The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP: KNOCKIN' ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin? It's time for the final installment of Witless Prattle's coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop. And this week, we wrap the whole shmear up with a look at the theatrical movie, Knockin' on Heaven's Door.

"KNOCKIN' ON HEAVEN'S DOOR"
"How do you say 'useless' in Texan?"

It was probably a good idea to have Bebop's bow a a feature movie be a story "hidden" in amongst the chronology of the show's run. Doing a "what happened after" wouldn't work, given who's left at the end of the finale, and doing a prequel wouldn't work because prequels always suck, especially when the whole hook of your show depends on the unsaid to work properly and explaining all the unexplained stuff would really . . .kill it dead, wouldn't it?

The challenge with shows where the finale of the series bangs the door shut with real finality but you have a whole movie yet to go is a tricky one. You either do a continuation or essentially re-tell the original story (for example: Evangelion is now into it's third version of the same story, as the finale ended with everyone but one masturbating shut-in reduced to Tang didn't really leave many places for the story to go) Bebop decided to look at it as a farewell tour. No need to rock the boat, no need to reinvent the wheel, just go out there and play Dark Side of the Moon for the punters one more time, strum the strings of sweet nostalgia, and leave them satisfied but always wanting more.

There was also a bit of a victory lap to be had, as well--initially, Bebop was plagued with all sorts of problems and caught a lot of flak for its violence and half its episodes didn't even air in its first run. How wonderful then, to come back with a big splashy feature to an anime that grew into one of the most beloved international successes ever?

Thus, Knockin' (I am not typing out that title every damn time) plays t generally safe, and you don't really notice that it's kind of Bebop's greatest hits unless you're really looking. Then again, Bebop never shied away from doing plots multiple times, because plot really wasn't that much of a thing: People liked the show because they liked the characters and the style in which Bebop was done. So it was a safe bet.

The plot is a biological warfare attack ("Gateway Shuffle") perpetrated by a veteran of the wars on Titan ("Jupiter Jazz") who has suffered some kind of damage to his memory and is out of his customary time and place (God, pick an episode, why don't you?) There's a lot of stuff that marks it as a product of the first decade of the new century--a comprehensive reaction to a terrorist threat, the fear of germ warfare, etc. Said plot eventually spirals way outside of everyone's ability to stop or control it, save the crew of the Bebop, who don't let a little thing like the impossible slow them down all that much.

Being that he's essentially a cipher, the villain of the piece, Vincent, isn't really all that interesting, as he's lost everything that made him a distinct person. We're supposed to be scared of him for that reason--lacking restraint or explanation, he's kind of supposed to be a force of nature, I guess. It . .doesn't quite come off, not does the notion that we're supposed to feel any kind of sympathy for him for losing his memory and being a victim of forces beyond his control, but it doesn't sit comfortably with someone who's indulging in a little nihilistic mass murder. Also, he sounds a bit too much like Vicious, and when you add in the common threads between them (enmity with Spike, his past on Titan, beats the shit out of Spike) he really doesn't differentiate himself successfully.

However, he's less a character and more an attempt to illustrate the main point of Cowboy Bebop--loneliness=bad; finding a place where you belong=good. Vincent has no memory and no connection to anyone and becomes a destructive nihilist. The Bebop crew, for all their problems, are a unit and manage to survive all the crazy shit that Vincent throws at them because of it.

Even if the science, which makes every effort to be plausible, is as dumb as a backward jackass.

Likewise, Electra, Vincent's former lover-cum-saviour, isn't all that interesting either, though she's a female character of a type not really featured on Bebop to any real degree and her and Spike get a lot of awesome moments together, and there's something to be said for being a good catalyst even if you aren't a fully fleshed-out character

However, as always, the ropey bits are balanced out by a bangin' soundtrack, my favourite of which (heaven help me for admitting this) is the utterly ridiculous/hilarious country pastiche/parody, "Diggin'"



If, like me, you grew up with country music all around you and it wasn't your favourite thing ever, then hearing this was the song that let you know you were not alone.

There's also the fact that this movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at--the attention to detail in the Moroccan Street sequences and the scenes of all the old airplanes taking off is just staggering and the action sequences that punctuate all the philosophizing and wisecracks are uniformly excellent, and really show off what all that extra money can get you.

I also like the near-rabbinical determination the producers of the movie had for making sure every single touchstone of Bebop got a bit in the movie. You want the three old guys who are always around playing cards? They're here? Big Shot? Definitely here. Ed wandering around the city in what seems like a plot-forwarding role, but more an excuse for a goofy break so we can chuckle over her and Ein's antics? Yep. Faye even gets tied up by Vincent, who, despite being a nihilist, knows what some folks paid to see here.

There's also the usual recurring imagery--lots of stuff about eyes and fishing, as well as a new wrinkle where things are framed by games--Vincent's Chinese Checkers-ish thing, Lee's various video games, Jet's shogi board, etc . . .there's plenty of subtext to plunder for the intellectually curious (or the hard-up blogger trying to fill up the page with words. . . )

But in between that, we get several great action scenes, and I wanna mention them now. Electra and Spike's first encounter is really rad, and demonstrates that Spike is awesome enough to hold someone off with a push-broom. The subsequent gunfight with Vincent on the Monorail is really awesome, as is the dogfight Spike has in the Swordfish with the Army jets (because again--everything you loved in Bebop got crammed into this movie, even the cool space battles) It all culminates with the fight on the tower between Spike and Vincent, which is just bad-ass.

I should make mention here that the whole philosophising about dreams and how it relates to the butterflies is a reference to a quote by Zhuangzhi, specifically:

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things."

The more you know.

I have no segues for these last few bits before I talk about the end so I'll just drop them in, as I wanted to also point out two other awesome songs from the soundtrack, specifically "Dijurido"



. . .and the totally awesome "What Planet is This"



So, while the final resolution between Vincent and Electra is inexplicable when it's not being mawkish (honestly, it's a little confusing and awfully convenient that Vincent remembers he and Electra was tizz-ight at the most critical moment) the movie uses it as a perfect opportunity to restate the final thesis and make Vincent's end a hopeful one: He's found the answer he needed, but not the one he sought. He wondered if he was living in the real world or not, but what he needed to know was that he wasn't alone after all.

This is meant to presage Spike's death in the finale, and it . . .kinda does, but it also doesn't, and even if the correlation were more explicit, it's hard to draw too close a line between their situation and his because we've had 26 episodes to get to know Spike, and asking an audience to fully identify with characters as this as Electra and Vincent is not so easy.

So instead of belabouring the point too much more, we close with a song, and it's a great one that elegantly restates the themes of the movie. To play us out, here's "Gotta Knock A Little Harder."



And that's Cowboy Bebop, y'all. The whole thing (so far) There's been occasional rumours of another movie or (god help us) a live-action version produced in the USA, a possibility I see as about as worthwhile an endeavour as fitting a Humvee with a vagina--sure it's a technical achievement, but the two things don't go very well together, really, do they?

And with that, we're done. I can't remember if this is our third series we've done in the entirety of or not, but it's certainly the first one of a different style for me. I took copious notes for this--there's like half a notepad's worth, for heaven's sakes. Maybe they'll put in in a collection of my papers or something one day. More than likely, they'll do what everyone else does though, and either skip to the Mad Men reviews or just come here from Google searches for "tits."

I hope you enjoyed this comprehensive look back at the entirety of Cowboy Bebop. Thanks to all of you who've followed along (I think we got one new reader out of this--that's a good day here at the Prattle) Until next time!

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #6

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin? It's time once again for another installment of Witless Prattle's continuing (for one more week after this, anyways) coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop.

This time we wrap up the series proper with the final four episodes. Typically, as a series reaches its final stretch, you'd kinda think maybe everything would get resolved, all the questions answered, and things brought to a close.

And they kinda do. Sorta. But the answers lead to more questions, and, I'd have to say, really Cowboy Bebop is a lot more about the questions than it is the actual answers. But a lot of shows are like that--or they are more because the plotting is so sloppy. In Bebop's case, it's more by design, I think. I'll try to explain as we go:

"BRAIN SCRATCH"
"If you want to dream, just do it by yourself!"

