Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Sessions 11-14

The first two DVDs of Cowboy Bebop feel almost eerily self-contained, considering that the show was produced only a couple of years after DVD technology was even invented.  The five episodes on the first disc form a beautiful little arc all on their own.  The second disc doesn’t quite have as much of a shape, but it still feels coherent, with all five episodes sharing the same theme (and to a large degree, the same tone).  Alas, Disc three does not feel coherent at ALL.    Toys in the Attic, far and away the silliest episode of Cowboy Bebop so far, serves as something like a summary coda for the thematic arc that started in disc two, giving us a chance to catch our breath before Jupiter Jazz, a sprawling two-parter that could have very easily been a stand-alone movie.   And then there’s the last episode on the disc, Bohemian Rhapsody, which feels like they just stuck it in because there was space on the disc.  Which they did.  And that’s normal.  The fact that these kinds of aesthetic questions can come up at all shows that Cowboy Bebop is a little smarter than the average bear:  when you watch TV on DVD, how often do you spare a moment’s thought for how the episodes are spaced out over the discs?  I don’t either, usually… but something about Bebop invites this kind of analysis.  (It might just be a function of how perfectly that first disc peaks in the fifth episode:  it feels so planned that it has you grasping at straws for the rest of the series).  Anyway.  Moving on.  This time I tried to just work the analysis in with the plot summaries.  If you preferred the old format, let me know in the comments and I’ll switch it back for next time.

11) In Toys In The Attic, we find the Bebop floating through deep space on its way to Mars.  The crew hasn’t had any work in weeks, so they’re a little bit  broke, and a whole lot stir-crazy. The episode beings with Faye literally beating the pants off of Jet at poker (see above), while Spike tries to grill kebabs with a flamethrower.   (The kebab sequence is a pretty cute joke, and it doubles as a convenient way to establish that, hey, they have a flamethrower on board.  I wonder if that’ll come in handy?)   Jet wanders off to the cargo bay to find a blanket and sulk, where he sees a mysterious refrigerator, and is bitten by a mysterious alien blob monster.  Spike tries to help him with some traditional medicine, but it, uh… it does not go so well.

The bulk of the episode plays out pretty predictably.  The blob monster picks off the members of the crew one at a time, until Spike is the only one left.  He gears up, flamethrower in tow, and climbs into the air ducts to go hunt the thing.  But the plot takes a hard left turn into crazytown at the end, because Spike loses.  You think that he’s killed the monster, but in true horror movie form it jumps back up and bites him, which we’ve been given to understand is probably fatal unless treated.  And since everyone else has already lapsed into alien-venom induced comas…  yeah.  This episode ends with a Total Party Kill.  The “Next Time, On Cowboy Bebop:” sequence at the end even starts out with Ed saying “And so they all died.  It’s very sad, but what can you do?  This was the last episode of Cowboy Bebop,” before the other cast members break in and shout her down.  (The “Next Time, on…” sequences have been played pretty straight up until this episode, but later in the series they go batpoop insane.  Later on, we’ll come across an episode where the teaser trailer is basically “Next week, on Cowboy Bebop:  a thrilling search for… ahh, who are we kidding.  The story never really goes anywhere. I’d skip it, if I were you.”  And then there’s one where it starts off with Jet saying “I’m tired of doing these voiceovers.  Here, Ein, you give it a shot,” followed by twenty seconds of barking.)

Much like these teaser trailers, Toys in the Attic is very ridiculous.  In fact, it’s almost fractally ridiculous, by which I mean it is silly on many interlocking levels.  It is, first of all, a parody of the movie Alien, and while Cowboy Bebop has referenced all sorts of movies in pretty much every episode, this is the first out-and-out parody.  So that’s pretty ridiculous.  Second, the episode is broken up into four “lessons,” separated by title cards (pictured left), in which each character takes a turn providing voiceover narration and a moral to the story.  Jet narrates the opening up until the monster bites him, then Faye narrates until it bites her, and then Ed, and finally Spike. This kicky formalist conceit would already be ridiculous in a French New Wave kind of way, but it’s pushed to new heights of ridculosity by morals themselves, which range from deadly serious (Jet, who more or less says “Hubris is clobbered by Nemesis”), to the amoral (Faye, whose big lesson is “Put yourself first and don’t trust anyone”), to the surreal (Ed, who breaks the 4th wall in her narration – “Lesson? Lesson? What lesson?” – before settling on “If you see a stranger, follow them,”), to the… well, we’ll get back to Spike’s moral in a bit. And also silly is the scene where Spike takes a time out from fighting the space alien to try to light a cigarette with his flamethrower, which is one of the most priceless bits of comic business I’ve ever seen comitted to film.

