Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Sessions 21-22

21)  Boogie Woogie Feng Shui has a reputation as “the weird episode” of Cowboy Bebop, which considering that the show has already had episodes devoted to peyote freakouts and rampaging leftover seafood, is really saying something.  It might be more accurate to call it the show’s most atypical episode.  The plot revolves about a spirited teenager named Mei Fa, who’s on a quest for the Sunstone, a mystical object of power which may have the power to reunite her with her long lost (and presumed dead), father. This  is actually a pretty standard plot in the grand scheme of things, but in the context of this show it feels peculiar indeed. Anyway, Jet was vaguely friends with Mei Fa’s father Pao back in the day, so he gets dragged along for the ride, leading to a couple of nifty chase scenes, some poorly explicated supernatural business about feng shui, a crucial last-minute use of the BeBop’s septic system (it vents into space, if you were curious), and lots of awkward jokes about how weird it is for a crusty old bounty hunter to be hanging around with a teenaged girl.  (Pretty much all of Spike and Faye’s dialogue in the episode is devoted to mulling this over.  “Is she his secret girlfriend?”  “Mmm… too young.  Maybe an estranged lovechild?”  “Mmm… too old.”)

Cowboy Bebop is a show that tends to reward an intertextual approach on the part of the audience.  Trying to experience it as a self-contained system, New Criticism style, does not get you very far.  But there are drawbacks to reading for the allusions, too.  The first big drawback is that you’re not going to catch all of them.  Take Mei-Fa’s orrery-ey fortune telling device, the luopan.  I assumed that was just a traditional fortune telling device, and I’m guessing a lot of the American audience did too.  Someone who has some sense of how Feng Shui works, on the other hand, is going to understand that this is a crazy sci-fi fortune telling device, because traditional luopans (and even most untraditional ones) are flat.

Someone who knows a little feng shui will react to this image more or less the way that I reacted to the 3D chess sets in Star Trek: by saying “man, stuff in the future is totally off the hook!”  Similarly, the scene where they find the sun stone “where the four gods meet” is completely surreal to your average White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, whereas I’m assuming that at least some of the Japanese audience understood what was going on.

Here, I’ll recap the scene for you:  they’re walking in a random public plaza, when Mei Fa suddenly stops and points off into the cardinal directions, shouting excitedly,

And from this, they deduce that the sunstone must be right where they’re standing, which it is.  If you were hoping for more of an explanation, that’s really too bad.  Because you aren’t getting one.  For instance, you never learn whether her father put the stone there for her to find, or if he just used his feng shui magic to deduce where it was, or… well, anything about it, really.  I’m sure if you do know a little of the lore behind it – or if you’re at least vaguely aware of the kind of thing that they’re referencing – this is still cool in a Dan Brownish way.  But it threw me for kind of a loop.  My fault, I know, not theirs – but still.

 

 

 

Another drawback of looking for allusions everywhere is that sooner or later you’re going to start imagining connections that only exist in your head.  “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui,” for me, is strongly, STRONGLY evocative of Hergé’s Tintin.  There are a variety of reasons for this:  first of all, there’s something ligne-claire-ish about the way it’s drawn; second, Jet falls pretty naturally into the Captain Haddock grumpy-protector role; and third, they jump onto the back of a speeding bus, which always struck me as the Tintin chase scene move par excellence. (And there’s also something less definable about the general mood.) But this connection seems frankly improbable:  if the Cowboy Bebop people had wanted to make that kind of a reference, it probably would have been as overt as the Batman reference in Episode 20.  If anything, I’m probably seeing the debt that both Hergé and Watanabe et al. owe to 19th century Japanese  artists like Katsushika Hokusai.  So I really don’t know what to do with this idea… I throw it out there on the off chance that one of you will be all like “DAAH! That’s what this episode reminds me of,” and also because it gives me a chance to point out that the Tintin books – despite their insidiously casual period racism, and despite the fact that they systematically and comprehensively fail the Bechdel test – are flipping sweet adventure stories.