I was dreading this one. "Brain Scratch" is my least favourite Cowboy Bebop, and while my re-watch revealed it has a few good qualities, my opinion still stands, as it's a story that Bebop's already done multiple times as it is, and this is not the best version.

The crew gets involved in chasing down Londes, the founder of a religion called Scratch, whose adherents want to migrate their consciousness into a digital sphere. Londes' voice actor is the same voice actor as Lord Zedd. The longest note I made while watching that episode was that Londes' voice was the same as Lord Zedd's--you tell me what that bodes for the episode.

The problem with "Brain Scratch," is that we've seen this whole "people not living in the real world as metaphor (or not)" a couple times already, most notably in "Bohemian Rhapsody." Then as now, the "threat" turned out to be mostly harmless, and the whole thing resolves ambivalently.

The framing device of Londes constantly switching channels is kinda cool, and certainly allows for a more distant take on the Bebop crew than we've had up until now, but in the end, it's just a gimmick and distances the viewer a bit too far from the main cast. Couple that with the fact we've plowed this ground a few times already, it feels a bit tired.

Plus, the episode chokes on its of philosophising about television and how deleterious an effect it has on the human psyche. See also: Everything written or performed about TV ever.

On the other hands, "Big Shot," Cowboy Bebop's long-ruunning gag series gets cancelled, which certainly isn't a harbinger of things to come at all. Nope, nosiree.

"HARD LUCK WOMAN"
"Jet--the girls are gone."

Among Bebop's many repeated themes--along with fishing, water, eyes, dreaming, people locked in by illusions and all the others I'm not typing out right now--is that of futility. One need look no further than the character of Appledelhi, Ed's father, who is engaged in mapping Earth's terrain. Only Earth is constantly being pounded by meteorite showers, which constantly reshape the terrain. Appledelhi tries to sell it as "making order out of chaos," but you and I both know it's a bunch of craziness.

I have to say, over and above that we say our goodbyes to three of the Bebop crew, given how much chemistry Ed and Faye have as characters, it's a shame this is the only episode wherein they get paired off and go on and adventure (or rather, Ed waltzes them around and tries to drive Faye insane) There's a telling bit when they arrive at the day care center where the woman in charge says that ed just sort of wanders in and out, which is interesting, as that's pretty much what Faye does on the Bebop.

If this episode has a theme it can call its own, however, it's without question, "belonging" Faye is so obsessed with regaining her memory and finding the place where she belongs again and Ed is so happy that they abandon the place where they really belong--on the Bebop. This is something which has ramifications beyond this episode, and I'll address them in the next one, but suffice it to say that it's only when they leave the Bebop for an extended period of time that real disaster strikes.

Not that saying goodbye is any the easier for the longtime viewer either. Faye running up the steps expecting to find at last the peace where she belongs and only finding ruins is heart-wrenching, as is Ed and Ein leaving the ship for the last time. And "Call Me Call Me" the song that plays over both? Pretty much a perpetual tear generator:



While it's sad Faye ends up with nothing (again) and Ed and Ein are gone, the notion that the remaining Bebop crew is the ones who are really lost is the more urgent point. If the crew is breaking up, and going in their own directions . . .that means nothing's the same any more, and well, anything could happen . . .

"THE REAL FOLK BLUES, PARTS 1 & 2"
"Where are you going? Why are you going?"

The more I've thought about it, the break-up of the Bebop crew seems to rob them of a large degree of immunity from harm, kinda. Oh sure, Spike has been routinely thrashed by the bad guys, Faye never seems to stay very long if she can help it, and if Jet gets hurt it's usually a stinging betrayal that only hurts on the inside, but it never. . .stuck, I guess.

Well, in part 1, that pretty much all goes to hell. Jet gets sidelined by a bullet to the leg, the Bebop is brought down by a full-on assault by the Red Dragons, and even before Vicious assumes control of the syndicate, they seem determined to kill everyone even tangentially connected to Vicious.

And Spike . . .well . . .

Well, except Shin, who is one of the most goddamned maddening characters in bebop, because holy God I have no idea why he's here. I know intellectually why he's here--he's Lin's twin brother from "Jupiter Jazz," who looks just like him and is in the Red Dragons, just like Lin, and is adjutant to Vicious. . .just like Lin. This is kind of a problem, in that Lin didn't really distinguish himself all that much and all Shin does is pop in a few times to move to the plot along and we're supposed to think that he's important, but damn if I know why.

Jet, having be dragged into this nonsense after having the good sense to stay away the last three times, tells spike that Vicious and Julia are like incantations opening some kind of door that shouldn't be opened, and given what happens, he has a point. It probably explains why Spike kept quiet about it up until now.

There's a good scene where the doctor from "Asteroid Blues" is patching up Jet's leg wound and compares the two of them to two stray cats that he can't get rid of. This story may sound familiar to you, because Spike said something very much about his ship in "Wild Horses." This is all finally tied up in a knot in Part 2, when Spike weaves a somewhat complicated and thickly layered with allegory story about another stray cat in part 2 of this story.

There's a little touch i want to talk about at the beginning of Part 2. Being that with the crew of the Bebop splintered and the titular ship itself torpedoed, there aren't even any opening credits: that's how much the Cowboy Bebop we knew and loved is breaking down.

But they're not taking this on alone, because Faye, being Faye, drifts back into the Bebop's orbit (it was either that or get tied up) but not before we get a great scene that will only make sense if you paid attention to the Big Shot stuff (or understood it was someone commenting externally on Faye's situation) This leads to Faye encountering Julia, and having a frankly awesome high-speed car chase/shootout.

The strength of this two-parter is that the action scenes come frequently, and keep the energy from flagging too much. It also glosses over a couple of bitterly ropey bits--Spike and Faye waxing about Julia, Vicious' teeth-gnashingly bad line about shedding tears of scarlet, all the times people talk about "dying because they're not sure if they're really alive" and . . .well, it really brings home the fact that when Bebop has to answer questions, it doesn't do so well. We're really here for the characters (and while in other shows that may seem like a cop-out, here it's very true) more than we are for the plot points.

Which is why Jet being hurt is sad, why it sucks that the Red Dragons bring down the Bebop hurts, Faye's inability to stop Spike from going to his final and fatal reckoning with Vicious. We don't want to see these guys go, and we damn sure don't want to see them hurt. But because they're broken, they like Vicious, like damn near everyone within the course of the series, they've "lost their place in the world," and like all ghosts, bad stuff ensues.

Speaking of ghosts, let's talk about Julia for a bit. She's built up frequently as Very Important, and while she is to Spike, she's not really that big a deal, or at least in the bits we see (though she drives like a bat outta hell and can handle herself in a fight) but ultimately her death doesn't really have the "oomph" you would have expected. She works better as a representation of the lost past (or the lost self) rather than as a fleshed-out character. Still, she makes more of an impression of fucking Shin, that's for sure.

Well, the showdown is on, and it's accompanied by an interesting reprise of "The Real Folk Blues," called "See You Space Cowboy." It's pretty awesome:



I won't spoil the finer details of Spike wrecking shit on the Red Dragons, as it's best experienced in the show and you know how it's gonna play. But you will, finally, get the context for that "bang" business in "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Wild Horses," which leads into the best and the final song in the series, "Blue."



It's awesome.

So, here we are. Cowboy Bebop, barring one more curtain call, is finished. It's been quite a ride, we got to know some cool people, heard some cool music, and even though we never really figured some bits of it (Seriously, Shin--why are you here?!?) and while on the face of things you could say the ending is weak (if you wanted the overplot wrapped up, you kinda got what you wanted, but that would mean knowing what the overplot actually was) you could also say Bebop succeeds in what it meant to do--make you follow and grow to care about these characters over the 26 episodes here to the point where you're genuinely sad to see them go.

As to what it was all about. . .well. Bebop's questions, as the finale proves, are way more interesting to ask than to have answered. If Bebop has a central thesis, it's probably from the preview for "Speak Like A Child," when Jet asks the audience "what conclusions will you draw from it?" If you canvassed 10 different sites for Cowboy Bebop reviews, you're going to get 10 different reads as to What It Was All About, but that's as it should be, I think. It can mean what it needs to mean for everyone who watches it.