But just when you’ve been lulled in a sense of security, suddenly… look out!  Behind you!

The great thing about the Alien parody is that, in the midst of all this sillyness, it is played brutally straight. The monster is creepy, yo.  The picture above doesn’t do the thing justice… no still image could, because the horror is in how they animate it.  Its shape, mass and volume don’t seem to stay the same from frame to frame.  It comes off as – dare I say it? – non-Euclidian.  The more specific references to the original movie aren’t played as jokes either.  There aren’t any face-full-of-alien-wing-wong comments, or anything… it’s just a monster loose in the air ducts, and a dude chasing it with a flamethrower, and a motion detector, and ventilation fans, and a creepy monster-POV cam, and the crew getting picked off one by one, and the monster slowly spinning out into space at the end.

So the only real joke in this very spooky episode is how note-perfect it is… until the huge, colossal joke at the end where we learn – and those of you who have seen the episode know that I’ve been kind of dancing around this – the monster’s origin.  We’ve had various theories on this throughout the episode.  Is it a rat?  A mutant rat?  A monster from the depths of space?  Finally, we learn the horrible truth:  Spike stashed some lobster in the back of the fridge over a year ago, and forgot to clean it out.  The result?  A poisonous mutant space lobster running amok in the crawl space.  And Spike’s moral, of course, is “DON’T… LEAVE… FOOD… IN… THE… FRIDGE!!!”  I almost expected a cameo from J. Walter Weatherman.  This retroactively infects everything in the episode – if not the entire series – with near-toxic levels of sillyness.  And it’s far and away my favorite moment in the series so far.

After that, things just get sillier.  As the tainted fridge flies off into space, we’re treated to a rapturous, swooning montage set to Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.  (This is the second time that music from The Nutcracker has turned up on the show, the first being at the end of Jamming With Edward, also a notably silly episode. Not really sure what’s going on there.)  The montage has some great, almost Eisensteinian, juxtaposition of images… it’s completely gratuitous, but then, it’s always been my contention that the best parts of Cowboy Bebop are the utterly gratuitous set-pieces.  This is just the first time that the gratuitous set-piece was lyrical instead of bad-ass.  Check out how every one of these shots seems to be layed out around a single axis of rotation.  There are even moments where the “spokes” on the wheel – Ein’s body, the fridge’s glitter trail, etc. – seem to be rotating between shots like the hands of a clock.

And then at the very end, Ed – who possibly was never bitten after all, but just wandered off and fell asleep somewhere – absentmindedly grabs the monster up off the floor and eats it.  Which struck me as a lot more messed up than it probably should have, but hey, I guess a free lobster is a free lobster.

Silly as it is, there’s a lot going on under the hood here, because the “lessons,” inappropriate as they are, do tell you a lot about the characters.  What Jet actually says is that man has to earn his living through hard work, and that whenever people try to get rich quick, they are punished by fate for their greed and laziness.  I remember reading somewhere that film-noir and pulp fiction heroes make a fetish of professionalism, clinging to the protestant work-ethic when all other moral codes have failed…  and this is very much the kind of guy that Jet is.  In several other episodes, people bring up his old police nickname, “The Black Dog who bites once and never lets go.” Which is honestly kind of cumbersome for a nickname, but we’ll let that slide:  the point is that he’s the kind of guy who keeps his word, even if it means that he winds up naked and shivering in the cargo hold of his own spaceship.

Faye’s moral is equally revealing.  Having watched quite a couple of discs ahead while I was writing about Choose Your Own Adventure books, I can tell you that Faye is the character who arcs the most over the course of the series from here on out.  Which is an interesting choice on the writers’ part, but never mind that for now.  What’s important is that her arc basically starts here:  she doesn’t let people get close because she’s been hurt in the past.  We’ll see how that begins to change starting in the very next episode, where she pulls a runner because she’s afraid of how attached she’s getting to Spike.

