Ok. 3, 2, 1: Let’s jam!
Hello and welcome to my first episode-by-episode review series. I will be starting with Cowboy Bebop, an anime series that premiered in the late 90s. On the surface, it’s a series about a small group of bounty hunters who spend their days tracking down bounty heads in order to keep food on the table and their spaceship in repair. And music. And fight scenes choreographed to said music. But, like all things worth writing about, there is so much more below that surface. Nothing is as it seems on Cowboy Bebop, not even the story structure. You think you are watching a collection of stand-alone episodes, following some (rather inept, if you think about it) bounty hunters as they try, and usually fail, to capture some bad guy of the week. But the more you watch, the more you realize that each crewmember has a different, very specific thing driving them. Each one came to the ship, the Bebop, for a different reason, and these reasons inform their actions on the ship. Although most episodes present us with an open-and-shut plot based on the “catch the bad guy of the week” formula, they also provide us with a little more information about who our heroes are and who they were before we met them. These reviews are going to focus mainly on identity and character interactions, and I will do my best to address other themes as they come up. Also, I am going to try to keep these reviews fairly free of foreshadowing spoilers, so that people new to the series can read along as well, but some references to future events must be stated in order to make some of my points. I will try to keep any foreshadowing as vague as possible.
The first episode, “Asteroid Blues,” purports to introduce us to Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, the sole crewmembers of the Bebop (for now, anyway). That’s what most pilots do. They introduce the premise and the characters. “Asteroid Blues” certainly does the former, in more ways than one. However, only the superficial premise will be immediately conveyed to new viewers. Like most episodes, this one presents the crew with a bounty head, the crew tries to capture him, and when the chase is done, life goes on. In this episode, like in most, the crew fails to get their man, but hey, you can’t win ‘em all.
The OTHER premise, though, is tied into the (non-)introduction of Spike and Jet. We do learn about the characters in this episode, but most of what we learn only concerns their present personalities, rather than their history. And most of what we do learn comes from watching their actions, rather than from any exposition. When we first see Spike, he is training Jeet Kun Do, but when he finishes, he lights a cigarette. He is a thin, wiry guy. He is clearly strong and in great shape, based on his well-defined chest, but with his clothes on, he doesn’t look like he’s the type of guy who’d put up much of a fight. Jet on the other hand is a big, muscular guy with a robotic arm. We meet him in the kitchen, cooking dinner for Spike and himself. Their first interaction makes us think that Spike is a hothead who causes trouble for the pair while Jet is the put-upon responsible team member. Spike is upset because there is no meat in the “bell peppers and beef” that Jet cooked, while Jet knows that they are low on cash and must be frugal. And when Spike asks why they barely have any cash, Jet responds, more annoyed than angry, with a laundry list of expenses, some of which were due to Spike’s negligence. In a lesser show, this initial scene would define these two characters’ entire personalities; Spike is the hot-head and Jet has to hold his leash. But as with real life, Spike and Jet are so much more than a single personality type. Spike certainly can be irresponsible and hot-headed, and Jet is generally the Team Dad. But in the very next scene, Spike is calm as can be, whistling a little tune to himself as he gears up to go capture a dangerous criminal. He maintains this calm for nearly the remainder of the episode, even when his life is in danger. Spike also shows reluctance to go after the bad guy of the week, but not because he is afraid. Rather, he sees the 2,500,000 wulong (the unit of currency) bounty as tiny, not worth pursuing. Only after he learns how dangerous the target is does he get excited.
We watch Spike and Jet go about trying to catch this week’s bounty head: a drug dealer named Asimov Solensan, on the run after stealing a cache of bloody eye, a substance that makes the user hyper-fast and nigh-invulnerable, but also wreaks havoc on the higher brain functions. The two bounty hunters barely spend any time together off the Bebop, so we see them develop through their interactions with others. Spike gets his leads by going to Laughing Bull, a Native American spiritualist, while Jet gets his by pummeling some low-level gangster mooks. This sets up their style of hunting and fighting: Spike is crafty and willing to take a longer path to his information, whereas Jet tends toward a direct route. This isn’t to say that Jet can’t plan or that Spike can’t fight, but these traits are reflected in their planning and fighting.