In lesser hands, this kind of thing is used as an excuse--ropey plotting forgiven as "oh, well, it was all about the characters all the time" is yet another craven defence of really shitty plotting, but in Bebop it had the ring of truth. These were people we came to care about, and when they're gone and there's no more Bebop . . .we'll miss them. The true test of whether people are important to you or not is when you miss them when they're gone.

And we'll miss these guys.

So good thing we have one more time around, eh? Join us next week as we wrap it up good and proper. It's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," the Cowboy Bebop movie for next week. See you then!

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #5

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin? It's time once again for another installment of Witless Prattle's continuing (and halfway over) coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop.

This week, we have what one might consider a bit of a palate cleanser before the finale. These aren't quite as deep an exercise into character as episodes previous to this have been, or indeed as the final three will be, but they're interesting little adventures and are our last opportunity to see the Bebop crew doing their thing . . .well, before what happens happens, that is.

"WILD HORSES"
"Unlike someone else here, I always return what I owe!"

There's a nice bit of foreshadowing in the opening scene of Spike thumbing a ride. It means nothing if you haven't seen the finale episode, but it's been telegraphed a couple times by now, if you've been paying attention.

And talking of foreshadowing and repeated motifs through the series, Jet and Faye are fishing. Well, metaphorically speaking. They're trying to capture a group of space pirates who paralyse their prey with a computer virus delivered through a grappling line (this shouldn't be necessary, but Bebop is not really all that interested in science beyond what's needed to set up the premise) which paralyses the MONO system (a universal control system for ships in the Bebop universe) and allows them to hijack and/or capture said craft.

While we get a decent space battle of it, it's not really the point of the episode, as much as it is to fill in a bit of backstory with Spike and his relationship to Doohan, the man who gave him his fighter, the Swordfish (all the Bebop fighters are named after fish--see what I mean about repated motifs?--the other two are Faye's Redtail and Jet's Hammerhead) Doohan has been drafted as Spike's mechanic, as Spike is pretty reckless with his ship (not unlike every other single thing Spike is involved with) and apparently they've done this song and dance many times--Doohan grumbles about fixing it, Spike says he's not the careful type, lather rinse repeat.

Spike has no great attachment to his ship, which Miles interestingly compares to "being in love with the wrong woman." Spike just harrumphs and says it's just an old she ship he can't seem to get rid of, and aren't there just a dozen ways you could read that?

"Wild Horses" isn't really deep, as much as it is a romp. There are some cool bits--the space fight, the space shuttle Columbia being towed by a tank (OK, that one's more bittersweet) but it's a bit thin on meat (and that CGI model has not aged well) but Bebop, like pizza, is pretty good even what it's average.

"PIERROT LE FOU"
"There's nothing more pure and more cruel as a child."

Man, the promo for this episode is messed up and really sets the tone for how creepy the episode itself is. It is, according to the creators a homage to Batman: The Animated Series, but I'll be damned if I've ever really worked out how, except in the obvious ways and stylistic touches.

Spike, after leaving a pool hall (called, amusingly enough, "C'est La Vie.") has the misfortune to run into Mad Pierrot, the villain of the episode, finishing up his task of murdering a few dozen someones. Pierrot isn't the sort to abide witnesses, and Spike isn't the type to allow himself to get murdered, so they're at loggerheads.

Trouble is, Pierrot has a force field that blocks every kind of attack thrown his way and has more guns on him than a year's subscription to Guns and Ammo. He also fights a bit like Pom Pom from Homestar Runner, which works far better than you'd think.

And Spike ends up a bandaged mess convalescing aboard the Bebop, a situation which even Faye can recall as familiar. But Spike being Spike, he's determined to settle the score with Pierrot whether he's at full force or not.

He toys with Faye by suggesting that this may be the fight he doesn't return from and asks if she'd go to save him, which is just him winding up Faye and if in no way shape or form any kind of foreshadowing. Additionally, all the stuff about eyes in this episode and how the cat that Pierrot is really terrified of has eyes of two different colours has nothing to do with anything. Nope. Not a thing.

"Pierrot Le Fou" is a pretty exciting episode, somewhat trippy and has a very heavy and dark conclusion, but if you think about it for more than five minutes, it looks a bit ramshackle, as all the pieces don't really fit comfortably together, and when the action is not constantly pushing things along, one notices the flaws. But the action and the mise-en-scene are pretty strong, and I find myself liking the episode anyways.

"BOOGIE WOOGIE FENG SHUI"
"Hot dog bun! Not too young!"

Man, this is going to be a short one. An old acquaintance of Jet's ropes him into an overly intricate plot involving his daughter and feng shui. Lots of feng shui.

I'm kinda glad we get one encounter from Jet's past that doesn't end in heartbreak for him, but I gotta be honest--this one doesn't really do it for me. There's a few fitful moments where it might have come together into something interesting--the comparison of feng shui as more active as compared to fortune telling (which bebop has never been shy about portraying as rather futile) and the notion of a treasure hunt with a feng shui twist is an intriguing enough concept.

However, I can't help but feel I would have gotten more out of this if I understood more intimately the underlying concepts of feng shui. But I don't, so it's just kinda . . .there.

"COWBOY FUNK"
"Yeah, and the teddy bear suit wasn't a tip-off at all."

This may be one of the most beloved episodes of the show, now that I think about it. On the trail of a serial bomber known as the Teddy Bomber (who I am contractually obligated to point out--just like everyone else who comments on this episode--is based on the Unabomber) Spike is constantly thwarted by Andy, who, in addition to being an utter lunatic, gets under his skin, because though he won't admit it (and everyone else will) they're very much alike.

Andy and Spike have an interesting relationship--they are alike, but not exactly, as Andy is way more light and upbeat (whether that is the serene certainty of the idiot I leave to you to judge) as compared to Spike. Probably Andy puts it best when he proposes a toast to himself "Reflected in [Faye's] eye." (and isn't that turn of phrase just brimming with meaning)

The whole hunt for Teddy Bomber is a bit of a punchline--whenever Andy and Spike get together, they're almost as destructive in their way as Teddy Bomber is, and the whole running gag of Teddy Bomber getting interrupted every time he's about to deliver his reasons for his bombing spree, it's basically the episode intentionally marginalising what one is led to beleive is the main focus of the episode.

"Cowboy Funk" is a lot of fun and carries a surprising amount of weight in terms of character insight, but doesn't bog itself down in trying to make itself seem more profound than it it is with a lot of forced melodrama. Andy is a one-shot character who doesn't outstay his welcome and manages to shed a little light on what Spike would be if he were just a little different.

That is--he would be utterly ridiculous.

And that's it for now. Join us next week when we finish out the series proper, and owing to spoilers, I'm not gonna tip my hand about what awaits. It's "Brain Scratch"; "Hard Luck Woman" and "The Real Folk Blues, Parts 1 and 2." Join us then!

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #4

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin? It's time once again for another installment of Witless Prattle's continuing (and halfway over) coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop.

Before we get too far along with that, I want to say something about the Bebop movie and when we'll be covering it. I know that continuity-wise it comes somewhere in between the final clutch of episodes, but I'm going to covering in the order of its release, partly because it breaks up my neat little orderly system for reviewing these things by DVD and also because really . . .I like the movie, it's awesome, but it's less an actual story and more like a curtain call for Bebop. Which is fine, and well-deserved. I see now reason why I shouldn't treat it like what it is.

I'm just glad they didn't do anything stupid, like a make a prequel that's three times as long that only serves to wring more blood from the proverbial turnip and makes the implicit explicit. If such a thing will happen, I sure hope I am a pile of ashes in a paperweight on someone's shelf when it does.

So with that said, let's get on with this week's episodes, shall we?

"MY FUNNY VALENTINE"
"Your story needs editing."

The first of our two Faye episodes actually provide some backstory for her, and don't feature her getting tied up. There's a novelty. It also starts off by juxtaposing her origins against the fate of some frozen fish--not the only time this week that Faye is metaphorically tied to fish, oddly enough.