Ed’s moral is probably just meant to be surreal.  But maybe not.  So far, the only reason we’ve been given for her even wanting to be on the BeBop is that… well, for some reason she really wanted to come.  “If you see a stranger, follow them,” is actually the most character development that we’ve had for her.  Now, I don’t know if I would have ever come up with this next bit if I wasn’t trying to read deeper meaning into the episode.  But maybe she was just lonely?  A kid who has no family, so she follows the next stranger she sees in the hope that they will become her family?  It’s at least plausible.

And then there’s Spike.  Like I said, “Toys in the Attic” is a thematic coda to the episodes collected on the previous disc, which – if you remember – were all about how past trauma, and past sins, will always come back and bite you in the ass.  “DON’T… LEAVE… FOOD… IN… THE… FRIDGE!”  I don’t need to explain the metaphor, right?  Yeah, I probably don’t need to explain the metaphor.

12 and 13) And then, hot on the heels of that little orgasm of goofyness, we find Jupiter Jazz parts 1 and 2, which are possibly the moodiest and darkest episodes yet.  Not “Dark!” in a winking, half-parodic way, like “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Ballad for Fallen Angels,” but honestly melancholy to the point of depression.  It telegraphs its seriousness in a couple of different ways…  It’s a double-long episode, which, like a double-disc album or a double-wide trailer, indicates a certain gravity of purpose.  It also marks the return of Vicious, the villain from “Ballad for Fallen Angels” and Spike’s flashbacks in episodes 1 and 6.  I’ve gotta say, Vicious didn’t do a lot for me at first.  I understand that he fits a certain character mold that has proved durable and popular, but… man.  Whenever he rears his ugly immaculately-coiffed head, you can almost feel the writers of the show poking you in the ribs with their elbow and whispering “Hey, isn’t this episode very serious???”  It feels forced and unnecessary:  his tortured relationship with Spike would work a lot better for me if he wasn’t such a caricature.  But I dunno, most Cowboy Bebop characters rub me the wrong way at first.  Maybe if there were more Vicious episodes, I’d get used to having him around.  He improves in this one, a bit, right at the end.

Another annoying writing tic that shows up in this episode is Faye randomly turning into a psychotic hose-beast.  Somewhere in the gap between the last episode and this one (presumably after everyone comes back from the dead), Faye decided to leave the ship.  No wait, she decided to sabatoge the BeBop, steal all the money from the safe, and run off in the dead of night.  This feels… unlikely.  And while we actually learn in the second part of the episode that she did have some reasons that, if not good, are at least vaguely believable, there is nothing believable about Spike and Jet deciding to let her back on the ship at the end.  I mean, I can see what the writers are trying to do with that:  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in… something you somehow haven’t to deserve,” says Robert Frost.  So maybe it works.  Maaaaaybe. But it’s a stretch.

At least Faye running off to join the circus provides a convenient impetus for the action of the plot.  While searching for her, ostensibly to recover the money, Spike runs across some information about his mysterious lost love, Julia.  But the specifics of this are just incomprehensibly dumb.  Ed just goes searching for Faye in cyberspace, and comes back with a name, “Julia,” and a location, Callisto.  The only way this could have worked is if Ed tried to search for Faye simply by typing the word “Woman” into google… and furthermore, it means that the only other woman mentioned anywhere on the entire internet just happens to be Spike’s ex-girlfriend.  Trust me, I’ve been on the internet.  It doesn’t work that way.  (And if you’re planning on trying this yourself, you may want to turn on the ol’ safe-search. )  Spike’s reaction is even more idiotic, because he immediately drops everything and goes tearing off to Callisto.  Jet even calls him on this nonsense:  “It’s a common woman’s name!”  But apparently not, because while Julia doesn’t actually appear in this episode, she was on Callisto not long ago.  And to fill out the unlikely-coincidence Quinella that the writers have been working on here, Faye actually did run to Callisto after all.

AAAAARGH!

Okay, I needed to get that out.  But let me just say that in most other respects, this episode is a smashing success.  Glaring as the plot holes are, you don’t really notice them when you’re watching (or at least I didn’t).

So like I was saying, Spike goes tearing off.  As he’s climbing into his ship, he and Jet have this deeply weird, deeply bitchy argument where Jet tries to cajole and threaten him into staying, finishing up with the always-reliable “Well if you walk out now, don’t expect me to let you back in!”  Spike, for his part, just says a bunch of really callous and hurtful stuff as if he’s not just trying to burn his bridges, but also sow the river with salt so that no bridge will ever grow there again, and I think that I lost track of this metaphor somewhere along the way, but you get the picture.

