Cowboy Bebop

I spent most of my evenings over the part few days watching Cowboy Bebop. All of it. Well, not the movie, but I did see that less than a decade ago and can mostly remember it. But the show itself, well, I hadn't seen all of the episodes (probably most of them) and it had been so long that I couldn't remember them that well. So I decided to just watch them all, in order. This might have been partially motivated by my having recently watched the entirety of Exosquad (through a rather convoluted cognitive pathway: Exosquad is inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam, but come on, I'm not going to track down and watch Mobile Suit Gundam right now, but hey, there are other anime things out there that I could watch instead and I've maintained for a while that Cowboy Bebop is my favorite anime, but I haven't seen it all, but I could remedy that by doing so). Anyway, there are only 26 episodes (27 counting the patchwork one they did as closure for the temporary cancellation), so it's not a lot to sit through really (Exosquad is way longer).

Going back to something after about a decade, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I might have found it to be more flawed than I remembered, or I might have found it to be better than I remembered, or I might have found it to be about the same as I remembered. It ended up being the second of those three: I definitely appreciate the show more now, for whatever reason, than I did back then. A few things stood out enough that I even decided to write this blog post...

The music was even more spectacular than I remembered, which is actually saying quite a lot considering that the show was always lauded for its music and that so much of the focus of the show (the titles of the episodes, the music box motif, etc.) is musical. It's really, really good. The show itself wouldn't be ruined if it didn't have great music, but it certainly wouldn't be as powerful.

The setting is really quite creative and detailed. For a relatively brief show that is focused primarily on bounty hunters trying to track and capture fugitives, a lot of work went into the appearance of the architecture, especially the "gates." I noticed that, when the action was taking place outdoors, it was always so easy to tell (even if there had been no clues in the dialogue) when the characters were on Earth, because Earth, science fiction technology aside, always looked like Earth, and none of the other worlds really did. I even started to recognize some of the other worlds. If the story had been a longer one, with all those details, it would have been natural to become familiar with the key features of all the space colonies depicted in the show (Ganymede looks like this, Europa looks like that, Mars looks like this, Callisto looks like that, and so on). There's even a joke that only works because of this: Jet sets the ship to go to Mars so that they can seek their next target, but Faye resets their course to take the ship to Earth. When Jet steps outside and it doesn't look like Mars, he asks Spike where they are, to which Spike sarcastically says that he isn't sure, but he thinks it's Earth.

Faye Valentine is the most compelling character in Cowboy Bebop. And I almost can't believe I'm saying that. I couldn't believe it when I was watching it. I didn't remember thinking much of her when I saw episodes of the show a decade ago, and even as she made her first appearance, I thought she was a thoroughly unlikable character. She is reckless, selfish, arrogant, and usually oblivious. At first, it almost seems like she's just there to serve as a token female and third person to round out the cast or as a device to cause additional trouble for the other characters to struggle against, only actually solving problems herself if it's through blind luck. But she's easily the most dynamic character in the series (Spike is extremely static as a character, Ed matures a bit but is still rather static, and Jet does develop somewhat as the story progresses, but not nearly as much). The way the audience perceives her character shifts dramatically when she, on a whim, tells the dog a story about how she was awakened from being cryogenically preserved and could not remember her past. From that point onward, new details start to let the audience make some sense of Faye as a character. She doesn't just lie about herself because she's a jerk (she is, but that's not the reason) or a psychopath: she lies to protect herself because she doesn't even really know who she is. She gambles away her money because her oldest accessible memories are of being unfrozen and immediately (through the actions of con artists) stuck with a massive debt that she cannot possibly pay. She is depressed at having lost her past and scared at the prospect of living in a future she cannot understand, so she retaliates by taking an aggressive, manipulative, and slightly hedonistic approach to life. The saddest moment of the entire story isn't when anyone dies: it's when Faye, having refused to have anything to do with a mysterious videotape that might be related to her past out of a fear that it's some debtor's trick to attack her, and refusing to reimburse Jet for the money he had to pay to view the contents of the videotape, leaves the others to watch it and then hides so that she can watch it too (she is a jerk, after all), only to see a message from herself as a child cheering her on and pondering what kind of person she might become, and not being able to remember any of it. In the end, when Spike is going to go to his probable demise against Vicious and the Red Dragon Syndicate, it doesn't even seem tragic. The whole series builds up to it. The thing that forces drama into an otherwise seemingly preordained situation is the reaction of Faye and, to a lesser extent, Jet. Spike isn't afraid to die, but Faye is afraid that she'll lose her best friend (not that she'd ever admit it).