The meat of this episode calls back to her lesson from "Toys in the Attic"--"Nothing good ever happened to her when she trusted someone." This is the story behind that particularly cynical bromide, as we learn that Faye was thawed out of cryogenic suspension, with no memory of her life before she'd been frozen, trusted and maybe fell in love with her insurance caseworker, Whitney Haggis Matsumoto who runs a con on her an turns her already considerable debt into figures best expressed with scientific notation.

There's an undercurrent in this episode that eventually everything comes back on you. Whiney conned Faye, which has caused Faye to become something of a (rather unsuccessful) con artist, the doctor hunting Whitney steals a police car and pretends to be a cop when they're trying to turn him in for the bounty. Likewise, Whitney, like Faye, has had to continually reinvent himself and concoct new identities while he's been on the run.

Faye does it, of course, because she can't remember her past. The real tragedy of her character is that she owes everything but she has absolutely nothing. There's a concrete answer to that in that what she owes and doesn't have is "money," but it goes deeper than that. Lacking a past, lacking any grounding or any place to belong (that she feels comfortable in) she kinda. . .fills in. Even Spike says her past is always changing, and he'd know better than anyone.

I do like that the song accompanying Whitney and Faye's montage is slightly off-key and arrhythmic. Very appropriate, that.

"My Funny Valentine" is a bubbly episode, kinda funny, but ultimately tragic. We'll revisit Faye's backstory a little later on (and it won't have the soft cushion of farce when we get there) but this is the first definitive clues we've got to her past and why she is the way she is. It's also great that she's allowed to be the feature of an episode in an episode wherein the word "Featured" doesn't mean "Tied up."

"BLACK DOG SERANADE"
"This ship is my ship, and this arm is my arm. I don't need instructions."

Jet Black suffers some more.

If Bebop has themes--and it has a lot of them--one of the crucial ones may be that however hard you try, the past always comes back on you--in some cases, rather violently. No greater illustration of this can be found than in the first shot of this episode, wherein a prison door won't stay closed. . .because one of several murdered men is blocking it from shutting.

Seems a mutiny has happened on a prison ship (I like that the prison ship is designed like a Tommy Gun. Nice touch) and one of the heads of the mutiny is Udai, an assassin for the Syndicates who is the man Jet blames for losing his arm. and on that arm hangs a tale . . .

Jet's old partner wants his friend to team up and stop the mutiny. Both of them are well past their best years, as is Udai, who Jet says "doesn't belong in this day and age," and Jet tries to distance himself from going after him as "old news" and "past the statute of limitations." But the past is not so easily escaped from.

And Jet's not averse to trying to escape. The fact that he doesn't feel pain when his cigarette burns down between the fingertips of his arm, even though Faye points out her could repair it and feel again, is a telling detail--Jet lives in denial because that's the only way he can live. He denies his past in much the same way he complains and grouses about the crew of the Bebop (you know, the people he welcomes back whenever they run off and helps even though it gains them nothing) For whatever reason, Jet can't say how he feels anymore.

Of course, given what we learn this time, who can blame him? Udai didn't shoot Jet and cost him his arm, his partner did. For the second time this series, Jet's opened himself up and depended on someone. . .and it's hurt him in ways external and internal. And circumstances conspire to force this issue to a head--it's no secret that as Jet gets close to Udai on board the prison ship, the bulkheads close in tighter and tighter, sealing them off.

I also like that when the secret comes out, it's cut in a way that makes it seem like Jet's partner shoots Udai from the flashback. It's a very concrete illustration of the idea of the past doing violence on the present, and a great homage to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which used the same effect.

"Black Dog Seranade" is a great episode. It has some fantastic action sequences, it has a very meaty and noirish story, and it provides some background on Jet, which we don't get much of, mainly due to the fact that Jet's usually filling the role of "person reacting to all the crazy people around him." It also frames the tragedy of Jet's character--because of all the stuff that's happened to him, he can't just come out and say he likes Spike and the rest of the gang, because look what's happened when he's trusted people in the past.

"MUSHROOM SAMBA"
"Pieces, pieces--all gone!"

So after two heavy episodes, with one more to come, how about some good old-fashioned tomfoolery to cleanse the palate, eh? How better then, to shake things up than letting Ed and Ein go off on their own adventure and sideline the rest of the cast by having them trip balls on mushrooms.

As I said before, plot is not generally all that big a deal in Bebop, and here's another great example. The episode pretty much subverts the crisis do jour whenever it rears its ugly head--Domino the mushroom smuggler is a dolt, the Shaft Brother even moreso, and Pam Grier's here because there is never not a good time to have a Pam Grier homage show up. You're not really meant to take any of it seriously.

It also has two songs most likely to get stuck in your head for long periods of time in "Mushroom Hunting":



and "Chicken Bone"



It also has Ed running like a maniac. I could watch that all day.

Because this is Bebop, and even their less serious episodes swing some dramatic weight, and we get these, idiosyncratically enough, in the form of mushroom-induced hallucinations. Spike walks up an endless staircase that a talking frog tells him is "the stairway to heaven." Faye dreams that the toilet floods the bathroom and she's swimming with fish (Hm, there's that imagery again) and Jet talks philosophy with his bonsai trees and eats a lipstick because they can't all be thick with meaning.

Oh, and Ein can talk to cows because of course he can.

"Mushroom Samba" is a great, lighthearted episode, and is fondly remembered because it's almost entirely occupied with just having fun, which is one of the many things Bebop does very well indeed: it's never afraid to be silly in a way that's light and playful but doesn't turn into parody. Plus--two songs you will never ever get out of your head again! How's that for a slice of fried gold?

"SPEAK LIKE A CHILD"
"The real value of a treasure like this can't be determined by looking at it."

There's something apt about the visual metaphor of this episode: Rabbits. The Rabbit Delivery Service is the one who delivers the package (C.O.D., of course) that touches the plot off, and Faye spends most of the episode at the dog track, watching the dogs chasing a rabbit which, naturally they will never get. Faye's talked a lot about meaninglessness and pointlessness, and this is as apt an illustration of that as anything.

Equally apt is that the package in question has a Betamax tape in it. It's not enough that most of the cast is completely dislocated in time, but now even their flashbacks are. Jet even alludes to the legend of the Tamatebako, which involves a man disappearing and reappearing so many years later that everything is utterly changed.

Who on this show does that remind you of?

While the show, to it's credit, constantly subverts that the tape is some kind of Big Secret--the fact that Faye takes off while Spike and Jet do their big wacky scavenger hunt for a Betamax player (only to get one in the mail)--it's pretty much treated as an afterthought . . .

. . .which makes the emotional gut-punch at the end that much more deeply felt. Because the tape is a message Faye recorded for herself as a young girl, wondering about who she is now and cheerfully telling her not to forget the person she was, which is exactly what she's done.

Thankfully, this is also underplayed and it's allowed to play out without a bunch of Claremontian melodrama and rending of garments. The point of the episode and the series as a whole is summed up in the preview of this episode "What conclusions do you draw from it?" The information on the tape doesn't give you any specifics about Faye's past, but it gives you tons of detail about her character.

And that's all for this week. Join us next week when we have an utterly improbable guest star in "Wild Horses"; One of the most terrifying one-shot characters ever appears in "Pierrot Le Fou"; Jet has a somewhat lighter feature episode than usual in "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui": and Spike meets his utterly ridiculous opposite number in "Cowboy Funk." See you then!

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #3

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system--how y'all doin'? It's time once again for another installment of Witless Prattle's comprehensive coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop. This week, we look at the end of the first "season" (more or less) of Bebop, and move on to the second half, and have a quartet of episodes wherein things are not what they seem.

In other words, just another week of episodes, really.

"TOYS IN THE ATTIC"
"So what else could it be but a horrible alien, huh?"

I used to hate this episode because it seemed to go on and on and it seemed like a stock horror plot with a dash of "Alien" grafted on to "Bebop." Didn't help that it came after "Ganymede Elegy," which I loved so much.

