[While Mlawski’s analysis of Battlestar Galactica is on indefinite hiatus, another Overthinker is surging into the gap, with another series of posts on a geek-friendly science fiction franchise.]
Cowboy Bebop and I have something of a troubled past. I had been hearing great things about the show pretty much since it came out (and I mean, like, freaking rapturous things), but I somehow managed to avoid watching it until the summer of 2008. Even then, all that I saw was the credits sequence. But what a credits sequence it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzyB0Cc1fFM
Judging from that credits sequence, Coyboy Bebop was some kind of hundred-year-storm combination of things I think are awesome. Jazz! Kung Fu! Animation! Spaceships! Pop Art! – and while I prefer an interesting female character to a pin-up any day of the week, I am not immune to the attractions of – Cheesecake! My appetite was whetted. Scratch that: my appetite was honed down to razor sharp keenness in one of those Williams-Sonoma electric home knife sharpener dealies, to the point where I could use it to do all the fancy tricks like chopping a can of tomatoes in half or slicing really thin and perfect slices of bread. Based on the strength of the credits alone, I was damn near ready to buy the DVD box set one day when I came across it on sale. But since I don’t have a lot of disposable income (buy a shirt, dammit!), I just decided to Netflix it, one DVD at a time. And at first, I was glad I did, because when I started watching the series, I was distinctly underwhelmed.
I’ll get into why in a little bit (and also why I, underwhelmed, kept on watching). For now I’ll skip ahead to the happy ending: it gets better. Lots better. To the point where if I find those DVDs on sale again, I’m buying them first and worrying about how to pay for it later. To the point where – about ten episodes in – I decided to loop back to the beginning again and subject the show to a full on, close-read Overthink, the results of which I’ll be sharing with you every two weeks or so for the next couple of months.
The episode by episode analysis is going to start on November 23rd, and each installment will work through one DVD’s worth of episodes. If you haven’t watched the series yet – or if you have, and want to refresh your memory – I encourage you to fire up your Netflix and watch along with me. Today, I’ll just give you a general introduction and a rundown of the cast of characters, so that next week we can dive right into the analysis.
First, the setup. The show is set in a distant future where humanity has colonized the solar system. In its treatment of spaceflight, the show’s sci-fi is semi-hard (like a nice Emmentaler): although there are some handwavey “warp gates” involved, interplanetary flight still takes a loooong time, and running out of fuel can be an issue. And this is crucial to the basic premise: because none of the planetary governments have the resources to pursue criminals between planets, interplanetary law enforcement is basically the province of bounty hunters. (This – although not much else – is sort of like the situation depicted in a lot of Westerns and might explain the titular “Cowboy.”) Cowboy Bebop chronicles the adventures and (mostly) misadventures of a particular bounty-hunting team, who I’ll introduce to you at this juncture right here.
Spike Spiegel: the main character, to the extent that there is one. Visually, a combination of Lupin III (his general visual aesthetic and oversized feet), Bruce Lee (his fight choreography), and Quadrophenia-era Keith Moon (his wardrobe and hair, although that might also be Sid Vicious), which is awesome. Unfortunately his personality – at least as it appears at the very start of the series – is pretty deeply annoying. He is petulant and ungrateful, and rude in a way that is probably meant to be refreshingly direct but in fact comes across as straight-up rude. He only ever cracks a smile when he’s getting to kick some kind of ass. This in itself is fine, and indeed some of the bright spots in the first few episodes are the moments in which ass is kicked…but often he seems to be treating the ass-kicking as a lark, which comes across as smug and condescending. At least he never starts a fight for the fun of it. I have fairly little experience with anime shows in general, but I will say that in many ways Spike’s character reminds me of a more petulant version of Gohan in the early stages of Dragon Ball Z, or even moreso of Ranma Saotome (but again more petulant). I can’t think of an American exemplar of this character type which makes me wonder if it’s somehow particularly Japanese… but odds are that they exist, and I just can’t think of them. In any case, these characters didn’t irk me the way that Spike does, which I think is probably down to the fact that they are children, which means that they have a license to act childish. Spike has no such excuse (although I suppose Cowboy Bebop was probably intended for pretty much the same audience). If all of this was played for comic effect, I would have found him a lot easier to take. But I think he’s supposed to be an honest-to-goodness hero, or at least an admirable antihero, and I always just find myself wanting to slap him. Ah well… like I say, it really does get better.