 

Actually, maybe there is more to it than that.  Whether the mood of “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui” strikes you as Hergéian or not, it’s inarguably a departure from the mood of the series as a whole.  It feels like a crossover episode, or a refugee from another series, maybe Tintin, maybe something else.  (If you changed it so that the Sunstone led to a famous lost diamond mine, “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui” would make a bang-up episode of Duck Tales.)   So part of why the episode feels a little funny, I think, is the fact that we’re basically seeing the finale of a series we never watched.  Everything’s too compressed.  Imagine it spaced over three years:  the first season has Mei Fa receiving the luopan and gathering an unlikely band of companions; in the second season the enigmatic clue about the four gods leads them all over the solar system and results in dozens of wacky misadventures before they finally find the Sunstone in the two-part finale, ending with the cliffhanger realization that Pao might still be alive, and the third season has Mei Fa and company using the newly powered-up luopan to search for her father, finally realizing that what they need to do is take the sunstone into hyperspace near where he vanished and blast it with a particle beam, at which point Mei Fa’s tearful reconciliation with the dude could take place pretty much as written in the episode as it stands.  That, to me, sounds like a pretty well plotted serial… but when you cram it into twenty minutes, it loses something.  The introduction of Jet works fine, as does the later realization that Pao might still be out there pulling the strings, but the “finding the sunstone” sequence feels really odd.  It’s pretty much hidden in the first place they look.  I mean, yes, there’s a little montage of them looking a bunch of other places, but we never know why they looked in those places, or what wacky misadventures it led to, or – most glaringly – what eventually led them to the place where they eventually did find the stone.  So even though they spend a fair amount of time looking in terms of fabula, in terms of sujet they basically just walk out and trip over the thing.  Similarly, there should have been at least a few weeks of episodes built around the crew trying to figure out how to use the luopan to find Mei Fa’s father, then learning that they’d have to destroy the sunstone, and finally deciding that a chance at rescuing Pao justifies the destruction of their precognitive mojo.  (The idea that they would need to blow up the stone to get to Pao makes total sense, in metanarrative terms, but because we see so little of them searching for it, and even less of them using it once they have it,  it comes off less “cathartic sacrifice” and more “easy come, easy go.”)

 

So it’s not a typical episode of Bebop, and it’s not a really a satisfying episode of the Mei Fa Mystical Adventure Happy Hour, or whatever that show would have been called.  This leads me to suspect that the real point of this episode is precisely the collision between these two aesthetics – not because the results are particularly interesting, but precisely because it is a collision.  A sense of things being out of place, out of order, topsy-turvy, is just all over this episode.  When Jet meets Mei Fa, she vaults over a tombstone and tackles him, sending him literally head over heels.

Notably, the way this is drawn disturbs our sense of the local “down”:  from the way this sequence is presented, it looks like Jet should be about to fall to his death. (Like so many of Cowboy Bebop’s odd little visual moments, the still image here doesn’t really do it justice.)  A few minutes later, and they’re sprinting through a hail of gunfire, the teenaged girl pulling the big burly ex-cop along by the standard female grab area.

 

Later on, Jet tells Faye and Spike that the Bebop is now a no-smoking area!! (The time is out of joint!)  And then most noticeably, we have the breathtaking little special effects sequence pictured at the top of the page, where the hyperspace tunnel that the BeBop is flying through is joined orthogonally by the hyperspace tunnel of Pao’s doomed spaceship:  a symbolic representation of the collision of Jet and Mei Fa’s stories, and what’s more their distinct narrative universes.

 

There’s some other important stuff going on here about fate and death (and some unimportant stuff about ice cream), but we’ll come back to that.  The fate and death, I mean.  For now, let’s move on.

22) Cowboy Funk

Well, it happened.  I suppose you couldn’t have a show that’s about stylistic pastiche and called “Cowboy Bebop” without throwing in an actual cowboy at some point.  This is a flatly hilarious episode – the last of these, I think that we’ll get for the duration of the series.  It begins with Spike tracking down a terrorist named “The Teddy Bomber,” who likes to blow up skyscrapers with explosive teddy bears.  This guy is one of the more interesting villains that the series has come up with so far, and seems like a perfectly valid conceit to base an episode around when suddenly –

So let me explain.  During his confrontation with Spike, Teddy lets slip that there are only two bounty hunters that he’s honestly afraid of:  Spike, and Andy.  Spike is pleased as punch to hear that he has a reputation (possibly the most honestly pleased we ever see him get, about anything, over the entire run), but perplexed that he’s never heard of this Andy guy…  and then Andy comes sailing through the window.  Andy, it turns out, is a cowboy.  Not in the sense that it’s usually used on this show, where it just means “bounty hunter,” but an actual cowboy – or at least a cowboy LARPer.  He used to be part of the YMCA (that’s “Young Men’s Cowboy Asociation” – no joke), but got kicked out for being too ornery.  Although it never comes up in the show, I think there’s at least a possibility that the only reason he takes in bounties in the first place is that people use the term “cowboy” to refer to that career.  In case it wasn’t obvious already, Andy is dangerously insane, and not a little dumb.  For instance, right after charging through the window, he tries to arrest Spike as the Teddy Bomber, and while they’re yelling at each other, the real bomber blows up the building and gets away.

