Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Sessions 6-10

Welcome back!  I hope you’re in the mood for Bebop.  Take a gander at the introduction or Sessions 1-5 if you need a refresher, and then settle in for some episode recaps.

Session 6:  Sympathy for the Devil
This is a really hard episode to summarize, because the writers keep pulling the rug out from under you.  Here, in order, are the different plots you think you are watching.
1) Bounty-of-the-week is trying to get revenge on an old enemy by kidnapping said enemy’s protege, an eight-year-old blues harmonica prodigy.  (Heh, prodigy protege.  Words are funny.)
2) No wait, the Bounty-of-the-week is actually a god guy.  He’s trying to rescue the kid from his evil, Svengali-like manager.  Were you aware that the original literary Svengali was, in fact, an A&R rep?
3) No, wait!  The manager is actually a good guy too!  The Bounty-of-the-week was trying to rescue his old friend from the child, who is an evil harmonica prodigy.
4)  No, wait! The child isn’t even a child!  He’s actually hundreds of years old, but frozen in time (and turned eeeevil) by the “gate accident” that half-destroyed the moon, blighted the surface of the earth, and scattered mankind across the solar system.

Now, if you check Wikipedia, the gate disaster is supposed to take place in 2022, and the main series is set in 2071.  So the ancient evil demon-child is actually, uh, like, 67.  But that doesn’t sound nearly as cool.  Let it slide.
Anyway, all of these shoes drop before the episode is half over, and the rest is devoted to Spike fashioning a magic bullet that can “return time” to the harmonica player, thus ending his… uh.  Reign of terror?  Killing spree?  Career as a blues harmonica player?  It’s not at all clear why they feel the need to do this, actually… Abominations are just there to be destroyed, I guess, and Spike Spiegel is the man for the job.  Never mind that he’s not getting paid for it – the Bounty-of-the-week gets shot dead and tossed out a window four minutes into the episode – and that the crew is so broke that Faye has been reduced to eating dog food.

Musically, this episode is obviously all about blues harmonica.  What’s interesting about that, though, is that it’s the first episode since the pilot to feature this kind of music (or at least this heavily).  I know that the show wasn’t originally intended for DVD, so this particular piece of formal symmetry is probably an accident.  But accident or not, it’s kind of neat.  Also, conspiracy theorists can probably have a good time with a momentary dream sequence at the beginning of the episode which could imply that Spike is a robot, or hallucinating all of this while in a coma, or both, or lord knows what.

Let me say that I really loved “Sympathy for the Devil.”  It’s like watching an episode of CSI that suddenly turns into an episode of Tales From the Crypt after the first commercial break.   I’ll have more to say about it later on, but for now let’s keep recapping.

7)  Heavy Metal Queen

This is a great one too.  Spike teams up with a mysterious space trucker named V.T. (who is a dead ringer for Glenn Close in The Shield) to track down a black-market explosives dealer named Decker (who is a dead ringer for Woody Allen).  Actually it’s more like Spike is tracking him, and V.T. gets reluctantly caught up in his nonsense, but you get the drift.  After a big space truck chase, they corner Decker in an old mining station that was evidently built by a team of video game level designers because parts of it randomly explode every twenty seconds or so.  Decker crashes his space truck and dies (no money for you, everybody!), and then the protagonists get trapped in the mine and need to blast their way out.  Their plan ends up requiring Spike to jump between spaceships without a suit, and he almost doesn’t make it, but at the last minute he manages to save himself with a combination of quick thinking, his pistol, and Newtonian mechanics.  And while Mythbusters has taught me that bullets don’t pack nearly enough kinetic energy for this trick to have worked, it was still hella awesome.

What makes the episode work, though, is the character of V.T., and the way they flesh out this weird little subculture of space truckers.   Oh sure, their spaceships look more like freight trains, but they all hang out at roadhouses and communicate by CB radio.  They’re truckers.  (Belinkie, if you’re reading this, know that they borrow a lot of their call signs from Convoy.)  And V.T. is totally rad, and extremely refreshing way.  She’s a middle-aged career woman with a blue collar job.  She’s good at it too, fiercely so — within the space trucking culture, she’s something of a legend — without falling into the played out “uptight corporate dominatrix” archetype. She’s not sexualized at all, but she’s still very cool looking — in animation, female characters who aren’t meant to be hawt are often made conspicuously ugly or grossly fat, or old to the point of decrepitude.  She calls Spike on his bulls___, which is always a plus. She’s not the least bit feminine, and this isn’t played up as a defect or as evidence of lesbianism.  (Nothing wrong with lesbians, but there’s no reason why they should have a monopoly on comfortable pants).  And not once – thank GOD – is there even a suggestion that she would be happier if she just had a man and some kids in her life.  So yeah, VT breaks a lot of the stupider unwritten rules of how women are characterized.  Also interesting is the fact that Spike seems to like her a lot.  He’s solicitous and respectful to her from the minute they meet (and actually becomes much less of a mopeypuss from this episode on).  Plus – and I include this almost incidentally – she kicks copious amounts of ass.

