Cowboy Bebop is such a great show that when it fails, it hurts all the more. “Mushroom Samba” is my least favorite episode of the series for two reasons: First, it focuses on Ed, my least favorite character on the show, and it shows her at her worst. And second, partly because of that focus, it wastes so much potential. This episode uses 70’s Blaxploitation films as inspiration and features three guest characters, including the bounty-head-of-the-week, straight out of movies like Shaft and Foxy Brown. But the only character who interacts with them is Ed, and I use the term “interaction” loosely, seeing as how Ed barely acknowledges what is going on around her.
Spike, Jet, and Faye are out of commission for most of the episode. The Bebop crash lands in the desert of Europa. Out of fuel and food and with the ship in need of repair, Spike and Jet stay behind to work on the Bebop while Faye deals with food poisoning. This leaves Ed and Ein to go out in search of food. In the course of her search, she comes across Coffy, Shaft, and Domino, but remains nearly oblivious to their actions. Coffy and Shaft are each hunting down Domino, a psychedelic mushroom dealer with a bounty on his head; Coffy is a bounty hunter looking for the reward while Shaft is looking to avenge his brother who died from eating one of Domino’s mushrooms. Unfortunately, these stories remain on the fringes of the episode and neither of them get resolved. Unlike in other episodes, in which we get insight into the lives and motivations of the guest characters (think Roco in “Waltz for Venus,” Gren in “Jupiter Jazz,” and Whitney in “My Funny Valentine”), the guest characters this week are merely one-dimensional riffs on Blaxploitation characters. Shaft especially gets the shaft, as his only defining characteristics are his purple zoot suit and rhythmic speaking voice full of jive slang.
Why don’t we get any exploration into the minds and motivations of these three characters? Because we only see them from Ed’s point of view, and that point of view is extremely single-minded and warped. Ed is a brilliant person, able to hack extremely tough systems (when she feels like it), but doesn’t know how to act like a human. She doesn’t experience emotions the way we do and doesn’t understand what’s happening around her. When Shaft pulls a gun on Domino, who is standing right next to Ed, her only reaction is to state to no one in particular that she is hungry. She eventually decides to capture Domino in order to collect the reward, but her bounty hunting skills leave a lot to be desired. Amazingly, she comes very close to capturing him, but I attribute that more to Domino being a coward than any skill on her part.
I’ll come back to that in a second, but first I need to point out how nearly all of Ed’s actions in this episode underscore my continuing bewilderment as to why Spike, Jet, and Faye haven’t dropped Ed off at the nearest space port and leave her behind. Early on in the episode, Ed tells Spike and Jet that she will assist in repairing the Bebop, but succeeds only in damaging it further, eliciting an extremely aggravated response from the two men. At the end of the episode, when a cop investigates the crew’s acquisition of what they believe to be extremely valuable and illegal mushrooms, she nearly (happily) confesses the truth, but Jet and Faye shut her up in time. But the most egregious example of her behavior is when, after seeing Ein have a bad reaction to eating one of Domino’s mushrooms, she proceeds to feed them to the rest of the crew in order to confirm that they are in fact dangerous to eat.
Faye has also done terrible things to the rest of the crew, but she eventually started pulling her weight on the ship. She is an effective enough bounty hunter (the crew’s failure rate is high, but not for lack of trying), which allows her to contribute to the crew’s income. Ed is not so skilled. Supposedly she acts as the ship’s computer expert, but as of this episode, we haven’t seen her hack into anything after joining the crew. In the one episode in which she was given the opportunity to do so, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” she declined in order to play online chess. Furthermore, before Ed came aboard, Jet showed that he was pretty computer-savvy.
If memory serves, this is the only episode in which Ed directly chases the bounty-head-of-the-week, and she only succeeds through pure luck. When she finds him in his ship, instead of incapacitating him, she sprays him with smelly gas. When she finally corners him again, all she does is hold up her hands menacingly. She doesn’t present any firearms nor has she ever shown herself to be an adept fighter. So when Domino gives up, I have to assume it was because he is complete coward, despite not being established as one earlier in the episode. Then to cap it off, instead of taking in Domino, she accepts his duffel bag of mushrooms, which he claims are worth much more than him. Assuming that’s true, the mushrooms are illegal, and the crew would have to find a way to fence them without getting caught. At least turning in Domino would be a fast, easy, and legal way to get money.
The episode isn’t all bad. The crew’s drug trips are pretty entertaining and say something about each character. Spike’s trip up an endless “stairway to heaven” reflects his belief that he continues to slog through life, even though he supposedly “died” before coming to the Bebop. Jet has a conversation with his bonsai trees, and chuckles that the world is a great place and that the “secret of the universe” is simple. Jet remains ever the optimist. Faye sees the world enlarge around her and then flood, immersing her in water. Faye is in way over her head, drowning in debt, but she doesn’t fight it, she just goes with the flow. In her trip, she doesn’t struggle against the growing hostility around her, but instead tries to go with the flow by swimming through it as best she can. Unfortunately, the characters are severely underused in this episode. They never leave the vicinity of the ship, meaning they don’t interact with any of the guest characters. I for one would have loved to see Spike play off Coffy or Jet fight off Shaft in an effort to get to Domino first. Alas.
Up next: Jet begins referring to a mysterious video tape as music from a caper film plays. He hints at surprising twists before admitting that he thinks the next episode is kind of silly. However, he suggests that, at the very least, “Speak Like A Child” will allow for multiple interpretations.
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