Stardate 20031017.1912

This page discusses Cowboy Bebop. It is loaded with spoilers, and gives away major plot elements while discussing the final outcome of the show. Those who have not seen the series who think they may someday want to watch it should not read this.

I originally picked up Cowboy Bebop – The Movie and wrote about it positively on this site. In response, several wrote to say that the entire series was good and I should give it a try.

I eventually ordered the first three DVDs and watched them, and I did like it, so I ordered the remaining three, which arrived two days ago. I watched all three in one session that evening. And I was pretty shocked. I've been mulling it over and I wanted to write my reactions to it.

Watanabe Shinichiro and his team executed a classic "tragedy", in the dramatic sense of that term. We watch characters, grow to like them even though we recognize that they're flawed, and then watch bad things happen to them in part because of their flaws, and feel loss and catharsis. That's the theory.

I hate tragedies.

What we were sort of seeing in this series was a seriously dysfunctional family, in a sense. Of course, they weren't related, and they fell together mostly because they didn't have anything else. Much of the first part of the series was intended to explain what in hell those five people were doing together on that ship, without it being the standard contrived "We all worked together once by sheer chance and it worked, so we should stay together" approached which so often figures in less-well executed origin stories. It started with Jet and Spike as a team, and it was clear that it worked because their abilities complemented one another, and there was some degree of mutual respect. It felt natural, so it didn't really have to be explained.

But it took quite a few episodes in order to switch from Faye as outsider to Faye as someone who was onboard some of the time to Faye as someone who was usually onboard but still not totally trusted.

In the middle of the series they engaged in a lot of character building, with episodes where various characters had encounters with people from their past. Of those, the most positive and satisfying was probably when Jet found his ex-wife, and ended up collecting a bounty on her current boyfriend. And yet, because he stayed true to himself as the Black Dog, and didn't let the boyfriend go, then it turned out well for everyone. It turned out that he was wanted for a killing which was actually self-defense. Thus it was going to remove the shadow hanging over both him and the woman. She finally told Jet why she had walked away from him. So he found closure. It's about the only time in the series where anyone did.

Episode #24 bothered me a lot. (As it was intended to.) Jet's backstory had pretty much been settled in #16 (Black Dog Serenade), and they were trying to wrap up the stories of Ed and Faye before the two-ep finale which would concentrate on Spike.

Ed found her father, and he called her "Francoise" and greeted her boisterously, but then he raced away to a nearby meteor strike as if she wasn't even there. And Ed stood there, watching him leave, and it was obvious that there was no family for Ed to go back to.

There was no place for her at that orphanage, either. The sister was a good woman, but Ed had already left it for good and sufficient reasons, and those hadn't changed. There was no enmity, but no place either. She could visit and be welcome, but it wasn't home.

I think after seeing her father, I had expected that it would mean that she would stay on the Bebop since it was the closest thing she had ever really had to a family. So I didn't expect her to take her computer and walk away into the ruins to return to the life she'd had before she forced her way onto the Bebop. In some ways, hers was the most tragic ending of all. As distorted a person as she was, she was beginning to feel just a trace of human feeling and compassion for others, which she showed in #23 (Brain Scratch). She helped Jet unhook the hacker behind that religious movement, but instead of leaving him alone and unhooked, she then gave him a different dream, as good for him but not harmful for anyone else.

Who can say? Perhaps once she returns to the wreckage of Earth and reappears as Radical Edward, she might make contact with him through cyberspace. God knows no one else has a chance of understanding her.

Faye finally found her past; she found it in the real world by close examination of the videotape and Ed's recognition of certain landmarks, and then she found it inside when she started to remember. And it gave her nothing.

It gave her no comfort. It gave her no place to go. It settled nothing. It told her nothing about herself. It answered no questions. It solved no problems. It replaced the pain of doubt with even greater pain in knowledge and disappointment. She might well have been better off without it.

So she returned to the Bebop because she had no place else to go, and because she was finally beginning to let herself realize just how lonely she was and how she needed to be around people, the same people, and to establish relationships with them.

Early in the series it becomes clear that Faye was beautiful on the outside but really rather ugly inside. She is cruel and uncaring and opportunistic and seems to have no conscience. As the series develops and they revealed more of her backstory, it becomes clear that she was like that because of a combination of amnesia and emotional scar tissue.

I think that about the