Have you ever felt like you’ve lost a part of yourself? Maybe you physically lost an item that you felt represented you, or some event occurred and changed your entire perspective on life. If so, your life may have gone in a new direction, but you still retained the memories of who you were. You could choose how to react to the change, and decide how it would affect your personality. Faye Valentine doesn’t have that luxury. She exists alongside Spike and Jet, both of whom probably wish they could forget parts of their past at times, and remembers only three years of her life. Her cynical, cutthroat nature is all there is too her, a personality resulting from a horrible betrayal.
The story is kicked off by the arrival of a mysterious videotape. A courier service drops it off for Faye, but believing the package to be something from one of her many creditors, she runs off. Because the cost of accepting the package was extremely high, Jet decides to find out what’s on the tape or get some money for it. He and Spike take it to a small shop run by a man who is basically a Martian hipster, complete with a flannel shirt, knit cap, and dismissive attitude towards any television shows made after 1999. The man is a collector of 20th century technology and covets his CD players and videocassette players as if they were worth their weight in gold. The machines probably have some value, as we learn that they are exceedingly rare. But they represent a dead technology, and the interest in them appears to be concentrated solely in the Martian collector
The man’s collection and the contents of an abandoned, underground museum show us some of humanity’s lost past. Spike and Jet walk by various items that we today consider to be essential to life – CD players, air conditioners – and have no idea what they are. Spike nonchalantly abuses one of the collector’s cassette players when it stops working, believing that kicking it will make it work better. This could be because machines are much less susceptible to damage in the future, but more likely it’s just another example of Spike’s casual attitude toward objects he is struggling to use (recall his struggle to open the virus canister in “Gateway Shuffle,” culminating with him shooting it). Spike doesn’t understand that any of these devices are precision equipment, over a century old, that probably shouldn’t be kicked. To him, it’s just useless junk.
Humanity’s loss is even greater than technology, though. Spike and Jet’s search for a working BetaMax player takes them to Japan, known to them as “Old Asia,” which is in ruins. They arrive in a ruined city, most likely Tokyo, which makes all the other decadent cities we’ve seen on the show look like bustling, well-kept metropolises. The city is abandoned, and debris litters the streets. Even after seeing parts of Earth in “Jamming with Edward,” the sight of a ruined Tokyo is shocking to the viewer, while it’s just an annoyance to Spike and Jet. Earth is a lost cause to them, part of a past that is long gone.
Eventually, the crew is reunited, after Faye finds the flimsiest of excuses to return to the Bebop, and they use a working BetaMax to watch the tape. And so begins one of Cowboy Bebop’s most heartbreaking sequences. Faye was sent the tape by herself. It just took a little longer to get to her than expected. The tape is a short video diary taken by her teenaged self, meant to be viewed ten years later. The Faye depicted on the tape (whose name may not be Faye) is very shy and nervous at first, but eventually opens up and reveals herself to be a cheery optimist. She wakes up and happily greets the day, wondering aloud what kinds of wonders she’ll encounter. She says that she’ll be different when she watches ten years later, but the same person deep down, then pleads with her future self not to ever forget herself.
Spike may not be a gangster any more. Jet isn’t a cop. But they still retain traces of who they are; Spike is still headstrong, while Jet still tries to live as an honorable man. But Faye has lost all traces of who she was before being frozen. Even after she awoke, we only saw her as a scared woman alone in a world that was unfamiliar to her before she became the cynic of the present. The vision of her as a cheerful, carefree girl is new to both viewers and Faye herself. And it brings her to tears.
Up next: Ein provides the narration, consisting mostly of barks and woofs, while Spike comments on what Ein is “saying.”
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