The movie references fly fast and fierce in this episode, and the most notable one right off the bat is to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone.  Andy’s leitmotif is a brilliant, loving pastiche of Ennio Morricone’s music for these movies, right down to the whistling, the mouth-harp, and the blurring of diegetic and non-diegetic sound (by which I mean, you usually are actually hearing Andy whistle his own theme song before the full orchestral treatment comes in in the background).   It’s something of a convention, in this kind of movie, for the most badass characters in the room to constantly be sizing each other up, just in case they ever have to try to take each other down… and no matter which side they’re officially on at any given moment, it’s understood that their true contest is with eachother:  a contest of manliness, in which badassitude is the prize.  In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, for instance, there’s no real reason for Blondie not to just shoot Tuco and be done with it, other than the fact that his real target is always Angel Eyes.

Spike and Andy end up in this kind of relationship from their first meeting, and it pretty much sets the pattern for the rest of the episode.  Twice more, Teddy Bomber tries to blow up a building.  Twice more, Spike and Andy show up, and in each case they’re too busy competing with eachother to pay any attention to Teddy.  By the end (pictured above), they’re literally telling him to shut up and go away so that they can focus on what’s important, and he starts trying to blow the two of them up because he’s so tired of being ignored. He traps them in an elevator that’s rigged to explode, and while either of them could have gotten out easily on their own, working together… well.

 

Needless to say, neither of them captures Teddy.  Eventually Faye shows up and captures him in about three seconds flat.  She also successfully turns him in to the police, making him the first and only major bounty that the Bebop crew ever collects.  But all this is incidental to the climax of the episode, which takes place after Teddy has been arrested, with Spike and Andy duking out FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER on top of a half-exploded skyscraper.

This is a typically awesome fight scene, and there are some interesting things about it.  You will already have noticed that Andy is basically a palette-swapped version of Spike, yes?  Well, they are also equally matched in badassery.  But where Spike is nonchalant while he fights because he has such incredible kung fu skill, Andy either punches like a 19th-century boxer or just flails around like a nutcase.  And this is more effective than Spike’s Kung Fu:  Spike basically gets took to school, here.

Andy’s fighting style is an expression of his entire character:  he’s just like Spike, but without the cool.  Spike’s persona is based on the heroes of film noir, who are basically the coolest people in existence. What’s more, we are given to understand that this is not because he wants to act cool, but because it’s an expression of his truest self.  Andy, on the other hand, acts like a cowboy, and not the cool, Clint Eastwood cowboy, but the lame Tom Mix kind of cowboy.  (I eagerly await the hate mail of the internet’s only remaining Tom Mix fanboy.  Bring it on, old-timer.)  Furthermore, this is clearly and specifically revealed to us as a pose:  he dresses up as a cowboy because he thinks cowboys are totally awesome!  The interesting thing here?  If you’re going to map good, bad, and ugly onto the main protagonists of “Cowboy Funk,” well… it’s a little tricky.  Teddy Bomber is Eli Wallach.  No surprises there.  But if pressed, I’d have to say that Andy is probably the good, and Spike is probably the bad.

Andy is always polite and friendly (though he swears like a Cowboy too – in English – if you listen to the original Japanese soundtrack).  Spike is a petulant grump, especially in this episode.  Andy is fabulously wealthy.  Spike is poor (and while poor is cool, it’s not something we ever really want to be).  Spike never has enough food.  Andy has his own line of canned soup, a corn-chowder looking concoction called Son-of-a-Gun Stew, which apparently has made him even fabulously wealthier — uh, even more fabulously wealthy.  Faye brings a case of this home after spending a night at Andy’s place — we’re not totally cued in on what happened, but it seems like she considered taking him on as a sugar daddy, and then split because he was too annoying, or reminded her too much of Spike (who she secretly loves), or annoyed her in the same way that Spike annoyed her, or something.