Later, Spike feigns ignorance when he encounters Asimov and his wife Katerina. Rather than simply try to get the drop on them, he speaks to them and even allows Asimov to choke him into near-unconsciousness, all in an effort to steal a vial of the drugs Asimov is peddling. However, when we do finally see Spike fight, we learn he is a force to be reckoned with. He takes on a drugged up Asimov, who had been shown earlier to be an unstoppable rage machine while hopped up, as well as a group of gangsters out to steal back the drugs Asimov took from them. His fighting style includes a lot of moving about and misdirection, confusing Asimov, who is more beast than man at this point, due to the drug use. When Jet shows up to bail Spike out of his 1-on-many fight, he once again uses the direct route: he flies his shuttle, Hammerhead, into the mooks’ car, thus ending the fight.
Having spent the last few paragraphs discussing the characters and the plot, I want to turn to the music and the setting of “Asteroid Blues.” Cowboy Bebop is well-known for its music: The theme song is a fast, jazzy number that serves to get the viewer fired up for what’s about to come. It is an aural and visual feast, with quick trumpet notes played over images of the Bebop crew, spaceships, guns, and dancers. Each episode has a musical motif, usually denoted by the episode title, such as “Asteroid Blues,” “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui,” and “Jupiter Jazz.” (Actually, even the episodes refer to themselves as “sessions,” as in jam session.) In this episode, “Asteroid Blues,” the episode begins with twangy harmonica chords. Later scenes are backed up with slow guitar riffs, and the climax is set to a slow, mournful saxophone-heavy melody. The denouement concludes with another harmonica-heavy song, played over another scene of Spike and Jet’s domestic struggles.
The episode also dabbles in western themes; the guitar transitions from bluesy to southwestern during Spike’s first encounter with Asimov and Katerina, when Spike refers to himself as a cowboy. Story elements also evoke western themes, such as Asimov and Katerina’s resemblance to the characters in Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, Spike’s use of a sombrero and smock as a disguise, and the overall south-of-the-border feel of the Tijuana asteroid, the episode’s setting. The series as a whole has western and film noir themes, but certain episodes feature riffs on other genres, such as Blaxploitation, science fiction/horror, and mystery. “Asteroid Blues” presents a great set-up of how western elements – the use of the term cowboy, saloon shoot-outs, and the need to rely on oneself or other private citizens for justice – are used in the series, while giving brief hints at the noir elements in the prologue and closing credits.
Cowboy Bebop is also a very beautiful series, even though much of what we see is in decay. Tijuana is clearly a decadent place, full of buildings in disrepair, people passed out drunk in the streets, and gangsters running around shooting up dive bars. The people who are conscious seem either consigned to letting their time slip by, like the three old men who go from bar to bar playing cards and reminiscing about the old days, or pining for a better life on a real planet. Katerina tells Spike about how she dreams of starting a new life on Mars, which is described as a kind of paradise. And yet, there is a sad beauty in the ruin of Tijuana, which has a very lived-in, human feel.
Strangely, while Mars is mentioned a few times, including a reference to Spike being born on Mars (one of two hints about Spike’s past), there is absolutely no reference to Earth. Just why no one mentions our home planet is one of the many past events left unsaid in Cowboy Bebop’s first episode. Although we learn a lot about who Spike and Jet are now, we hear almost nothing about who they were, or why they are together. They seem friendly, but don’t seem to be friends. Or at least they don’t seem like the kinds of people who would gravitate towards each other. All of this information is imparted through showing, rather than telling. The episode is light on exposition when it comes to the characters, letting the story be told organically, rather than having Spike and Jet bring up the past for no reason other than informing the viewer of who they were.
The only hints we get about who Spike was before his days on the Bebop come from the dialogue-free opening, still images in the closing credits, and a strange statement he makes to Laughing Bull about being killed by a woman. The intro shows us a Spike locked in an epic firefight, with a smile on his face as blood flows down his head. He hides his automatic rifle in a bouquet of roses and grins as he pulls the pin on a grenade. The credits show us Spike dressed in very similar clothes as those seen in the pre-credits sequence, with a bouquet of roses, another callback to the intro. But this time he seems much kinder. Clearly, something happened between then and his arrival at the Bebop. And those stories, the tales of who the crew members of the Bebop are and who they were before they arrived, is the story that will take us through the series.
Up next: Each review will end with an analysis of the preview segment at the end of each episode. This time, Spike and Jet set up the next episode as a fun romp about animals, which Spike claims is suitable for the whole family, a claim Jet isn’t so sure about…
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