But none of the stuff I’m talking about makes her a well written character.  Rather, the fact that she’s well written (believable, and what is more important, interesting), allows all the feminist stuff to matter.

Let’s see, where was I?  Oh yeah, one more important thing.  V.T. always goes by her initials, and her real name is a mystery.  People are always trying to guess it, and there’s even a cash prize involved.  Right at the end, Spike cracks the code.  But he turns down the cash, despite the fact that they didn’t get the bounty (again), and his ship just got wrecked (again), and they’ve had to start feeding Ein bean sprouts because Faye ate all the dog food.  Nice.

Musically, this episode spends a lot of time repeating V.T.’s favorite heavy metal song, which always seems to be playing on the radio in her space truck — another refreshing thing about the character is that she has well-defined musical tastes, which is vanishingly rare for any character, male or female.  But it’s also interesting that the big truck chase has a prominent ska number… and just like we heard blues in episodes one and five, the last time we heard ska was in episode two.  Hmm.  Hmm. Nah, that’s gotta be a coincidence.

8)  Waltz for Venus

Yes, that’s right, we are eight episodes in, almost one third of the way through the series, by the first time our heroes successfully collect on a bounty.  Also note that these clowns have nothing to do with the main plot of the episode.  We just see them getting caught right at the beginning, presumably to explain why the main cast hasn’t up and died of starvation already.  What this episode is really about is Rocco Bennarro.

Rocco’s a goofy small time hood who sees Spike capturing the aforementioned clowns, and makes a unilateral decision that Spike will become his kung-fu teacher.  Spike isn’t interested, of course, but Rocco tries to convince him by 1) attacking him with a knife, and 2) mocking him when Venus’ helium-rich atmosphere makes his voice squeak.  And yes, this actually works.

When he’s not stabbing his way into judo lessons, Rocco smuggles contraband for the local mob and takes care of his sister, Stella, who has been blind since birth due to an adverse reaction to Venus’ plant life.  These duties conflict when Rocco is tasked to transport a fantabulously valuable “Grey Ash” plant, which happens to be the only substance that can cure Stella. He tries to double dip, and – Cowboy Bebop being Cowboy Bebop – ends up getting himself killed and the priceless ash plant destroyed.  Luckily he managed to collect some seeds ahead of time.   And luckily, Spike does the noble thing and sees to it that they go to Stella, rather than just selling them at a massive profit. (In fact it’s implied that Spike pays for her very expensive medical fees, which means that the crew probably still takes a net loss on this episode.  Man, they cannot catch a break, can they?  Dog food and bean sprouts, ahoy!)

I don’t quite know how to feel about this one, honestly.  I mean, I see how it fits into the Spike’s broader character arc:  he plays big brother to Rocco and Stella, and this continues the humanizing process that begins with his treatment of V.T. in the previous episode.  And while Rocco does play a very annoying character type, he’s a pretty innocuous example of said type.  The music box theme that pops up here becomes important in the soundtrack of a later episode (see below).  But nothing about it really grabs me.  Also there’s something off-putting about the way they deal with Stella’s blindness.  She’s been blind from birth, and by her own account doesn’t have a problem with her condition.  Then her brother gets himself killed trying to “fix” her.  I wonder which one she would rather have had:  working eyes, or a living brother?  There’s nothing problematic about this so far — it’s entirely believable that Rocco would try to do something like this for his sister, and after all, it’s not like he thought he was going to die.  The problem is how everyone else reacts to it:  Spike and Stella both seem to think that this was a fair trade, her life for his.   The idea being:  until she can see, Stella isn’t really alive.  Okay, that’s an overstatement for rhetorical effect, but still, you see the problem right?  Something similar pops up with the main character in Avatar.

