This episode is something of a necessity. We have this backstory for BoJack that is constantly alluded to – the wildly popular but insipid 90s sitcom Horsin’ Around, starring BoJack Horseman himself. It’s arguably what forms BoJack. It is BoJack. And even the later plots deal with showing us the dark story behind the sitcom – but I’m jumping the gun. To understand the impact of the sitcom on our lovable main man/horse, we need to really get into the sitcom. And what better way to do that than through a horrifyingly dark story about a child star?

Sarah Lynn, voiced by Kristen Schaal of Bob’s Burgers fame, is a hard pill to swallow. Adult Sarah Lynn is the epitome of unlikable – she’s rambunctious in dangerous ways, attention-seeking, manipulative, drug-addicted, and constantly straddling that fine line between party and ER visit. She’s hard to watch as an adult, because she’s so damn annoying. It’s – oh no, I’m going to use the word – cartoonish how much of a train wreck she is. But I think it works, although this episode definitely has its rough patches.

We’re jumping all over, but let me hit the title real quick. “Prickly-Muffin” is a great title for this episode because it captures the weird duality of Sarah Lynn’s life (and, by analogy, BoJack’s life). On one hand, it’s the Horse’s nickname for Sarah Lynn’s character Sabrina on Horsin’ Around. On the other hand, it’s the title of 18-year-old Sarah Lynn’s pop song, squeezing every horribly lewd connotation out of the phrase “prickly muffin” that you can imagine. Good title. I like it.

BoJack’s opening monologue to young Sarah Lynn is honestly traumatic. It’s especially interesting in light of later scenes with BoJack and his mom. I’m going to go ahead and spoil it because I’m so excited I noticed the parallel this time. The scene in Horsin’ Around is Sabrina hiding under a table, and the Horse convincing her to go to school. In between takes, BoJack makes an exceptionally dark speech about how she can never stop smiling and never stop dancing, and she always needs to give the people what they want. In episode 11 (I believe it’s 11; I’m almost positive) BoJack has a drug-induced flashback to his childhood. He’s hiding under a table, and his mother is making him perform the lollipop song – “because that’s all you’re good for.” It’s a very dark moment that shows us something gnawing at the heart of BoJack Horseman, a moment where we see the gremlins chewing at his cerebellum and making him believe that really, performing is all he’s good for. And the fact that he makes a similarly traumatic speech to Sarah Lynn in a similar moment? Damn, BoJack. You’re becoming your mother.

Enough about episode 11. I swear my review for 11 is going to be a master’s thesis at this point. Let’s talk about the plot in episode 3.

We see the all-too-familiar arc of the Tragic Former Child Star in the cold open, a montage of news coverage about Sarah Lynn that covers her first pop album…and her 30th birthday, at which A Ryan Seacrest Type observes “Does anyone care about Sarah Lynn anymore? After all, she is thirty.” The writing here is a little on-the-nose; not exactly subtle. That’s really the raison d’etre of the whole episode, I guess; it’s about over-the-top behavior. But there’s only so much heavy-handedness you can take before your hands fall off, you know? When the girl in the furniture store squeals “OMG! OMG! OMMFCSDVRQQPQFG!” it doesn’t feel like a clever joke. It feels like a joke from 2005 – “those darn kids with their internet acronyms.”

I should say – while some of the jokes fall flatter than chocolate chip pancakes, this episode does have a few truly classic moments. My personal favorite is Sarah Lynn bleeding out in BoJack’s backseat, to which BoJack blithely responds “Beautiful day for a drive though, huh?” I want to be that horse in the driver’s seat. Also the running jokes about Andrew Garfield (he loves lasagna and hates Mondays).

The overall plot of the episode is another familiar sitcom plot: the shitty houseguest, whose flaws the host ignores. Sarah Lynn is a parasite in many ways, and BoJack is the rube who blindly ignores her flaws in favor of his own deluded memories of her. We hear the phrase “Who wants chocolate chip pancakes?” three times in this episode: once at the beginning, as a line in the sitcom Horsin’ Around, then from Todd, who is trying to rouse a sleeping BoJack, and finally from BoJack again when Sarah Lynn decides to crash at BoJack’s. It’s a fun device – each time, it’s an artificial line with an ulterior purpose, whether that purpose is to put on a show in Horsin’ Around, to trick BoJack into making pancakes (oh Todd, honey), or, in the final case, for BoJack to continue convincing himself that Sarah Lynn is the little girl he remembers and not the addict she’s become.

The real focus here is BoJack’s delusion. The whole episode is nothing but examples of ways in which BoJack refuses to face the truth about Sarah Lynn. Okay, there are some other things – the somewhat meandering subplot about Princess Carolyn becoming Andrew Garfield’s agent, I guess? It felt like they needed something for PC to do during this episode, and while this plotline is better than Todd’s weird online dating/scam artist plot last week, it’s not that much better. I think the rule of subplots is that they shouldn’t be more complex than the main plot, and when the main plot is a sitcom formula it sort of limits your options for subplots. Oh well. It’s not that bad; there are some good lines that come out of it – “what it is, banana bread?”

Diane gets good moments in this episode – her third-wave feminist rant about Sarah Lynn is the kind of smart-awkward dialogue we should see from Diane, as is her misguided attempt to console BoJack at the end by explaining that “this is what celebrity culture does to people.”

The episode becomes particularly poignant when you add in the all-important mantra from episode 11: Am I a good person? Is it too late to become a good person? In Sarah Lynn’s case, the answers seem obvious: no, she’s a bad person, and yes, it’s too late for her to change. She manipulative and spiteful…but also clearly damaged, and we see the things that pushed her to that in the flashbacks to her upbringing on the show. And we never actually get adult Sarah Lynn get deeper, do we? We never see her have the BoJack moment of clarity – am I a good person? Instead, she tells us to “suck a dick, dumb shits!” It’s fascinating because we get a look at the way one broken person makes another person broken – and, as Sarah Lynn points out, she’s in a place where she doesn’t have to change or rise to the occasion; she can just surround herself with sycophants and enablers until she dies tragically young. The gut-wrench here is that she’s right. No one has the power to make her change, and BoJack stares into the heart of what he at his worst can do to someone else.

Which brings me to the ending. The only bad thing about such a dark episode as this is that, well, BH is still a comedy. BoJack should feel horribly guilty, but instead we get the hilarious cop-out of “it’s society’s problem!” I don’t know how else they could have ended this episode, to be honest. Anything more serious would have been way to dark for this early in the season. It does feel like something of a writing cop-out – in a show full of consequences, this action really doesn’t have any – but it’s saved by the bird paparazzi subplot. Which eventually peters out into nothingness. Maybe it’ll come back next season?

I give this episode yet another B. I never thought about it this way until I started writing these guys, but the first three episodes are flawed in different ways – still hilarious, but flawed. The promise of brighter episodes is around the corner, though; this episode brings us the first mention of the Herb Kazaz cancer subplot, which is one of the best parts of the show. Stay tuned, and suck a dick, dumb shits.