Oh, and in addition to all of this, Spike also has a Mysterious Tragic Past, which seems to be shaping up as the main mystery of the overarching plot. Please leave this unspoiled in the comment threads.
Jet Black: Spike’s partner and/or boss and/or surrogate father (it’s a little unclear, but he owns the spaceship they live in, and tends to make the executive decisions). To a degree, he is the brains to Spike’s brawn: Spike usually does the actual apprehending of the bounty-of-the-week, but Jet tells him where to look. Jet is everything that Spike isn’t. He is endearing, serious, warm, peace-loving, and – alas – he is NOT the character that gets the most screen time. He also has an awesome beard, which may be coloring my sympathies somewhat. It’s not quite clear at this point whether Jet has a tragic past, but considering that he has a prosthetic arm and a rivet holding his face together, it is not unlikely. Oh, and by the way, Mr. Black? (Can I call you Jet?) I’m putting you and your alliteratively named friend Spike there on notice for having the most ridiculously and self-consciously “awesome” TV character names ever. Jet Black. Honestly.
Faye Valentine: Faye show up a couple of episodes in, and feels like a one-shot character at first, but winds up becoming the third major character on the show. As (basically) the only woman, she has to carry a lot of weight. She’s the femme fatale. She’s the tomboy. She’s the love interest. She’s the action girl. She’s the damsel in distress. She’s the cheesecake. (Exhibit A. Faye seems to have had a strong effect on certain segments of the target demographic: trying to find an image to show you, I actually had to turn on safesearch in order to convince google that when I typed “Faye Valentine” I was just searching for a picture of Faye Valentine, and not a crudely drawn picture of Faye Valentine having sex with, like, twenty dudes.) Like Spike, she gets on my nerves a lot in the early going. She’s meant to be a tough-as-nails broad with a heart of gold, which can work well when done right. But they make two missteps here. First, the crusty exterior is a little too crusty. Standoffish is one thing, but Faye comes across as – again! – petulant, and what’s more she flat out double-crosses and robs the other crewmembers on a semi-regular basis, which makes it hard for me to accept that they’d let her keep sticking around. Second, they telegraph the “heart of gold” aspect a little too broadly. At no time did I ever expect Faye to turn out to be anything other than an innocent at heart. Maybe this was necessary, since it does makes her more likable when she’s in her abrasive mode, but it makes the innocent moments feel a little forced. Like Spike and probably Jet, she has a Mysterious Tragic Past, and in her case it has caused her to owe a catastrophic amount of money to some shady and dangerous people, which motivates a lot of her behavior. Beyond that, let’s leave this one unspoiled.
Radical Edward: Okay, so first of all Jet and Spike? You guys are no longer on notice. Carry on. Radical Edward was apparently a boy in early drafts of the script, but was made female in order to create gender parity. To the writers’ credit, all they changed was her gender: she is refreshingly androgynous, and mostly just reads as a child. It doesn’t really create parity, though (or make up for the more absurdly fan-servicey aspects of Ms. Valentine), because while Edward features about as heavily as anyone else in the main titles, she hardly qualifies as a main character in the show itself (at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far), usually popping up for a scene or two to provide comic relief. Anyway, in addition to being a computer hacking genius, Edward seems to be functionally insane. Like a lot of cloudcuckoolanders, she fluctuates between the twin poles of “acts crazy but actually knows more than she lets on” and “acts crazy and desperately needs Thorazine.” I could have done with a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter, although at times her wackiness is a welcome tonic to Spike’s moping. Edward probably has a Tragic Past in that her family is not in the picture, although it’s hard for her to be all mysterious about it when she’s so busy being craaaaaazy!!! I’ll say this for Edward: she is not petulant. It is probably hard to be petulant when you have the word “radical” right there in your name. Unless it’s the political kind of radical, because a lot of them are pretty petulant. And actually, it would probably be fun for those of you who have already watched the whole run of Cowboy Bebop from start to finish to go through it again pretending that Radical Edward is actually a Marxist agitator. It would make a… fairly surprising amount of sense.
Ein: A Pembroke Welsh Corgi that may or may not be super-intelligent. Like Ed, Ein is there more for comic relief and color than as a major character in his (or her?) own right. The only character other than Jet that seems to have a sense of responsibility or to be capable of warmth, and, unsurprisingly, the only character other than Jet that never grated on my nerves. If they ever wanted to make a sequel that was just about Jet and Ein palling around the solar system, I would be so there, man. Ein also has a Tragic Mysterious Past. Ha! I am kidding. Or am I? Honestly, I probably am. But I wouldn’t put it past the show’s writers. Ein shares a special bond with Edward and likes Jet, but usually ignores Faye and Spike which (again, when I first started watching), is sort of what I would do, given my preference.