Just for the record, that music box theme I was talking about earlier?  Has a conspicuous melodic similarity to the honky-tonk piano theme that they’ve been using to finish most of the episodes… which was introduced in episode three.  This is beginning to wig me out a little bit.

9) Jamming With Edward

This episode is a bit more of a whodunit than most: typically the identity of the bounty is known from the outset, but here it’s a general purpose bounty on the persons or persons responsible for hijacking an orbital laser defense satellite to burn pseudo-Nazca earthworks into the ruined surface of the planet.  (Incidentally, I’m beginning to think that one of the Mysterious Tragic Pasts that we’re going to be delving into is that of the Earth itself.  I don’t think we actually heard anything about the Gate Incident until episode six, where we learn that it blew up most of the moon.  In episode nine, we also learn that it made the surface of the Earth uninhabitable, which is why most people moved on other planets, and the few who remain hang out in a network of tunnels to avoid near-constant meteor impacts.  I’m guessing we’ll learn more about it later on — and maybe even the cause, although I could see this writing team leaving it unexplained.)  The prime suspect is a mysterious hacker known as “Radical Edward.”  All the crew has is the name, so there’s a fun little sequence here where Jet goes around digging up totally useless, contradictory information about who Ed actually is.  I like this because I just imagine the writers taking the character designers aside and telling them “Hey, have fun guys.  This one is for you.”

It turns out that the real culprit, however, is the CPU of an ancient spy satellite, who – isolated from all outside influence following the gate incident – has gradually over the ages become self-aware, and then insane.  Never mind that there’s no reason why the satellite wouldn’t still be picking up broadcasts from the tunnel people, and never mind that the gate incident was actually just fifty years ago:  it’s a cool bit.   And the requisite action scene, which has Spike and Faye frantically threading their ships through a gauntlet of defensive laser blasts, is pretty damn cool as well.  On the downside, though, Cowboy Bebop joins the ranks of countless other scifi shows in utterly failing to come up with an interesting visual metaphor for cyberspace.

At the end, Ed has to convince the program to voluntarily transfer itself to the drive that Spike has inserted.  She tells it that they’ll make a copy, give it to the police, and keep the real copy with them on the Bebop so that it won’t have to be lonely anymore.  It agrees, there’s a snap cut to represent the data being beamed into Ed’s cyberspace rig, and then Ed falls over backwards.  Later on, a disk is presented to the police (who promptly refuse to pay, on the grounds that bounties cannot be collected on inanimate objects the crew must always fail at everything they do).  Now here’s the thing:  there’s a suggestion here that the artificial intelligence somehow merged itself directly into Ed’s mind.  If not, presumably it spends the rest of the series cruising around on the Bebop with everyone else.  But at least in what I’ve seen so far, the AI is never mentioned again.  Which makes it possible that Ed was just lying to get it to transfer itself onto the hard drive, and it spends the rest of the series moldering in cyber-jail.  That’s some coldhearted business, right there.  And after the AI let Ed play around with the laser satellite, too…

10)  Ganymede Elegy
So at the end of the previous episode, for reasons never adequately explained, Ed wound up joining the crew of the Bebop full-time.  Other than the opening credits, there’s nothing to suggest that Ed was more likely to become a recurring cast member than Rocco was (or even V.T.)  But here she is, and here she’ll stay.  And I’m sure she’ll find a role to play on the crew.  Like hacking computers!  Or… say… torturing prisoners?

This one opens with the crew cashing in the bounty on Baker Panchorero, who they apparently captured sometime in the break between episodes.  The interesting thing about Baker – the only thing about him really, as he’s on screen for all of a minute – is how much his character art is meant as an echo of Jet Black’s.  And appropriately enough, the main plot of this episode is about how Jet too is “tied up” by his past mistakes and regrets.

Having come to Ganymede, Jet decides to pay a visit to his ex, Alisa, who runs a failing bar called (appropriately enough) Le Fin.  Each episode has a fairly elaborate musical number that plays over a montage establishing the geography and culture of whatever new planet or asteroid they’re on, and this is no exception.  But I’d kind of like you to stop and listen to it, because the music is truly exceptional.  (Skip to about 5:30 into the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50ArHQvlhHs

When I first heard that song, I assumed it was some brilliant jazz standard that I’d never heard before.  It’s so, so true to the idiom.  But it’s a Yoko Kanno original:  in fact, this is the melody that was introduced as the music-box music in “A Waltz For Venus.”  Genius.  (While we’re on the topic of music, there’s no connection between this one and Episode 4 that I could detect.  Phew.)

