revious episodes of Cowboy Bebop introduced Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, interplanetary bounty hunters who manage to be suave even though they're never successful. In fact, most of the time they and their shipmates--swaggering know-it-all Faye Valentine and bandy-legged genius hacker-girl Ed--are starving.
As the series concludes, they never do catch a break. They have a run-in with a self-absorbed incompetent bounty hunter who styles himself as a cowboy (he and Spike are so much like each other, Faye comments, that it's no wonder they loathe each other on sight), meet and help the daughter of one of Jet's old friends, try to collect the bounty on an elusive cult leader urging believers to abandon their bodies and live as electron patterns in the Universal Network, and fight pirates who infect their targets with a nasty computer virus. In one of the creepiest and most dramatic episodes so far, Spike becomes the target of a mad assassin, an unstoppable powerhouse who deflects bullets, floats on air and never leaves a living witness. But whether they walk away unscathed or limp out feeling lucky to be alive, Spike and Jet never do seem to make a buck, which leaves them without much future as bounty hunters.
In the final episodes, though, it's the past rather than the future that comes between the crew of the Bebop. Faye's missing memory begins to resurface as she watches an old videotape of herself, acquired in an earlier episode, and she leaves the ship to search for her past. Ed returns to Earth and finds a clue about her own family. And Spike gets word that his old enemy Vicious tried to orchestrate a coup in the Red Dragon crime syndicate, to which Spike and Vicious once both belonged. With Vicious awaiting execution, the Red Dragons are planning to clean up the loose ends by killing everyone who was ever associated with him--including Spike and the mysterious femme fatale Julia. In spite of Jet's protests, Spike returns to Mars, where he says he already died once, and faces the remnants of his former life.
A series to start a revolution
Cowboy Bebop cruises into a moodier and more melancholy tone as it winds down, but without losing the sense of visual and personal style that made it a major fan favorite. That style, not the plots, carries the series--the stories frequently have niggling holes or simply aren't entirely resolved, but the focus is strongly on the characters' personalities, their interactions, the creative situations into which they get themselves and their well-rounded inner conflicts. All of Bebop's stars are fighting their own quiet internal wars, but their nasty sides don't manage to overrun their humanity or swallow up their ability to function. As cruel as they can be, they're still oddly likable people--an increasingly rare thing in anime series, which more and more often seem to focus on airheads or unadulterated jerks. (See Sol Bianca: The Legacy, Outlaw Star, Silent Möbius, Lost Universe, etc., etc.)
The DVD bonuses on these two disks are pretty paltry--trailers, plus a textless ending-credits sequence on #5 and an "art gallery" of past Bebop video-box covers on #6--but the DVDs are still a better deal, and they allow for some nice freeze-framing of the casually rich art. The assassin episode in particular (Ep. 29, "Pierrot Le Fou") is worth still-framing through for the innovative camera work, the weird digital effects, and the chilling, near-subliminal images as the assassin moves at top speed.
There's never been a series quite like Cowboy Bebop (although the various Lupin series and movies still come closest), but there probably will be a lot more to come, as more artists try to inject Bebop's mixture of musical flair, visual panache and thematic creativity into their own genre comedies. (Pioneer's Legend of Black Heaven seems like the current front-runner in that department.) There are certainly worse models to work from. If there was any artistic justice in the world, Bebop would serve as the rallying cry for a new wave of anime that would wash out the cute-critter influences of Pokémon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, et. al. But even if it doesn't, fans can still take some satisfaction in the 26 episodes of stylish noodling they've gotten so far.