Yoko Kanno: The show’s music director and composer. She doesn’t feature appear onscreen (although the character design of Edward is apparently based on her to some degree) but she’s easily as important to the show as any of the characters, and to a large degree is why I kept watching the show even though I didn’t take to it at first. The music for Cowboy Bebop is outstanding, both as music qua music and in the way that it’s woven into the show. Part of the reason I’m writing this series of posts is to sketch out some preliminary thoughts for an essay about the show’s music that I might try to get published someday. So you can expect to see a lot about the music in the coming weeks. Get excited for that (or, you know, consider yourselves warned).
Beyond the core group, there are a few recurring frenemy characters who show up every now and then to advance the overarching plot, and a greek chorus of old drunks that seem to pop up in every bar and restaurant to provide local color. Typically, though, the show is just about putting Spike, Faye, and Jet through their paces with a different supporting cast. The basic ur-plot goes like this: Act One introduces us to a gang of interstellar criminals, Act Two shows our heroes tracking them down, Act Three is a chase or a fight, and in the denoument – this being that kind of show – the bounty gets snatched out from under their noses. (For all that they’re fearsomely competent, the crew of the Bebop kind of suck at their job.) Wash, rinse. Repeat.
There’s been a lot of talk on this blog in recent weeks about whether TV shows should be episodic or serial. Cowboy Bebop is kind of an odd duck here. For the most part, it’s completely episodic. Every now and then you’ll get an episode that moves the overarching plotline forward, but they are few and far between, and always feel like “very special episodes.” Despite this, the show does seem to be building towards something. And the way that it builds is through repetition and recurrence. Themes, motivations, and bits of character business keep on popping up again and again and again and again, until they aquire a significance that is somehow more than the sum of its parts. The main reason that the show wasn’t working for me, at first, is that it takes a while for this approach to build up a full head of steam. But the fact that all this repetition eventually winds up feeling rich, rather than lazy, is what finally made me decide that Cowboy Bebop was a great show after all. The experience that it most resembles, oddly enough, is George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. If you read one Krazy Kat strip – which should be easy enough to do online – you will probably say something like “Ok, the art is original and amazing, but I don’t understand why I was even supposed to find that entertaining.” Read a dozen or so – which will probably mean tracking down a published collection – and you will fall head over heels in love.
This constant, cyclical variation on a few fixed elements can be – and has been – seen as analogous to jazz, possibly explaining the title’s “bebop.” Mind you, it’s easier to explain the title as a random combination of rank Americanisms chosen for exotic effect, sort of the equivalent of an American show getting a title like Godzilla Kabuki. (Note to self: am sitting on goldmine with this Godzilla Kabuki thing. Put in call to Bruckheimer.) There’s a lot of this kind of thing floating around the background of Cowboy Bebop. I mean, consider the name of the main character: Spike Spiegel. In English, this is a pretty silly name, but otherwise remarkable. In Japanese – the language the show was written in – consonant clusters and the letter L do not exist, so the main character’s name is actually Supaiku Supiigeru. I’m sure that part of the point was to come up with a name that is hard to pronounce in Japanese: the more foreign it sounds, the better.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for tonight. This has run long already. Check back in two weeks for an analysis of the first five episodes. If you want to take issue with my harsh description of the characters, sound off in the comments.
But as Mlawski did in her posts on Lost and Battlestar Galactica (which you may consider me to be very, very sincerely flattering here), I am issuing a general ban on spoilers in the comment thread for this post. It’s a little bit more relaxed for this column, in that – for the most part – this show is not concerned with long-simmering pots of mystery soup. Like I said before, the show does build to something, but it’s not an organic or teleological process: instead it builds through the accumulation of tiny details. This makes it largely spoiler-proof, in the same way that you cannot exactly spoil Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by blurting out “Guys! The twelfth way is from the blackbird’s point of view!” I’ve already done a teensy bit of spoiling right here in this post, in that I’ve described major characters that don’t appear in the first episode. Still, there are a few big mysteries, so stay away from those. And if in doubt, it’s probably best to assume that it is a spoiler.