This was a few watch-throughs before I twigged on to the fact that for the most part, plots don't mean shit in Bebop, and they're merely vehicles for characters, and this episode was meant as a character showcase.

So let's knock the plot out the way: Spike's left something in the fridge for a year, and it comes to life, gets out, and starts biting everyone on the Bebop. Spike eventually gets the fridge out of the ship so we can have a 2001: A Space Odyssey homage, and Ed eats the purple blob thing.

The real goal of "Toys" is to shine a light on each of the characters as they deal with some "empty time."--a long hitch of traveling in space, boredom has set in--well, before the blob thing gets loose. Jet loses his shirt (literally) gambling with Faye (who, as is her wont, cheats) and delivers the first of four lessons that frame the episode. Jet's lesson is that anyone who goes in for getting rich quick is going to pay a high price in karma, which he's just paid, of course. Whether he includes Faye in this I leave for you to speculate.

Faye's lesson is that nothing good ever happened to her when she trusted someone, which will make oodles more sense when we start looking at her character in more detail in the later episodes. Faye also gets bitten by the blob thing in the bathtub, because the blob thing was not able to tie her up, I guess.

Ed's lesson is "If you see a stranger, follow him." This is pretty cut and dried, because that's exactly what Ed did when she came aboard the Bebop. Bear in mind, of course, that Ed is even more strange than the collective rest of the Bebop crew. She has no more luck with the blob-thing than anyone else, but then again, it really isn't the point.

Spike's lesson is the last one we hear, and the one that closes the episode, is perfectly in keeping with his character's ongoing repudiation of the idea of any mysticism/predestination/etc. We saw him not take the shaman's warning seriously in "Asteroid Blues," say him scoff at the words of Wen in "Sympathy for the Devil," and so his lesson is the eminently practical admonition that you shouldn't leave things in the fridge.

On the face of it, it's obviously a wink to the audience not to take any of this all that seriously, though if one is so inclined, one could look at it as foreshadowing as if you keep something in your past secret, it can easily come back to bite you later.

Not that that kind of thing ever happens on this show, right?

"JUPITER JAZZ"
"I have no luck with them--I'd rather be an armadillo"

Man, the first two scenes of this two parter are murderously awful. They may actually be the shittiest in all of Bebop, but I don't like to dwell on the negative. The Indian mystic stuff is so agonisingly on the nose (even moreso because its reprised at the end of part 2) and has none of the counterpoint stuff that "Asteroid Blues" had, so we're meant to take it seriously, and there is no damn way that one can take at all seriously any more than that My Little Pony episode where they tried to talk about Manifest Destiny.

This is then followed by an equally embarrassing scene of leaden exposition where we are reintroduced to Vicious and Lin, who fails to make an impression in any meaningful way (which is a shame, as he's somewhat more important) because the exposition chews it all up. Here's what I know--Vicious is dispatched to Callisto to broker a drug deal with a man he knows. Lin is sent along because the heads of the Red Dragons don't trust him and go on and on about how Vicious is a snake and Vicious tells Lin he should be prepared to betray him and can we please get on with this?

OK, back at the Bebop, Faye has ripped off the ship and run off with all their money. Naturally, Jet wants to get the money back (Faye he can take or leave) but in the process of getting that plot off and running, Spike hears the name "Julia," and heads off for Callisto, but not before having a knock-down drag-out fight with Jet, who throws him off the ship and we're left to fret that their bromance may never be the same now.

The fact that, in trying to track down what "Codename Julia" is, Spike runs into a transvestite named Julius and there's that whole weird scene where Gren (our nominal main character) tells Faye that if you don't say "take care" when someone sneezes you turn into a fairy really makes me wonder about the subtext of this episode, at times.

We get a good fight wherein we learn that comparing Spike to Vicious will cause him to murder your ass, and he finally faces off with Vicious, but rather than their protracted fight as they had in "Ballad of Fallen Angels," Lin steps between them and shoots Spike dead.

Oh, and Faye finds out that Gren has boobs, because Faye is unable not to be nosy.

We get an explanation for some of this in part 2, which is good, as this episode has really been struggling not to be shapeless. Gren is trying to set up a trap for Vicious, because Vicious saved his life when they were soldiers on Titan and Gren thought that meant they were buddies, but Vicious actually set him up for charges of treason and led to him getting moobs. Concurrent with the man-boobs, Gren is also terminally ill in that oh-so-Japanese way where you look really weak and wan and cough up blood occasionally--it's a good non-specific symptom, and they're a real big believer in it. In any event, Gren is trapped by the past and declares he's both at once, and neither," which on the surface seems to refer to his extra attributes, but in a larger sense, he exists as a distillation of the Bebop crew and their driving struggles to escape their pasts.

There's a nice callback to the end of "Ballad of Fallen Angels" with Spike having feathers (black, this time) raining on him as he wakes up--Lin shot him with a trank dart and we get a few more nuggets about Spike's past--his eyes are two different colours and his left eye sees the past. Spike lays out his plan to leave the Red Dragons to Julia and asks her to come with him, but she can't. Vicious says to someone "I'm the only one who can keep you alive and the only one who can kill you," which is true for more than one person in this series, I'd wager.

Anyways, never mind all the foreshadowing for a bit, we must get on with things. Gren knocks out Faye and ties her up because it;s been two episodes and the withdrawal was killing them. Gren stages a drug deal to give him a chance to face Vicious and ask him why he sold him out, but Vicious sneers that "there's nothing in this world to believe in" and gets Lin killed, because when your mentor's name is Vicious, you kind of expect that and they'd telegraphed it so blatantly my neighbours complained about the excessive foreshadowing and asked could I turn it down please.

Anyways, we get a good fight in the skies above Callisto, Gren gets killed but wants to be sent out to space to return to his past again and the god damned Indians are back to tell us that the falling star is the tear of a warrior and . . . hey, you know what? The song that plays over the credits, "Space Lion" is actually pretty damn good!



Right, well. "Jupiter Jazz" has the makings of a good episode of Cowboy Bebop. So why is it two? It feels extraordinarily padded, and while it has some good dramatic beats and foreshadows a lot of what's to come for everyone, since you don't really know any of that until you get there, you have a two-parter that feels a bit bloated and overlong and the stuff you do learn isn't doled out evenly enough to keep it all lively. I don't hate it . . .but there are a lot of other episode's I'd just as soon watch.

"BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY"
"This is either an idiot or a genius!"

Someone has enacted an insanely intricate plan to punish the manufacturers of the astral gates that make hyperspace travel possible.

If ever there was one episode which blatantly undermined it's own plot, it's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here is an episode which, while it's going on, basically proves that it's plot is inconsequential when it reveals that the person who planned out this incredibly baroque plot to get back at them . . .is now too senile to really even remember that he did it.

Not only does the plot stand revealed as an intricate but ultimately pointless endeavour, but it actually negates itself. One should admire that kind of gusto, I think, really. There's a really good bit at the end where you get the idea that Spike kind of admires Hex (the literal and figurative chessmaster behind the gate plot) because in completely forgetting his past, he's able to live with a freedom he can't even imagine. It's a subtle thing, but if this episode is truly "about" anything . . .it's probably that.

Also--Ed claps with her bare feet, because of course she does.

I also like that in the future you will have an entire space colony dedicated to growing and smoking marijuana, and I'm certain that will probably be the next Harold and Kumar movie or something.

In any event, that's the end of this week's installment! Join us next week when we get more Faye backstory (in a way that may or may not involve her being tied up--it's hard to know, really) in "My Funny Valentine"; Jet gets into a plot so noirish it might as well take place at midnight in a coal mine in "Black Dog Serenade"; EVERYONE GETS HIGH and also Pam Grier in "Mushroom Samba"; and we end where we begin with "Speak Like A Child." Until then, why don't you go and have a sandwich?

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #2

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin'? It's now time for Big Sh--oooh, almost got too caught up in the bit. This is Witless Prattle's continuing coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop, because you demanded it. Both of you. This week, we continue on, and imagine my surprise when I was watching these and taking notes that damn near every single episode pivots on the themes of "time" (don't worry--there are plenty of eye motifs also) I don't know if it was intentional, but it runs right through all five of them, and that's good, as it gives us something to talk about.