The way this fight is written and performed is very jarring.  It has to be the first time we’ve ever seen Jet really lose his temper.  And it feels like nothing so much as a lover’s quarrel, which is not a vibe that we’ve gotten from these two so far.  But maybe that’s intentional, because this is definitely the “Cowboy Bebop plays with alternative sexuality” episode.  In a big way.

On Callisto, Faye is holed up in a bar getting tanked, apparently hoping that some dudes will try to attack her so that she can work off some steam by kicking the crap out of them.  At the bar she meets Gren, a sax player, and briefly considers working off some steam with him the other way (if you know what I mean) before learning that he doesn’t care for the ladies (if you know what I mean about that too), and they just get drunk together instead.  Meanwhile, Spike goes, like, absolutely King-Kong nuts on some thugs who try to rob him.  Incidentally, you know how I said a few posts back that the first episode of Cowboy Bebop makes it look like it’s going to be all about kung fu?  This is, I think, the first episode since the pilot to live up to that promise.  Theoretically the brawl is motivated by the fact that the thugs mistake him for Vicious – Spike was asking about Julia, and it turns out that the reason her name was floating around the internet is that Vicious is using it as a password for a huge drug deal that he’s running – and being compared to Vicious makes Spike really, really angry.

My inner cynic suggests that the brawl is motivated by the two-part special episode having a slightly larger animation budget.  But no matter.  Faye eventually pours herself out of the bar and goes wandering around the streets looking for trouble, which she finds.  Actually, she find the exact same group of thugs that Spike just humiliated.  If they think that they can take their frustration out on her, they’re sorely – OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO HER LEG??!!

Okay, so actually distortions like this on a single frame are a time-honored way for animators to convey the extreme speed or forcefullness of an action, but that doesn’t make it look any less horribly wrong when I unfairly freeze it as a still image.  Anyway, we never get to find out whether they’d have been able to take her in a fight, because as soon as she flattens that one dude, Gren pops out of nowhere, clobbers the head thug with his sax case, and pulls Faye away to safety by her wrist.

Back at his apartment, they drink vodka and hot water (which actually sounds like a pretty great drink for a brutally cold day), and shoot the breeze.  Faye notices a music box – now where have we seen one of those before? – that Gren is oddly defensive about.  Then he goes off to take a shower, and she notices an old picture of Gren wearing a military uniform… and standing next to Vicious.  (Man, these coincidences are just piling up.)  Meanwhile, Spike and Vicious come face to face on a random frozen street corner.  Spike, who has a pistol, would seem to be at a tactical advantage, but Vicious has an underling  with him, Lin, that Spike has some kind of past friendship with, and is therefore unwilling to shoot.  Back in Gren’s apartment, Faye pulls her gun and marches into the bathroom to confront Gren for… for what, having ever known Vicious? Who Faye, although she certainly has no reason to be fond of him – he did hold her hostage that one time – basically doesn’t know?  Whatever the reason, she barges into the shower, only to learn, in a NSFW sequence, that Gren is actually a hermaphrodite.  Or a pre-op transsexual.  Or something.  Let’s just call him differently gendered and leave it at that, since it’s by no means clear what he identifies as.  In any case, Faye’s reaction is comically disproportionate.  I mean, we’re given to understand that she has seen a thing or two in her day, and she is not generally a woman given to freezing up.  But plot convenience demands that she not actually interrogate Gren at gunpoint at this time, so she freezes up and he takes the gun away.   My best explanation for this is that she must be falling down drunk:  she was already pretty potted at the bar, and by this point she seems to have consumed the better part of half a bottle of Gren’s vodka.  But before that situation can resolve itself, we cut back to Spike, and learn that although he was unwilling to shoot his old buddy Lin, Lin was under no such compunction.  Blam.  Cue the soaring saxophone solo, and the end credits for part one of the episode.

Spike Spiegel Deaths So Far:
1:  Gunned down in a hail of bullets by persons unknown in flashback at start of “Asteroid Blues.”
2:  Thrown off of an exploding cathedral by Vicious at the end of “Ballad for Fallen Angels.”
3:  Poisoned by mutant Lobster at the end of “Toys in the Attic.”
4:  Shot dead by Lin halfway through “Jupiter Jazz.”