There are a few interesting things going on in this episode.  One is the way that Andy stands in for the good old U.S. of A., with Spike presumably standing in for Japan.  I guess this is how the world sees us… maybe they hate us not so much for our freedoms as for our stupidities.  Another connects back to episodes 19 and 20:  like these, “Cowboy Funk” also does something interesting with the activation and resolution of mysteries.  Right at the beginning, when Andy flies through the window on his horse, he cuts of Teddy Bomber in the middle of his villainous monologue where he explains the motivation for his reign of terror.  Same deal for the second bombing, at the costume party.  At the third bombing, Teddy tries to explain himself, and then gets tired of being interrupted and tries to kill everybody.  But right at the end, he does get to give his speech – not to anyone that matters, but to a random prison guard and, crucially, the audience.  Since the writers apparently thought it was worth having him say it, I’ll give you the quote here (from the subtitled version – the dub tones down the Marxism ever so slightly):

I wanted to give a warning against all the unneccessary waste created by capitalism lacking philosophy.  Planets that needlessly get colonized.  Media that needlessly get circulated. And buildings that are needlessly tall to symbolize all of this!  And by destroying them, I wanted to raise the question of how a true pioneer should be.

Other than the awkwardness of “how a true pioneer should be,” this is interesting stuff, especially when you project it back on the episode you just watched.  What Andy had, and what Spike is revealed to have (at least here, although you could argue that his behavior in this episode is a little out-of-character), is basically badassery without philosophy.  They have incredible physical skills, but no reason for having those skills.  Their fights, like the colonization, the circulation of media, and the skyscrapers, are needless.  And neither one of them has much of a pioneer spirit:  Andy’s a poseur fanboy, and Spike is a jaded scene kid.  Of course, Teddy might not be much of a pioneer either.  Blowing up buildings ain’t exactly making a garden in the wilderness.  But it’s a pretty damning critique, the more so when you consider how much Andy can stand in for the whole aesthetic enterprise of Cowboy Bebop.  That is:  should we read him as American?  Or as someone messing around with the remnants of American pop culture, i.e. as the show runners themselves?  This gets doubly interesting when he shows up right at the end of Teddy Bomber’s speech (he tries to interrupt it again, in fact, but gets there a little too late), wearing a full Samurai outfit.  After all, he only promised Spike he would stop being a cowboy, not that he would stop doing… what it is that he does.  And then you remember that after Cowboy Bebop, Watanabe went on to make a similar series set in feudal Japan…

But what I like about this episode is that it exposes Spike as the assjack I always kind of suspected he was.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ve grown quite fond of him over the course of this series.  But when I go back and read my initial assessment of his character, it find myself saying, “Huh, that’s still all basically true.  I guess he is kind of horrible.”  We put up with the mopeyness, the hostility, and the irresponsibility, though, because he comes through in the clutch, and besides, he’s so damn cool it hurts.  Well, “Cowboy Funk” is the episode where he loses his cool.  Head back to that climactic fight scene again:   we’ve seen Spike get beat up before, most notably by Pierrot in episode 20.  We’ve never seen him made to look like a fool, though, which is what happens here when this totally bitchin’ jumpkick

utterly fails to connect, and sets Spike up for the girder-to-groin action we saw further up the page.  Even more damning is just how annoyed he is at Andy for biting his whole badass-bounty-hunter-with-a-pointy-nose-and-improbably-poofy-hair schtick.  A big part of being cool is not seeming like you care about being cool, right?  Well, with Andy around, suddenly Spike cares about being cool a WHOLE lot.  And this makes him lame.  Finally, there’s the end of the fight.  Here, look at some more purty pictures – they’ll set the scene better than I could.  (By the way, this awesome orange color scheme is used nowhere else in the episode.  In fact, the rest of it is pretty much blue, making it the extended version of that one obnoxious high-contrast color scheme they use in every single movie poster nowadays.  Bebop did it before it was lame, though.)

Yeah.  So Spike doesn’t actually fall to his death here, but he’s lost the fight.  Infuriated, he punches a wall… causing a major section of the building to collapse onto Andy.  (Just in case this isn’t clear, this is a freak coincidence, not a clever use of the terrain.) But Andy doesn’t know that, so he surrenders, acknowledges Spike as the better man, swears that his days of dressing like a cowboy are over now that he’s met the real thing, hands Spike his hat, and literally rides off into the sunset.

