off expectations and start writing their own stories.
Diane’s plot line is the most literal example. She wants to help people and leave a lasting impact on the world, not chronicle a rich, arrogant cat’s halfhearted attempt to make a difference in war-torn Cordovia. She hits us over the head with this episode’s theme when the voiceover she’s been doling out for the book she doesn’t want to write about Sebastian St. Clair abruptly cuts out when she quits her Cordovia gig and returns to LAX.
Princess Carolyn also embraces a drastic change for herself. Even if it’s not what she expected Rutabaga to propose in the janitor’s closet, she liked what she heard: a shot at being her own boss, and at getting more respect.
As a bonus, Princess Carolyn’s realization features some insanely cool design choices. She loses herself in a painting at the discount art store, and her fantasy of starting a new life free from her work as an agent is punctuated by vibrant, dreamy colors and textures. The show’s bold and inventive artistic flair has been a huge asset, especially this season in the form of elaborate sets and varied visual storytelling (think: Wanda’s mulch joke).
Character actress Margo Martindale, one of BoJack’s most entertaining recurring gags, pushes for change, too. Decades of solid roles on film and TV haven’t led people to actually associate her name with her acting work, so she turned to a life of crime to make headlines at last. In her latest quest, she’s shooting up police officers in the art store as a diversion for BoJack, who is breaking into the Richard Nixon presidential library.
BoJack, of course, is on his own mission to change his life. He desperately wants to be more than a bad sitcom actor. Secretariat producer Lenny Turtletaub might not agree, but BoJack feels he doesn’t have another sappy, cutesy story left in him.
He and Kelsey defy Turtletaub and decide to film the movie’s pivotal moment without him. With the help of Martindale & Co., they sneak into the library to film Secretariat’s meeting with the president in a replica Oval Office. It’s a rough scene, and Kelsey needs BoJack to cry. He can’t cry in front of her, even after she tells him something about Secretariat that is also strikingly true of himself: “Something inside you is broken and it can never be fixed.”
The scene seemingly goes off smoothly even without the tears, but then we see the aftermath. Lenny fires Kelsey, but that’s not the worst of the damage. BoJack stands outside the library alone, crying his eyes out. All the soul-searching he does as an actor takes a toll on him as a person, as we also saw in this season’s premiere.
BoJack then arrives home to find a fellow lost soul waiting on his doorstep: Diane. Her marriage with Mr. Peanutbutter is on the rocks, so she asks to stay with BoJack for the time being. That should make for some interesting drama between her and Wanda, who is getting increasingly passive-aggressive toward her boyfriend for maintaining such a close friendship with another woman (gasp!).
With a new girlfriend and a serious acting gig, BoJack is trying hard drag himself out of his own misery, but we haven’t seen yet that he can succeed. As we get into the last third of the season, it’s hard to imagine things wrapping up without his harshest reality check yet about the permanence of the darkness inside of him.
Julie Kliegman is the weekend editor for TheWeek.com and a freelance journalist based in New York. She’s written publications including BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, PolitiFact and the Tampa Bay Times. Tweet her your favorite SpongeBob GIF.