Just so we’re counting.

But of course he isn’t really dead.  He gets up in the second part of the episode, and we’re told that Lin was using tranquelizers or something… I don’t know.  It seems more probable to me that Spike, like the demonic kid from “Sympathy For The Devil,” is in some kind of ontological freefall due to a past trauma that cannot be resolved until he revisits and violently recapitulates said trauma, and as such is effectively immortal.  You know, kind of like Harry Potter and Voldemort:  each can only be killed by the other.  (Two guesses as to who the Voldemort figure is in this case, and they’re both “Vicious.”)  To be clear, I don’t think that this is actually literally true within the universe of the show – although I suppose it’s possible, since it is sci-fi – but it’s definitely the symbolism that they’re going for.

Anyway, the second part of Jupiter Jazz is really all about Gren.  Like any good Cowboy Bebop character, he’s hiding from a mysterious tragic past, which in his case has to do with trench warfare on Jupiter’s  desert moon Titan.  He knew Vicious there – in fact, the show very coyly suggests that he knew Vicious in the biblical sense.  (Although, does that phrase really work if it’s two dudes?) At the very least, he idolized Vicious.  But when Gren made it back home, he ended up arrested for treason, and apparently because Vicious had sold him out.  (That music box is somehow involved in this.  It’s not quite clear how.)  Then, while in jail, Gren was exposed to some drugs that changed his body to its current form.  Depending on whether you believe the subtitle translation or the dubbing, this was either because prison drove him to become a drug addict, or because the government was doing secret tests on prisoners, so this isn’t very clear either…  but it hardly matters.  The causal chain that we’re supposed to follow, I think, is
1)  Gren falls in love with Vicious
2)  Vicious betrays Gren
3)  Gren is physically transfigured by this betrayal, losing his masculinity.

Now, if we wanted to judge this episode purely on whether its politics are “correct,” it would probably be a pretty bad episode.  Being differently gendered is presented to us as this catastrophic wrong that has been inflicted on Gren; furthermore you could read it as “punishment” for having the “wrong” sexual orientation to begin with.  Neither of those is great, to put it mildly.  I mean, the conflation of homosexuality and intersexuality is pretty bad all on its own, right?   I could try to defend the show – point out that Gren is allowed to have narrative desire in the sense that Callot brought up in a comment thread here, point out that he is if nothing else a sympathetic character, and point out that a problematic treatment of LGBT issues is still better than no treatment at all.  But I wouldn’t want to sweep the troubling aspects under the rug.  They’re there, and if we want to enjoy this show, we need to acknowledge them.  We don’t necessarily need to dwell on them too much, though.  The specifics of Gren’s backstory – gender change – are a lot less important to the plot and to his character than the simple fact that he has a long simmering grudge against Vicious, even though they used to be quite close.

With Gren’s backstory established and Spike back up on his feet, the stage is set for an epic confrontation between Spike and Vicious.  Except that’s not really what happens.  Instead we get a confrontation between Vicious and Gren.  And this is one of the things that I really like about “Jupiter Jazz:”  it’s not Spike’s story, or Faye’s or any of the other regular cast members.  It’s Gren’s story, and the crew of the BeBop are just supporting characters.  Gren has arranged to sell a load of drugs to Vicious, just as a pretext to get close enough to confront him about his betrayal.  Vicious is unrepentent, and when Gren brings up their status as old brothers-in-arms, he just laughs it off.  (The dialogue is pretty overblown here – Gren:  “I believed in you!” Vicious:  “There is nothing to believe in, nor is there a need to believe.” – but I feel like the show has earned it).  It turns out that Vicious’ business on Callisto was as much about killing Gren to clean up loose ends as it was about buying drugs:  the suitcase of money that he tosses over turns out to be a bomb.  But Gren dodges this, and then Spike crashes the party, and they end up in a three-way spaceship dogfight.  Vicious is getting the best of this, when suddenly the bag of drugs that he got from Gren also turns out to be a bomb and explodes (which is kind of awesome), crippling his ship and forcing him to beat a retreat.  Even so, Vicious lives to fight another day (presumably until the series finale, at the very least), while Gren is mortally wounded by a stray round.  As a last request, he has Spike carry him into his spaceship and set it on autopilot for Titan, the only place where he’d ever been happy in his crazy, mixed up, differently gendered, saxophone playing life.