Anyway, Jet finds his ex’s bar, and meets her hostile, twitchy boyfriend, Rhint (who, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, will later turn out to be the bounty of the week).  Rhint heads out for a smoke, though, and Jet and Alisa have a conversation that would probably seem pleasant if it wasn’t for the weird, jumpy editing, which makes it seem like someone’s going to throw a punch any second.  It turns out that Jet’s after answers:  Alisa left him without explanation back when he was a cop on Ganymede, and he’s always wanted to know why.  And at first, she won’t tell him. Instead, she just tells him to move on and get over it.  “That’s a story from long ago,” she tells him.  “I have no use for time that stands still.”  Which is a great line, both because it ties together the episode’s symbolic vocabulary (Jet’s stopped watch contrasted with the sounds of the clocks and the drinky-bird in Alisa’s restaurant), and because it’s kind of an amazing rebuke to the show’s entire ethos.  But later, after an intense spaceship/boat chase, she explains:  Jet was always taking care of her, to the point where she didn’t get to live her own life.  “All I did was wait for you to come home.”

The ending of the episode is, uh, open to interpretation.  You could argue that Jet learns his lesson and decides to move on, and helps Rhint get off on a self defense charge as a parting gift.  This seems to be the version that the voice actors subscribe to.  You could also argue that Jet has learned nothing.  Because what he actually tells Rhint as he collars him is, in as many words, “Be a man and shoulder this murder rap so that Alisa doesn’t have to suffer.”  That is:  “Look, she doesn’t want me infantilizing her any more, so you’re going to have to do it.”  This is the version I prefer, and it also seems to be the version that the animators were thinking of.   Alisa ends the episode by saying that she’ll go back to waiting in her restaurant, only now instead of waiting for Jet to come home from being a cop, she’ll be waiting for Rhint to come home from jail.  She sounds moderately happy.  She doesn’t look happy, though.

Well, that was certainly a mountain of text!  What else is there to say about these episodes?  Well, sessions 1-5 taken as a whole, seemed to be about creating a shifting pattern of comedy and drama.  This batch is a lot more consistently dramatic.  In 1-5, only one episode (#5) really dug into the past of one of the main characters.  That’s sort of true here too, with #10 exposing a lot more than we’d known thus far about Jet.  But the division between #10 and the others isn’t all that sharp.  Basically these are all about depicting an interesting one-shot character (the harmonica player, V.T., Rocco, Ed – who counts as a side character at that point – and Alisa) and running them through some variation on a single theme:  that the only way to get through past trauma is by reliving the trauma in the present.

• This is made clearest in Sympathy for the Devil.  The harmonica player has a traumatic event sometime in his past.  As a result, he stops aging and turns evil, essentially stepping outside of time and society.  At the end of the episode, Spike restores all of this to him:  his place in society, his trauma, and his time.  He dies, of course, but it’s presented as a good thing.
• In Heavy Metal Queen, VT has a traumatic episode in her past when her husband dies.  As a result, she leaves the society of bounty hunters (although she joins a warm and friendly community of space truckers).  At the end… well, you don’t get the feeling that she’s ever going to stop being a space trucker, but she’s reopened diplomatic relations with bounty hunter society, and you feel like her personal trauma is somewhat eased.   And this requires a double whammy of traumatic events.  First, there’s all the incident that makes up the body of the show:  she puts her own life on the line several times, and a dude, a truck, and an abandoned mining satellite are all blown up during the course of her catharsis.  Second, Spike guesses her name.  She isn’t really bothered by this, but mark me, it’s traumatic.  Learning someone’s true name, in stories, is a way to gain power over them.  And it means that Spike beats her:  penetrates her psychological armor, learns her true nature, and drags her out into the open.

• Waltz for Venus doesn’t actually fit into this pattern very well, but you can still kind of make it work.  Stella had a traumatic encounter with a plant in her youth, and lost her ability to see.  This removes her from society – and note that from a disabilities studies perspective, the way Cowboy Bebop treats this girl is just awful.  At the end of the episode, they’re able to use another plant to restore her sight (and presumably her place in society), but this requires Rocco to die, sort of displacing the trauma.