So let's get right down to the heart of this thing.

"SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL"
"A baby hipster--very cool!"

I'm sure Spike's odd little flashback wherein he apparently got an artificial eye will in no way shape or form really ever be germane to anything, will it? This whole episode seems like yet another "The Bebop crew gets roped into some weird plot that has a bounty attached to it and solve the immediate problem, but fail to collect the bounty" thing, but damn if it isn't positively drenched in foreshadowing from the first scene on.

Spike and Jet are taking in the music of a kid named Wen, who has an amazing facility with the harmonica, specifically in the realm of blues. Jet's into it, as he's been singing the blues since the day he was born, so he says (and given what we see of Jet's past, that may not be much of an exaggeration) They're also trying to take down a bounty of course, but that goes pear-shaped, as usual, as they get wrapped in old business that is intimately tied into some of the backstory of the Cowboy Bebop universe.

You see, about 80 years before the show began, they fired up the first hyperspace gate and blew up the moon, creating a constant shower of debris that rain down on Earth without fail and also, for reasons even Jet has trouble wrapping his head around, "froze" Wen as a young boy. Worse still, he can't die, and he's turned into a bit of a nutcase.

Meanwhile, Faye makes a point to Ein about how women need to be pampered whilst wolfing down a can of dog food. You may feel free to apply your own reading of that scene here.

Jet later tells her that "Betrayal comes easy to women, but men live by iron codes of honor." Faye asks him if he really believes that and Jet says he's trying to. This scene means little for this episode, but it's as revelatory about Jet as it gets, and we're not gonna long wait to see that.

Wen is a very literal metaphor for time and how messed up you get if you're "stuck" in one point in time. Recall that Vicious was caught up in the past and kept dealing in ways that just weren't right anymore, and in not dissimilar ways, Wen is also caught in a destructive pattern, where he can't die, and he's lived way too long, and he's gotten a bit indifferent to anyone but himself.

To his credit, spike shoots him in the head. It doesn't take alas, and Wen already shot him in the arm, which leads to a scene where Jet's patching him up and spike apologises . . .but for what we're encouraged to speculate.

The guy who got Spike and co. roped up in this mess, a man named Giraffe (who was trying to save his friend Zebra--neither black nor white, as the plot of this episode is") has a ring with a very special stone, a stone that can return time to Wen.

There are about a dozen ways in which to do this, but Spike knows what makes good drama, and gets one single bullet made and tags Wen in the head, and just so we tie in the whole "devil child" motif that's run through the whole episode, there's a big fire roaring around them when he does so.

Fortunately it works and Wen goes all Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on us, whispering to Spike that he feels "heavy" and yet at peace (this will be contrasted later with the final song in the show. . .I did say this was layered with foreshadowing) and Spike flips Wen's harmonica up in the air and shoots it with his finger whispering "bang."

Ah, that's odd. Oh well, I'm sure it won't be important later.

This episode is not that bad, really, but works much better if you've already seen the series once. If you haven't, then it's a passable mystery with a few good hooks and a very grim noirish style to it that really keeps the episode moving along. It's nothing that hasn't been done before, but . . .well, that's not really the point.

"HEAVY METAL QUEEN"
"It's called heavy metal. It's quite soothing."

First things first: This song is rad as all hell:



"Heavy Metal Queen" is all about how a space trucker named V.T. is all sorts of awesome. She can kick ass with the best of them (In this case Spike, running a few gears lower this time because he's got a vicious hangover) and can pilot a space truck through a collapsing asteroid. He name means "victory dance" (sorta) for Christ's sake.

But less explosively, she's on her second life, much like spike. Her husband was an infamous bounty hunter who died, and then she became a trucker. Likewise, Spike was a criminal who became a bounty hunter. V.T.'s done all she can, to the point of hiding her real name so much that it's turned into a game for people to guess her name.

The interplay between the two of them is the dramatic heart of the episode (while the action is totally bitchin, it's framed by V.T. and Spike's interaction) V.T. hates bounty hunters and initially wants nothing to do with Spike when she finds out he's one. Spike did all he could to not be like Vicious (He'd "bled all that kind of blood" away, after all) and yet. . .it's V.T. who saves Spike when he recklessly ejects himself into the hard vacuum if space and nearly gets himself killed and it's Spike who figures out V.T.'s real name--"Victoria Terpsichore" ("Victoria"="Victory" and Terpsichore is the muse of dance. The More You Know . . .) while one of Bebop's themes is that your past is not so easy to outrun with a simple change of address, in this episode, we have a more benign version of that.

This is part of a subset of Bebop episodes throughout the run that are character studies wherein the main cast is paired up with a one-shot character and we're invited to examine the both of them working together (or against each other) in such a way as to allow us the luxury of comparing and contrasting them. Of course, there's still plenty of great action and atmosphere here and the episode is well worth a look.

"WALTZ FOR VENUS"
"He was a great guy. Exactly like the person you thought he was."

Well, for those of you keeping track of all the eye imagery in Bebop, this episode is about as on the nose as you could get short of 22 minutes of Spike kicking a giant eyeball. We start with Spike stopping a hijacking (after being rudely awoken--I like this his sleep blindfold has eye painted on the outside) and runs into Rocco, who is so blown away by Spike, he annoys him into teaching him some of his fancy moves (and Spike takes the opportunity to drop a little Burce Lee on him) and more importantly, gets Spike to hold his MacGuffin for him, and draws Spike into the plot, which is full of eye and vision metaphors.

Rocco, you see, has a sister who's been blind because of a rare condition which affects people on Venus. He's stolen a plant from the group of thieves who were looking to sell it for huge amounts of money, because it can be synthesized into a cure for her blindness.

There's a couple of hooks here--we have all the eye imagery and important plot elements hinge on a music box (this will be important later) Rocco's fate is foreshadowed by a shot so long it must be deliberate of Spike looking at a sign that says "Observation: You can see one off" moments after they talk.

Rocco appeals to Spike's mercy and compassion, Spike insists he's all out. His actions this episode give the lie to that. Rocco's sister, Stella, after meeting Spike says there's something beautiful inside him (just like her brother) Spike says he doesn't beleive that.

Rocco's attempt to help his sister gets him killed, and we have an intriguing bit where he wonders if he and Spike had met earlier would he have turned out different (again, time and timing at play) which, given what we already know about Spike, could be taken many different ways, I imagine.

The final scene, where Spike visits Stella in the hospital is rather sad, but features an interesting line from Spike, which was the quote of this episode, and it's a telling idea--that what a person "looks like" has as much (maybe more) to do with the image the seer has of the person than actually seeing them.

This is actually a much-beloved episode by people other than me. I find myself wanting to like it more than I actually end up liking it. It has some good ideas and is rather thought-provoking, but it never quite clicks together for me.

"JAMMING WITH EDWARD"
"Always alone."

In which Spike answers a question before he asks it, and the Bebop gets a new crew member.

Here's more eye imagery--specifically the HAL-like "eye" of MPU, a satellite that apparently got self-aware, then got bored and starting drawing the Nazca lines on South America out of . . .nostalgia? It's not entirely clear, but then it's not meant to be. The actual answer is much more intriguing, but we'll get to that in a bit.

We learn a little more about what happened to Earth after the gate accident--apparently it rains moon-rocks there like, all the damn time, and everyone on Earth is a little strange, not least of which Edward herself (it blows my mind that the English voice actor for Ed was also Gaz on Invader Zim. Talk about establishing two opposing poles. . . ) who is a genius hacker despite the notable handicap of being absolutely insane.

It's Ed who makes contact with (and names) MPU, whose habit of going all Banksy with the laser satellites surrounding Earth and who becomes their means of communicating with the crew of the Bebop, who are there to collect the bounty on MPU (which goes up in smoke, because satellites aren't sentient, according to the police. I hate when I lose money due to issues of philosophy) in the best tradition of these kinds of capers, no one on the Bebop really gets the idea of hacking, which allows for Jet to get this zinger off on Faye:

"It may have been that way when you were young, but that was a long time ago."