But there’s more to it than that, which I can’t get into without doubling back and talking about the way that music has figured in this episode from the beginning of “Jupiter Jazz part 1.”

Generally in Cowboy Bebop, episodes have a lot of music.  They also tend to have lots of different kinds of music:  goofy funk here, a haunting music box there, stride piano in a third scene, etc.  “Jupiter Jazz” is fascinating, because while the scope of the narrative, and even the scope of the action scenes in this episode is so vastly expanded, the sense of musical space is rigidly confined.  The very beginning of the first episode is pretty normal, in that we hear a few different things:  pseudo-Native American chanting in the opening scene, a menacing Blade-Runner-era-Vangelis synth pad for some scenes with Vicious’ mafia bosses, etc.  But in the scene where Gren is introduced, we hear him playing the opening bars of a smooth jazz ballad on his sax… and once this music appears, it is essentially all you hear, as underscoring or otherwise, until the very end.  Well, that’s not entirely true, come to think of it, but it’s not far off.  Adding to the sense of claustrophobia is the fact that it’s usually played by saxophone alone, without even the piano accompaniment that supports the theme in its first appearance.  It’s always at-pitch too (by which I mean, they don’t create musical variety by transposing it up and down).  But it’s not just the same recording over and over again – you can hear the performer adding different little ornaments and playing with the rubato – so we can assume that this was a conscious choice, not a cost-saving measure.

The melody figures into the plot, too.  Gren learned it from Vicious.  Specifically, he learned it because it’s the melody played by the music box, which he got as a gift from Vicious during the war, and Vicious in turn may have received as a gift from the mysterious Julia.   And when Gren met Julia, years later, and told her how where the music box came from, she instantly realized that Vicious used it to set Gren up:  he’d been using a beacon inside the music box to transmit troop movements to the enemy, and by giving it to Gren he was framing another man for his own crime.  (Or something like that.  I’m still not %100 on the details.)  This means that in the second episode, we also get to hear the theme played on a music box… and that musical texture has a certain resonance on this show. Nifty.

Okay, so back to the climactic dogfight.  When the bag of drugs blows up in Vicious’ back seat, it’s triggered by the music box, which Gren used as a timer.  And the music box doesn’t just explode:  it plays the beginning of the melody first.  And when Vicious hears it, this shakes him to his core.  He flashes back to meeting Gren on Ganymede, to the camaraderie and (if I’m reading the subtext right) love that the two of them shared.  So yeah, Vicious wins the fight, and Gren gets killed.  But Gren wins the argument.  Vicious really did care about him, and there is something to believe in.  D’awwwwww…

Oh, and another thing about the melody:  the A section, which is usually all you hear, sounds almost exactly like the introduction to Maria from West Side Story.  You know, the part that goes “the most beautiful sound… that I ev-ver heard…”  At first, I assumed this was accidental, and unfortunate.  Looking back at it, I’m not so sure.  The significance of the melody, to both Gren and Vicious, is its role as a trigger for memory.  So maybe by choosing a melody that strongly evokes another familiar melody, Yoko Kanno puts us in the paradoxical position of already remembering the Jupiter Jazz theme even the first time that we hear it.  It’s not something that’s new, it’s something we’ve always known – that is, our relationship to it is the same as Vicious and Gren’s relationship to it.  (But the fact that the B section bears an even stronger resemblance to the bridge from The Christmas Song – “You know that Saaaanta’s on his way… He’s loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh…” probably is an accident.  And the fact that we hear this part for the first time during a dramatic pan to a snow-filled sky is decidedly unfortunate.  I don’t think that my reaction to Spike getting shot was supposed to be a guffaw at the underscoring.)