Spike’s final act of lameness is to try to pass this off as an honest win:  in a few hours, he’s laying back on his couch with a plate of Son-of-a-Gun Stew (which before this, mind you, he had refused to eat), and explaining to Jet and Faye how Andy was never really in his league.  (And never mind that he’s talking and eating around a bandage on his jaw, from where Andy basically punched it off.)

Interestingly enough, although this is quite clearly an instance of Spike being a self-satisfied asshole, it’s also one of the most recognizably human – and therefore, one of the most sympathetic – moments that he’s had on the show so far.

Heartwarming, innit?  Now let’s talk about death.

Cowboy Bebop and the Ars Moriendi

(Some familiarity with the last two posts in this series is assumed.)  Death has come up a lot in these recent episodes.  “Wild Horses” has Spike resigning himself to death and offering Jet his hidden bottle of whiskey.  Pierrot got stomped by that parade.  Pao gets one of the more moving death sequences in the series in “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui.”  There are also been some figurative deaths:  Doohan wrecking the antique spaceship he spent his life rebuilding, Andy saying goodbye to his cowboy persona, and Teddy Bomber getting dragged off to prison.  Of course, death has always been part of Cowboy Bebop‘s palette – I seem to remember that the very first episode ended pretty badly for a couple of characters – but I do think it’s being used more often now, or at least more thoughtfully.  And I think it’s because there are so few episodes left.  The end of a show is another kind of death, after all.  Of course it’s certainly possible that nothing’s changed:  that I’m just noticing the death references more because I myself am hyper-aware of just how few episodes remain.  But for the sake of the argument, let’s assume that it was intentional on their part, in which case the various deaths on the show are probably in some way reflective of the death of the show.

Particularly interesting here is the question of what constitutes a “good death.”  This is a concept with major roots in both Japanese and Euro-American culture.  You can see it in Plato, and in Kabuki theater, and in the medieval/renaissance tradition of Ars Moriendi literature.  I’m no expert on any of these topics, but from what little I do know there’s a remarkable degree of consensus about the right way to die.  To wit:

1) Don’t live in denial:  understand that you will die, and prepare for it.

2) Do not fear death.  After all, it happens to everyone.  So it’s not that bad. (And maybe there’s a reward! Traditions with a heaven tend to bring that up here.)

3) Die as you lived.  That is, don’t abandon any of your deeply held convictions – i.e. religious faith, political allegiance, or whatever – in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.

4) Perhaps most importantly, don’t whine about it.  If you do, you’ll make it harder for your friends and family to do #1-#3 when their turn rolls around.  If possible, you may want to make your last words an exhortation of religious faith… or if that’s not really how your culture works, crack jokes.

Of course, in modern American society, it works a little differently.  We’d want to add

5) If at all possible, make your death a heroic sacrifice.  Like, be a fireman who dies saving babies from a burning building.  Ideally, you should try to die from wounds sustained while throwing Emperor Palpatine into a ventilation shaft. I mean, that’s a pretty good death, guys.

But it only works a little differently.  #5 is a nice bonus, but #1-#4 are still required.  How awesome would Darth Vader’s death scene really be if, after his heroic sacrifice, he spent his last few moments screaming “The force lightning! It BUUUURNS!  This is the worst pain IMAGINABLE!! Luke, would you stop sitting there like a nerf herder and get your old man some freaking MORPHINE?!”