• In Jamming With Edward, there’s an ancient (thus, outside of time) and isolated (thus, outside of society) communications satellite.  The traumatic gate incident caused its isolation, although I suppose you could argue that in this case loneliness itself that is the real trauma.  At the end of the show, the crew of the Bebop blast their way past the satellite’s defenses and more or less abducts the AI, thus returning it to time and society.  This invasion could be seen as the traumatic act, or if you like, the Nazca lines that the satellite and Radical Edward blast into the surface of the Earth could be seen as a recapitulation of the other, more dramatic, blasting of the surface caused by the Gate Incident.

• Ganymede Elegy is an interesting one.  Watching this episode, you really think that Rhint or Alisa or both are going to end up dead.  This is partially because the structure and aesthetics of the episode are almost identical to the first episode, Asteroid Blues, which you might remember ended about as traumatically as anyone could hope for.  (Young lovers on the run from the mob, the cops, and Spike, big chase scene where one of them pulls a handgun, fight scenes in monochrome shakey-cam… and the similarities don’t stop there.) But it’s also because we assume that Jet and Alisa’s past trauma is going to need to be resolved with a gunshot just because that seems to be the name of the game here in noirland.   So when you realize that Rhint’s just going to jail, it’s really kind of a relief.  Even though Jet ends up dragging his answers out of Alisa, you feel like the trauma has been avoided.  And his parting words to her, “You won’t be waiting long.  Time is still flowing along,” suggests that just getting along with your life might be possible in some limited situations.  The music may play a role here too.  The episode has kind of set up that jazz song — called “The Singing Sea” on the soundtrack — as Jet’s theme.  Alisa has a theme too:  a latin-inflected guitar number in 3/4 time, which has a very clear phrase structure and leads to a very standard cadence.   And even though he “won,” it’s her music that shows up at the end of the episode.  This is especially striking because The Singing Sea has already been used to end one episode (Waltz for Venus), and contains the honky-tonk piano tag that’s been playing at the end of almost every episode.  Abandoning this for new music could symbolize the opening of a new chapter in the characters’ lives.  You could even argue that jazz, with its constant melodic variations over relatively static chord changes, is less goal-oriented, less temporal, than the folksy guitar texture that replaces it.  You’d be taking some wild swings, but you could make the argument.

Although I’m no longer so sure what the pattern of dark vs. light episodes is working out to be, some of my broader points from last time around do still hold.  You still get these inexplicable moments of kinetic jouissance, although a lot of them feel more lyrical than action packed this time around.  (See especially the chase scene from Ganymede Elegy).  The withholding of information is still a big tactic.  In Sympathy for the Devil, they sort of explain why the harmonica kid never gets any older… but they never explain why he’s bulletproof.  And even the explanation they give for the aging thing is lampshaded as empty technobabble.

And formalism is still a huge part of how the series works.  This time around, I’ve been getting a real kick out of how it works on the smaller scale.  Check out this series of shots from Sympathy For the Devil:

Standing over the corpse of his former bounty, Spike looks at the triangular pink ring that the dying man gave him.  It suddenly starts to sparkle…

…which in the next shot is revealed to be caused by the lights of the police cruisers which surround Spike’s triangular red spaceship (located more or less in the same part of the frame where the ring was)…

… and a couple of shots later, we cut back to the ring, now with Jet’s scanning device taking the place of the police cruisers.  Note that, even though there are five lenses (or whatever) on the device, they are broken up into three groups, to match the three police cruisers.

Neat, huh? There’s another nice bit from the same episode where a warm red-orange glow is used in shots of the harmonica player performing very early in the episode

… and about halfway through the episode…

… in order to set up and foreshadow a similar glow in the climactic gas station battle…

…which does not have diagetic music but does have the episode’s most prominent and exciting piece of underscoring.  Very cool stuff.

I have a theory about why they use these self-conscious, so-clever-it-hurts constructions.   It has to do with whether Cowboy Bebop can really be thought of as a parody of less self-conscious shows, or whether something else is going on.  But it’ll have to wait till next time – this is pushing 5,000 words as it is.  Gentles, for your patience thanks.  Oh, and a quick question for the comments:  what are some specific movie references you’ve noticed in the series?  There seem to be an awful lot, and I’m sure I haven’t noticed them all.  Feel free to list ones from future episodes if you like, but to avoid spoilers please just list the name of the episode and the name of the movie it references, rather than going into detail.