In most of my Cowboy Bebop posts so far, I’ve given you a video clip with a music clip to listen to.  I’ll give you one here too.  It’s the very end of Jupiter Jazz part II.  As the music begins, you’ll hear a version of the theme that I’ve been talking about.  But as the closing sequence continues, this expands into a strange, Peter Gabriel-esque texture that blends the Jupiter Jazz theme together with the “Native American” chanting from the very beginning of Jupiter Jazz part 1.  And eventually, during the credits sequence, we hear some fairly nifty smooth-jazz sax work – the first music that could pass for jazz (in the sense that all true jazz involves improv) over the entire two-part episode.  I warn you, this one isn’t as immediately appealing as the show’s main title theme or the “In the Rain” from episode five.  You have to be able to stomach Peter Gabriel style “ethnic” cheese.  You have to be able to stomach smooth jazz.  But man, if you can swallow those pills, this is an epic use of film music.  You have two seemingly unrelated cues combining in counterpoint.  You have a rigidly circumscribed theme established as a leitmotif throughout the episode suddenly bursting into full and rapturous song.  You have the delayed expectation of “jazz,” established by the episode’s title, finally fulfilled during the closing credits.  (Also worth noting:  “Jupiter Jazz part 2” is the only episode so far that has its own special closing credits sequence.  This in itself is kind of a stunning moment.)  And becuase this is all set over an image of Gren’s ship burning up in re-entry over Titan, his ashes sprinkled across its desert like snow, the explosion of melodic exuberance from the sax (Gren’s instrument), and the (admittedly cheap) spiritualism of the chanting, combine to form a frankly glorious image of the liberated soul as it escapes from this tortured world of woe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPWjaU_dy8

I mean, look, Cowboy Bebop doesn’t ever talk about religion or the afterlife, and I’m pretty well an atheist here in our world.  But after hearing this cue, I believe that Gren got to heaven.

14) Man.  After all that, it almost seems pointless to talk about Bohemian Rhapsody. “Jupiter Jazz” is a tough act to follow.  But just to fill out my contractual obligations, let’s touch on a couple of things.  The crew is searching for a mysterious criminal mastermind who is behind what amounts to an identity theft scheme involving the interstellar transit gates.  (When people pull up to the gate, he uses their EZ-Pass cards to access and drain their bank accounts.  Not too shabby.  They eventually figure out that the man behind the scheme is Chessmaster Hex, a brilliant engineer who was largely responsible for designing the gates to begin with, but was fired after he grew dissatisfied with the system. (It’s vaguely implied, but never actually stated, that he realized the gates were unsafe and would wind up blowing up the world the way they did.) To get his revenge, set up an elaborate and fully automated plan to take revenge fifty years down the line.  But in the intervening time, Hex has became completely senile, so that the person who actually committed the crime is, for all intents and purposes, gone.

This isn’t played for horror, amazingly enough.  (I may have a slightly more than rational fear of losing my mind.)  Overall the tone of the episode is wacky and fun, sort of in line with “Stray Dog Strut” and “Heavy Metal Queen.”  It’s also a fun one for playing the “find a Cowboy Bebop logic flaw” game.  For instance, Hex’s plan to take revenge on the Gate company wiped out the life savings of many innocent tollbooth users, and mildly inconvenienced the Gate company executives in that they had to answer a lot of angry phone calls. Mission accomplished!  Also, at the end of the episode, when Jet figures it all out, he confronts the gate executives about it.  So far so good.  They ask how much money  it’ll take to keep him quiet.   So far so good!  Nothing, says Jet, just don’t hassle that senile old man any more.  Let him live out the rest of his life in peace.  Ed has taken to playing chess with him over the internet, and it would make her sad to lose her partner.  Very noble of Jet to put his surrogate daughter’s happiness above material gain.  Very dramatically satisfying.  On the other hand, could one perhaps ask for the old man’s safety… AND a few hundred million dollars?  Just how much Jet got screwed on this deal becomes apparent in the closing shot of the episode, where, after trouncing Ed at chess one last time, Chessmaster Hex dies.  In peace, granted.  Still, for sacrificing the financial security of his entire crew, Jet bought, like, a week of peaceful, hassle-free existence for an old man who, remember, the Gate company had no real motivation to mess with anyway.  The execs didn’t want revenge, after all they just wanted to stop the theft, and Hex was no longer in any position to stop it.  Speaking of which… are we to understand that people are just going to keep on getting their accounts drained from now until the end of the series?

But none of that much matters.  Two things really stand out here.  First is that this episode borrows heavily from the music of earlier episodes.  This isn’t the first time a cue has ever been reused, but it’s the first time that it’s been systemic.  I rather suspect that this means something – not sure what yet – for the next arc of episodes.  Second, Faye has high-heeled shoes on her spacesuit.  Yeesh.

Random, parting thoughts:  Gren’s full name is Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener.  So… Gren or Grencia == Glen or Glenda?  Cute, Cowboy Bebop writers.  Real cute.