Yeah, it seems like not much of a sick burn, but if I wrote it down in my notes, that meant it was probably some kinda foreshadowing.

Tying into our theme for this week, MPU is trying to recapture the past Earth and the strange drawings he used to see from up in orbit. You're not really a Bebop character unless you're trying to live in or escape from some period of time, are you?

So the Bebop crew "captures" MPU more or less and in trying to puzzle out what a satellite was doing drawing things in the Earth, and Spike answers quite plainly: "It was lonely, so it drew itself some friends." Think about that and then look at the scene where, as he did the previous two times, Spike's complained about a new crew-member on the Bebop. I refuse to believe this isn't intentional.

We get another great line from Faye about how "some promises are made to be broken--in fact, most of them are." Which tells you a lot about how she views promises (yet she's frequently bailed out Spike and co. even when it wouldn't possibly profit her. Funny, that)

This is the intro of Ed, and Ed episodes tend to follow their own surreal childlike logic, and this episode is no exception. There's a weird sense of playfulness to the episode (bitchin' action scene with Spike flying in to capture MPU notwithstanding) and the whole thing has a breezy gentleness to it--since the bad guy's not really bad and he doesn't really get caught either. Plus, Ed will slowly be driving nearly every member of the crew crazy, so there's that to look forward to as well.

"GANYMEDE ELEGY"
"I live and wander with a group of weirdos"

I wonder sometimes is Jet Black isn't the most tragic character in the entire show. Oh, we'd like to think it's spike, or it's Faye, but consider this: Jet continually does the right thing over and over again and he seems to get nothing but misery out of it. We'll see more of this in "Black Dog Serenade," but this is the first really detailed look we get into his past and his life.

Of the quintet of episodes this time around, this is the one most blatantly about "time." Part of that has to do with the pocket watch Jet carries, frozen on the moment in time where the woman he loved, Alisa, left him.

Bit on the nose, sure, but then the whole episode is about being frozen in a moment in the past. Jet's great gift--he's nicknamed "the Black Dog" because one he gets his teeth into something he never lets go--is also the thing that causes him the most pane in this episode--he's stuck in this moment, and the reason Alisa left him was because he was so rigidly overprotective, she felt like a child.

I'm not sure she exactly traded up, but that's kinda pointless to the larger themes at work. That theme, as well as time, is futility. Faye puts it best when describing her suntanning routine thus:"Beautiful skin can only be maintained by tireless efforts which are ultimately futile." That she's telling Ed this while Ed tries to unsuccessfully fish and Jet fails to get much closure from the whole business with Alisa.

While he does ultimately toss the pocket watch in the water, understanding at last that time can't stand still, that this knowledge gives him any peace at all is unlikely. While we move on, and can ultimately let go of things, the notion that it gives you any kind of "closure" is probably wishful thinking, and more likely, as Jet says, "little by little, a part of you just goes numb."

And on that rather down note, we're going to leave it there. Join us next week when we learn some valuable lessons in "Toys in the Attic:; groove on through the mid-season finale (kinda) in "Jupiter Jazz, Parts 1 and 2"; and get caught in a landslide, no escape from reality in "Bohemian Rhapsody." See you in 7.

The Whole Damn Thing: COWBOY BEBOP #1

. . .well, it was the clear winner of my "what shall I review next?" contest (with two whole votes. My majorities are generally silent) so I guess we have to do it. Plus, at a neat seven weeks, this'll hold us until we get to Mad Men's 5th season starting in March. Here, for your entertainment and edification, we here at Witless Prattle will be covering the entire run of the rather awesome anime (awesome especially for people who generally don't like anime) Cowboy Bebop.

First, a brief word about how I'm going to be covering this: Typically, I tend to do long rambling intros with information about the character and the background of the series and all that. Not going to be doing it this time, as half of what makes Cowboy Bebop so good is that you're not really given a whole lot of backstory about the world or the characters.

Rather than that feeling like half-baked storytelling, it's . . .not, really, and I'm going to attempt, and in all likelihood fail to explain it. You're given certain impressions of the main cast, and expected to make up your own mind about it. The goal is not to give you the kind of backstory you could pull off a Wikipedia entry, but to give you a sense of the person, and as you watch Bebop, draw your own conclusions about what's what.

Typically, I hate that kind of thing, but they make it work here. It's not unlike Blade Runner, wherein the story behind the story is

Oh yeah, another programming note. I reserve the right to stop the reviews at any time and draw your attention to certain selections in the soundtrack. Because it is (along with the soundtrack for FLCL) an amazing soundtrack, full of multiple genres, and it easily transcends genre and indeed its parent anime and can fully be enjoyed on its own.

I have a LOT of Bebop music on my MP3 player.

Okay, let's get right to the heart of this thing!

"ASTEROID BLUES"
"This is all very mystic and all, but do you have anything to eat?"

First things first, we need to address this stuff at the start--There are two kinds of people: Those who think "Tank!" is an absolutely banging thing to play over the intro to your TV show, and assholes:



After a flashback which is terribly stylish but doesn't mean too much to us [yet] we meet our heroes, Spike Speigel, the lanky green-haired guy who might remind you of Lupin III and Jet Black, who may remind you of Daisuke Jigen (If you have no idea who either of those people are, it's not that important, just recognising the general reference for both characters) Spike and Jet are broke and hungry, being that they're bounty hunters in space and while they're pretty good at their job, they have a tendency to cause so much damage in the doing of it that any profits.

One of the things you don't really notice about the series as a whole until you've seen it through a time or two is the recurring eye motif that's sprinkled throughout, from the eye-shape of the exit to the hyperspace gate, the iris in the intro, to the way this episode's villain, Asimov uses his super-drug Bloody Eye--by spraying it into his eye, which somehow gives him, well, kinda-superpowers.

Asimov and his girlfriend have picked an out of the way place to compete a Bloody Eye deal, but really, the plot's not super-important, except as a vehicle for the characters to do their thing. In this case, it's to give Spike a big showcase and let us in on some things about him which we won't be able to contextualise until we're a bit further along.

For now, all we have are an allusion he makes that he was killed by a woman before, no one seems to know when he's joking or not (which he uses frequently in this first brace of episodes to cause people to underestimate him) and my God does he kick a lot of ass. He's the only person that Asimov, all hopped-up on eyedrops can't murder outright, and is so good, in fact, he actively seems to be messing with him in various moments.

Ultimately though, as frequently happens in Bebop, the situation spirals out of Spike and Jet's control, and there's an intriguing callback to the prophecy of "being killed by a woman" that unspools in a way not precisely as you'd expect.

This is a pretty good intro to the series. It gives you a clear picture of these characters and what they do, even if the "why" is not entirely clear. It rolls along at a pretty fierce clip, has some amazing action scenes, and the music is pretty damn awesome. You won't be able to make much sense of the clues about Spike until you've seen the final episode, but really, you have to approach Bebops as being more a story of the journey and not the destination, as after 26 episodes with these people, a lot of the heavy lifting about what it all means is going to be left to the viewer to draw his own conclusions.

Oh yeah, and the song over the end credits, "The Real Folk Blues," was what made me fall in love with this show.



"STRAY DOG STRUT"
"SHIT! THIS IS WHY I HATE PETS!

If "Asteroid Blues" was a slick but very thin noirish episode, "Stray Dog Strut" goes pretty much in the direction of pure comedy. Essentially, it's Spike chasing after a dog and a guy who looks like Kareem Abdul-Jabar for 22 minutes. It's dressed up with a lot of hugger-mugger about the dog in question being a "data dog," which sounds impressive, but is rather light on actual facts.

The data dog in question is an adorably precocious Welsh Corgi named Ein, who takes an immediate liking to Spike (much to Spike's irritation) and seems to be pretty adept at getting himself out of scrapes. Ein becomes the first new crew member on the Bebop (Jet's ship) and thus begins a recurring theme of them getting new crew members who don't profit them at all, and even though they complain the whole time . . .Spike and Jet never really seem to get around to throwing them off the ship.

For the second time in as many episodes, there are attempts at prophecy or divination that don't quite come off as you'd imagine, partly because they're so vague they could mean anything, and also because by the time the person finally spits it out, it's not the future anymore.

