Sarah Lynn has always been a source more of humor than of drama on BoJack Horseman. Sure, there's always been a dark edge to the jokes made about her drug-induced lifestyle and the ways in which she was doomed from a young age, but for the most part, it was part and parcel with the satire of Hollywood and its dark side that stretches throughout this series. And yet, in this episode, that humor is brought down to Earth. It's not that there's no ridiculousness here, but suddenly the show starts taking that part of Sarah Lynn's background seriously.
And the tragedy of it becomes much more clear. Both BoJack and Sarah Lynn have been harmed by this lifestyle, bereft of empathy and only seeking thrills and substances to try to fill that hole in their lives. But the difference is that BoJack came to acting as an adult. Sarah Lynn was forced into it as a child, she never had a choice, and she never had a chance, and that's tragic. That's what makes something truly tragedy -- not just that it's sad, not just that it's unfair, but that it's the horrible result of forces beyond a person's control.
There's a Trainspotting vibe to this episode, a sense in which both BoJack and Sarah are letting go of whatever control they have as they take a feverish jaunt across L.A. and eventually across the country. That leads to the episode feeling somewhat shaggy in places, but it works with the rambling, unfocused, black out experience of the main characters, and so it works. That tack gives the story momentum even when it's rolling all over the place.
That spree takes BoJack (repeatedly) to the door of Ana Spanakopita, where she delivers an assessment of BoJack that is possibly even more harsh than Todd's. When BoJack asks why she abandoned him when he needed her the most, she basically tells him that he is not only unsaveable, but that he brings down anyone who would try to help him. He doesn't quite understand it, but there's a cold truth to those words, especially as they come to fruition in the rest of the episode, as BoJack brings down two young women.
The first of these is Penny. After a frantic, misguided attempt to make amends to all of the people BoJack's hurt (which leads it a hilarious "Dianne is just Asian Daria" routine), BoJack stalks Penny at Oberlin. In the process, he discovers something surprising -- she's just fine. She seems happy; she has friends, and she seems cool and comfortable where she is. That is, until BoJack shows up to mess that up. His presence reminds her of what happened and rattles her in what seemed like a safe environment. As Sarah Lynn points out, she was good until he showed up.
Sarah Lynn doesn't have the same kind of self-awareness about the way in which BoJack brought her down as well. It's hard to say that BoJack is truly the cause of Sarah Lynn's downfall. After all, in the past there were her parents and the other parts of the Hollywood machine that helped turn her into the person she became, and in the present, the very fact that Sarah Lynn was only engaging with sobriety so that she could get a really good high later suggests this would have happened eventually regardless of what BoJack did. (And, true to life, people who relapse often overdose, because their tolerance has diminished but they still consume their drug of choice in the quantities they used to, which overwhelms their systems.) To a degree, there was an inevitability to this.
But BoJack could have been there, could have eased her away from it, could have been a voice of experience and an angel on her shoulder rather than someone who brought her into his desperate race away from his own misery. Instead, BoJack was feeling bad for himself, and had managed to alienate literally everyone else important in his life. So he resorted to his old co-star, the one he was a father figure to, and jumpstarted the process that led to her demise. Maybe this would have happened eventually anyway, but BoJack was there, he hastened it, and took part in it, and managed to lose one of the last people who'd bother speaking to him in the process.
BoJack has his own damage to deal with, and much of it isn't his fault. He has an emptiness and a selfishness that he inherited, both through nature and nurture. The problem is that he prioritizes his own pain over everyone and everything else, and doesn't care about what his means of trying to feel better, or at least feel less, does to anyone close to him. That's what makes Ana's words so vital here -- BoJack really is drowning, he really is thrashing and kicking and trying to keep his head above water. He has legitimate problems, and sometimes he even makes legitimate attempts to fix them, but he's oblivious to those connections to others in this terrifying world, and that's his greatest sin.
So we feel for him when he loses out on that Oscar. It represents something important for him -- a signifier that his life and his work meant something. And we sympathize when he wants to do anything but face reality when that falls apart. But then Sarah Lynn wins an Oscar, and we see how meaningless it is for her. All she can do in that moment is think about what it should mean, what it would have meant to her, before she went down this path. BoJack is a victim, but also a perpetrator. As far as we see, Sarah is just a victim, someone who was poisoned before she even really knew how to read. And BoJack could have done something to stop it, to help it, then and now, but didn't.
Because BoJack just wants to try to anesthetize himself from his own pain, to hold himself back from his own damage. That's why when he looks into the projected stars of the planetarium, he absolves himself. BoJack never accepts blame, never takes the fault. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the eons that pass in a blink when pulled out to that scale, and declares that he need not feel bad for anything he does because nothing he does matters. To put it in Brothers Karamazov terms, anything is permitted. BoJack takes it to the self-serving extreme, to ignore his fractured attempts at making good so that he needn't feel guilt.
There is, however, a catch the nihilist's way out. Try as he might, BoJack still feels a connection to Sarah Lynn. As they sit on that bench together, gazing at the sunset as they've done in the past, he realizes that she is one of the few people equipped to understand him. They may have come to it on different terms, but they've been through the same thing. He cares about her. He may not want to care about anyone. It's easier to justify your own bad actions, to compartmentalize all the terrible things you've done, if you don't care about anyone.
But he does. And Sarah Lynn dies. And he was there for it all.
That's the kicker. Maybe your choices don't matter on a cosmic scale, but they matter on a personal one. You can hurt the people you care about, and no matter how many beers you drink, how many drugs you take, how many false amends you yell into the night, you will still feel that. BoJack will still feel that. All of his attempts to run away from his pain have only caused more pain, for many innocent people whom he's dragged beneath the waves with him, and for himself.
Who knows if Sarah Lynn would ever have become an architect. Maybe she would, as Tony Soprano once put it, ended up selling lawn furniture on Route 9. But maybe she would have been happy. Maybe BoJack could have helped her be happy, made himself happy, or at least avoided letting one more lost soul into his morass of discontent. Instead, a young woman dies, and for all his attempts to avoid his own hurt, to avoid the results of his bad acts, they finally catch up to him, and to those unfortunate enough to be in his wake when that reckoning comes.