Now let’s apply this to the deaths in Cowboy Bebop.  Who dies well?  What does this imply?  Well Pierrot fails dying, hard.  He’s wailing at the top of his lungs (4) and he never sees the parade coming (1).  This is consistent with Pierrot having pretty much, like, the most horrible life imaginable.  But most of the rest acquit themselves pretty well.  Spike doesn’t complain when he thinks he’s going to die, and Doohan doesn’t hesitate before tossing his life’s work away (2).  In both these cases, you get the feeling that (1) while neither of them were necessarily expecting the hammer to drop on this particular day, Doohan knew that in an emergency he’d have to get the Columbia airborne, which would end up destroying it, and Spike knew that bounty hunting is a dangerous job that would end up killing him eventually.  And they’d both (4) made their peace with this circumstance.  Furthermore, neither of them shied away from their chosen course of action.  Doohan could have only worked on the Columbia’s exterior, making it a museum piece that would never fly, and therefore never be destroyed.  He also could have gutted it and turned the interior into a modern spaceship, making it into something that could fly without being destroyed.  But if he did either of these things, he wouldn’t be Doohan… and eventually, something would have destroyed his life’s work no matter what he did.  (Pace Kanye West, nothing lasts forever-ever.)  By the same token, Spike could settle down and get a job teaching Karate somewhere… but he’d still die, eventually.  So he might as well do what he loves.  Actually, it’s pretty clear from the series taken as a whole that what drives Spike to bounty hunting in the first place is his massive death wish.  We’ll pick that up in another post.

But it’s Pao’s death in “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui” that really makes the Ars Moriendi relevant to this discussion.  Here we need to take a little detour into the show’s jazzed up concept of feng shui.  As I understand it — which is to say, “as the wikipedia article on feng shui understands it,” — feng shui is a way to design and situate buildings, roads, and other structures in order to attract good energy and ward off bad energy.  Cowboy Bebop’s “Universal Feng Shui” allows its practitioners to use these techniques to literally see and even change the future.  It’s the difference between “set up my store to attract more customers” and “get Bill Gates to hand me a million dollars.”  We’re given to understand that Pao – a grandmaster of the style – was able to use it to drag Jet and Mei Fa across the solar system, all while he was trapped in a hyperspace rift.  Even Mei Fa seems to be able to use it to get away from the gangsters that are chasing her.  (It’s not that she’s luckier than any other adventure hero – like I said, plenty of buses drove by just in time for Tintin to jump down onto them.  It’s just that, for once, the character’s luck has an in-world explanation!)  Yes, the show equivocates on this a bit.  Jet gives a nice “it wasn’t your magic that brought her here, it was her plucky can-do attitude!” speech, right at the end.  But in the final analysis, the sheer weight of contrivance burdening the episode’s plot winds up favoring Pao’s explanation.  Sure, Mei Fa seems like a nice young lady.  But her showing up in that place, at that time, with exactly the right people to help her unlock the Sunstone, is an astonishingly random coincidence if you don’t think there’s some kind of magic at work.

The question then, is this:  why does Pao die?

Theoretically, he could have used his power to do any number of things after he got in trouble with the syndicates.  He probably could have arranged to disappear entirely, living peacefully on some half-deserted rock for the rest of his days.  (Maybe Doohan needs a roomate?)  Maybe he could have brought the syndicate down, or reconcile with them… who knows.  What he chose to do, instead, was have one last conversation with his estranged daughter.  There are basically two possible interpretations of this, both of which have some value as we proceed into the final dvd’s worth of episodes.

The first is to assume that, with all Pao’s godlike power, this was still the best he could do.  That the syndicates are just… that… bad, and the only thing you can possibly hope to do if you wind up in their crosshairs is to say goodbye to your loved ones.  And this is indeed consistent with everything we’ve learned about the syndicates so far over the course of the series.  But I like the second possibility better.

The second possibility is actually kind of exactly the same as the first, except it is Death, not the syndicate, that Pao is struggling with, and Death that he could not defeat.  Say he could fly off and live on a rock somewhere:  to what purpose?  He would still one day die.  Say he could bring the syndicate down, or reconcile with them, so that they would no longer threaten his life.  Would he then live forever?

Having accepted that he would die, and no longer fearing death, his only remaining concern is to live a life that he’s proud of — which means reconciling with his daughter — and to inspire his loved ones (i.e. the daughter again) to face the test with bravery when their own time comes.  And in this, Pao is successful.  The closing sequence of the episode shows Mei leaving the luopan on her father’s tombstone. (This by the way, is scored with the lilting guitar piece that serves as Cowboy Bebop‘s standard “redemption” and “happy ending” music.) She is no longer trying to predict the future, which means she is no longer trying to fight fate.  And when death comes, she will be ready — but in the meantime, a full long life.

Jet is changed by Pao’s last actions too.  As we learn in the closing voiceover, he has “stopped reading the horoscopes,” which implies a similar embrace of the inevitable.  And this will motivate a crucially important change in his behavior in the very last episode of the series, “The Real Folk Blues.”  But on this more later.