"Stray Dog Strut" is generally lighthearted, and even the soundtrack underlies that, featuring ska-style music over the final chase and the brassy tune, "Want It All Back" that plays over the first:



If you go into it looking for a frothy stylish caper show, you'll get a lot out of it. Just be aware that this kind of mood whiplash is the norm for this show.

"HONKY TONK WOMEN"
"Somehow, I don't think Charlie Parker'd be quoting Goethe."

Enter Faye Valentine, the Fujiko Mine of the show, if you're still doing the Lupin III comparisons. Frequently, and most especially in this episode and the one following she's as much an ally as an affable adversary--she's perfectly willing to snooker the Bebop crew out of a fat bounty as she is to beg them for help when she ends up broke and stranded--Faye being up to her eyeballs in debt is a common theme with her.

Faye doesn't have a past as such, or not one she's willing to share (or, as we discover later, entirely comprehends) except we know from her dealings with Gordon the casino boss this episode that she's assumed to be the legendary Poker Alice. Faye points out if she was, she'd be 200 years old, which is . . .not really a denial. Later on she claims to Spike and Jet that she's a gypsy, which is not technically true, and yet . . .

The caper this time out is that Faye is hired by Gordon to cheat at cards and get a special poker chip--one which contains a smaller microchip with the ultimate decryption program on it (Hopefully the irony of a program which is designed to reveal all things kept secret on a show where the amount of things kept secret could fill a small building if you printed it out is not lost on you) Spike very helpfully swallows the chip and keeps it out of Faye's hands (he can cough it up at will, which he demonstrated earlier in the episode, in a nice subtle touch) and they try to sell it back to Gordon for a higher fee than Faye's bounty.

The denouement of this takes place in space, and features one of the coolest things about bebop--here's a show that understands that space has three dimensions and there is no real "up." This is shown off in a very elaborate action climax which features Spike fighting in an EVA suit on Gordon's ship while the Bebop is inverted above/below (depending on your perspective) it. Pretty gnarly.

While Faye hasn't technically joined the Bebop crew yet, she's been drawn into their orbit, which we'll see play out in the very next episode. This episode continues the early run of the show's predilections for flashy, stylish action sequences that offer plenty of opportunities for the cast to strut their stuff and it plays really well. We're getting a few crumbs of clues about who they are, but there's still a few pieces to put into place yet . . .

"GATEWAY SHUFFLE"
"I don't know and I have no opinion."

Spike and Jet try to stop a group of environmental terrorists from turning everyone into primates with a genetically engineered virus. Faye helps for purely mercenary reasons, and naturally ends up with nothing because that's just how these things go.

This is the first instance of something which happens again in the movie--while trying to collect on a bounty, Spike and Jet get snatched up in something that is wayyyyy above their level--in this case, biological warfare.

I should also add that the head of the Space Warriors terrorists, Twinkle Maria Murdock, is this year's recipient of the Daisy O'Mega Cool Yet Ridiculous Name Award, even if she is a stuck-up bitch who ends up not being a smart as she thought she was.

Spike, however, gets to show off why underestimating him is such a dangerous thing, as his initially reckless attempts to open up an ampule of the virus, which seems like it would be a hatefully dangerous thing to do, but he's actually doing it to watch Murdock's reactions to it--thus, he knows it's dangerous enough for her to worry about, which comes in handy later.

We get a cool space battle (in hyperspace!) as well, the denouement of which fills us in a little on how hyperspace works in the Cowboy Bebop universe. I quite like that we get little bits of world-building like that with such economy.

Faye also joins the crew in much the same way that Ein did--with Spike and Jet bitching about it the whole time. Also as with Ein, while she gets on their nerves, they don't seem in so much of a hurry to throw her off the ship (the punchline of this episode notwithstanding) which says as much as what they do.

"BALLAD OF FALLEN ANGELS"
" . . .you sing off-key."

And now here's the episode that starts answering a lot of questions about Spike, and as with the best kinds of those episodes, it brings up twice as many questions.

The teaser from last episode makes explicit a recurring motif of Spike's--that he's living a dream he can't wake up from. This will ultimately hit a critical mass at the finale of the series, but we're a way's away from it, and this is only the leading edge.

A man named Mao Yenrai, who works for the Red Dragon Syndicate, is murdered just as he makes peace with a rival syndicate by a man named Vicious, who, and I may be reaching here, is the Goemon of the show, with a little Captain Harlock thrown in. Vicious is a horrifically amoral killer who takes a quiet glee in killing people. More on him later.

Before he dies, Yenrai gets off a good line about how times have changed and the kind of bloodletting that Vicious deals in have to stop, which is a good bit, and ties into this episode's recurring bloody imagery and the notion of characters who are locked in specific times, which applies neatly to about 80% of the cast, now that I think about it.

There's a bounty out for Yenrai, and Spike's resolved to go after it. Jet balks at it, wanting no part of anything that dangerous, but Spike's still resolved to go. It's obvious there's something else at work here, but Spike isn't talking. When Jet presses him on it, Spike reflects the question by asking how Jet got his artificial arm. Neither is willing to answer the other, which is kind of the problem underpinning this episode.

As Spike's leaving, Jet notices that he dropped a card--the Ace of Spades.

Also known as the death card. Ah well, probably means nothing.

Faye, coming in at the 11th hour and not really caring about their tiff, looks at the dollar signs for Yenrai and, in trying to collect the bounty, meets up with Vicious and gets herself captured. I've not mentioned how often Faye gets handcuffed or is otherwise in some kind of bondage, so let me make a note of it here, as I'm sure someone out there reading this is probably into that, so let me point it out here: Faye spends a lot of time in bondage of some sort. There.

Spike, meanwhile, follows the trail to a woman named Annie, who knows him, and is more than a little shocked to see him still alive. She claims that Yenrai never thought he was dead and we get the impression that he was some sort of mentor for Spike and what's more, we learn that Vicious has a history with both men, and that Yenrai took Vicious in and "made him everything he was." Vicious kind corroborates this, but seems to imply that he lost respect for Yenrai because he because "a beast that lost its fangs." Whatever that means.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Faye calls in Spike and Jet, and Jet's all like "Screw you, you got yourself captured." but Spike decides to go for her for reasons of his own, one assumes. I should add that the tracks that plays as Spike walks to the church where the showdown takes place, "Rain" is another awesome track



The subsequent fight in the church is pretty awesome as well, partly because the setting of the church really elevates the scope of the fight and provides a really slick Gothic backdrop to things, but mainly because it's a substantially different fight that we've seen before, because Spike is overmatched from the beginning, takes more than a few share of hits, and when he finally fights Vicious, we're put on notice that this guy is Bad News, because he's the only one we've seen thus far who can hang with Spike and ultimately beat his ass and toss him out the window, considering how easily Spike runs rings around most of the bad guys so far, it's a big deal.

As Spike tumbles out the window, we get a series of flashbacks (punctuated by shots of, you guessed it, Spike's eye) which gives us some picture of Spike and Vicious' backstory--they were allies, there's a woman involved, and apparently Spike "died" as a result of all this, but how much of that is fact and how much of it is conjecture is, well, I did say that a lot of Bebop was you putting the puzzle pieces together.

We finish up with Spike, bandaged to the point of mummification hassling Faye, who shreds a pillow over his head (giving us a rain of feathers which calls back to the episode title) and leaves the Ace of Spades on Spike's head. Not that that probably means anything.

While the previous 4 episodes had been slick and action-packed, they'd been a bit samey and stingy and a little formulaic. It's this episode that finally gives us a peek at what's going on and raises the stakes in a real way. It's the first great episode of the series, and an ideal place to close out our inaugural edition of this feature.

And that's gonna do it for this week. Join us next week when Spike declares war on lids in "Sympathy for the Devil"; we have an extended debate over the proper way to make a prairie oyster in "Heavy Metal Queen"; Spike gets an apprentice of sorts in "Waltz for Venus"; the final member of the Bebop crew arrives in "Jamming with Edward"; and Jet gets mad at his watch in "Ganymede Elegy." See you in 7!