6x08 A Quick One, While He's Away

[7.6/10] I both love and hate how this mid-season finale is the negative image of the prior episode. While “The Face of Depression” was about BoJack moving past his sins, and the ways in which he is unexpectedly capable of helping others, “A Quick One, While He’s Away” is about how those sins are still poised to come back to haunt him, and how other people are still dealing with the lingering effects of his worst behavior.

For the latter, we reunite with Kelsey Jennings, the original Secretariat director who, as she herself notes, was the only person in any way punished by the incident in season 2 where she and BoJack and the rest of the crew broke into the Nixon library to film the big scene. Much of this season, and frankly this series, is about how women bear the brunt of the negative consequences for this kind of behavior, and I like this as an illustration of that. (It’s no coincidence that all of our point of view characters in this episode, and the people who harm has been visited upon, are women).

We haven’t seen much of Jennings since season 2. But when we check in on her life, we see how she’s reduced to doing “sponsored immersive content” far below her talent while hacks like her film school pal get to do big budget work. Hers is one of the few hopeful stories here, where she sticks to her guns and to who she is when she pitches for a big time superhero movie, and ends up winning the job. But at the same time, the episode isn’t shy about how much of a struggle it’s been for her to get out of director jail all this time.

Things are, shall we say, less hopeful for Gina, who we see for the first time in season 6. She’s the lead in her own film, but she’s still traumatized by what happened on the set of Philbert last season. It’s reached the point where she’s hypersensitive about anything even vaguely surprising happening on set, and when, in a moment of improvisation, her costar holds her by the neck as part of an innocuous dance move, she has a moment of panic, falls and hits her head, and ends up storming off the set while packaging it as the “modicum of respect” she’s owed as number one on the callsheet.

It’s a sort of pain and discomfort that is not her fault, that is the result of BoJack’s issues being inflicted on someone else, but when Kelsey is looking for an actress to star in the new film, Gina’s current director gives her the dreaded temperamental label. It’s mediated by other events, but however much BoJack has gotten better, his actions have made Gina’s life and her profession less secure for her, and indirectly keeps from getting a bigger break (or even, possibly, a smaller one).

But these are events that are unlikely to be seen or understood by BoJack, if he’s ever aware of them at all. It’s also no coincidence that none of the regular characters appear in the episode (outside of the intro). In many ways, “A Quick One While He’s Away” is about the ripple effects of BoJack’s behavior, occurring far outside of his immediate orbit, but still affecting people far beyond him and maybe even coming back to haunt him.

The least compelling of these is the big His Girl Friday parody of the investigative reporter pursuing the story of who was with Sarah Lynn on the night she died. While I can appreciate the specificity, accuracy, and joie de vivre of the spoof, it feels like a mismatch for what the show is trying to do with the Sarah Lynn story. There’s something poetic and ironic about Sarah Lynn’s death being the thing that convinced BoJack to start trying to get better, but which could, if his role in it is exposed by a reporter, be the thing that ultimately tears him down. The breadcrumbs that the reporters find are interesting, particularly when it seems to lead them to Penny and her family as well, but it feels more like a weird tease of things to come within this broadly comic shell than anything substantive in his own right.

But the best of the four stories is Hollyhock’s, where what starts as a story of BoJack’s actions having second order effects on people in his life turns into a story of his old misdeeds coming back to haunt him. I like how the show explores Hollyhock’s reluctance to drink given the most recent examples in her life of people out of control, something she knows is in her blood and that makes it hard for her to relax and enjoy something fun. Her interactions with Tawnie, her panic attack, and her gentle recovery from it are all endearing and well-observed and a little sweet.

The catch is that the person who helps her out of that panic attack at a college party is Pete, one of Penny’s high school classmates. The two commiserate over their mutual traumatic experiences involving alcohol, and it’s a convincingly quick bond between them. That turns more traumatic, though, when Pete starts telling Hollyhock about how “this guy” was the cause of this horrible experience, with the episode making a devastating cut right before the person in the world BoJack loves most and sees as the best reflection of himself learns what is, well, not even the worst thing about him, but something that could still shatter Hollyhock’s image of her big brother in her mind.

I like the way the episode sets all of this up, teasing out connections between these events at the periphery until they crystalize into a broader, more haunting whole. The show finds a natural way for Hollyhock to learn about one of BoJack’s worst sins, through a chance connection that is just intermediated enough to not feel contrived.

That’s the bitter irony of this one. The BoJack we’ve known and watched for five and a half seasons has made meaningful progress in getting better. He has accepted himself, learned to forgive himself, made it possible for him to help others and think of their needs before his. He has taken these lessons and these mistakes and used them to become someone who is worthy of the care and attention and affection so many people have shown him before he did anything to deserve it. He is trying to make a fresh start and to forgive himself for the things that, in the episode where we got into his head, led to him constantly calling himself a stupid piece of shit.

And just when he has that breakthrough, just when he becomes a person semi-worthy of his status and web of meaningful relationships, the ghosts of his past seem poised to emerge all at once to tear his life asunder. BoJack may be getting better, may be turning a corner, but the other people touched by his worst actions are not, are still hurting from the things he’s done, some never to recover. Even as the show implicitly lauds BoJack for his progress, it doesn't forget the lasting harm he’s done to others not so privileged or lucky to be able to recover from it. That afterimage of his own recovery, the uncertain future so many people, so many young women, will labor under, isn’t going away, and that’s the thought BoJack Horseman leaves us with, as our heroes are left on the sidelines, before at the beginning of the end.