It took me 18 or so years, but I finally finished watching Cowboy Bebop. I’ve been sour on the idea of slogging through it after the ending was unexpectedly spoiled for me by some friends at an anime convention (their argument was that if I hadn’t finished it by then, then I never would, and ten years later I’ve finally proven them wrong), but I’m grateful that not only did I finally watch through it, but I didn’t get spoiled the part of the story that makes the show so meaningful for me.
First off, what was spoiled for me was the fate of my favorite character at the time. I physically removed myself from the conversation to avoid hearing anything else. I was just a teenager when I first started watching the show on Cartoon Network, and this character resonated with teenage me, so finding out what happened to them bummed me out.
Due to the nature of television, I could only catch random episodes, out of order, so I never had a fully coherent version of the story from TV. I never caught more than a handful of episodes, and ended up having to rewatch some episodes multiple times.
To fix this, I began buying the Cowboy Bebop DVDs, which in the early 2000s were $30 each, and only contained four episodes per disc. Pretty expensive on my $5.65/hour wage, working between 9 and 18 hours a week, that I also had to use to pay for my semesters of community college, and my other vices, like videogames and computer parts. I was even paying for a dedicated phone line for a 56k modem for a while because the area I lived in did not yet qualify for cable Internet and I was already a several years established Internet feen.
Anyway, I only ended up buying up to the fourth of the six DVDs that comprised the whole series. I don’t remember why I didn’t finish purchasing them. Maybe the stores I bought anime from didn’t have the later DVDs (that was a common problem for me), or maybe I moved on to collecting other expensive series. I had to buy Evangelion one DVD at a time, $30 a piece, for the whole 8 DVD series plus 2 more for the movies, for example. Anime used to be hella pricy.
Just a few years after that, I would be moving away from home to start my adult life and career. I took my anime DVDs with me, but somehow left behind my interest in them. Interestingly, only now as I write this do I realize that the only reason I stopped watching anime was because I moved. The same thing happened to me with comic books and playing with toys. I played with toys probably much later than most kids; I was in 8th grade and still enthusiastically playing make-believe with X-Men action figures. The summer between 8th grade and 9th, my family moved across the country, so those toys were packed in a box and so was my desire to play with them. Similar deal with comics; I packed them up and never felt an urge to read them or buy more again. I forgot about them and sort of just moved on.
This year, I made a resolution to myself to get my life back on track in certain ways. One of them that I haven’t mentioned before is to tie up some loose ends that have always bothered me. I got close to the end but never finished Final Fantasy X, for example, and I never finished watching FLCL and Cowboy Bebop. Today I can finally say that I’ve done all three.
I’ve been watching anime primarily while on the treadmill in my basement. I built a TV mount so that I could position a spare TV in front of me while I walk or jog. I put my non-Pro PlayStation 4 down there and use it to watch anime on Hulu, Netflix, etc. It’s great. It’s been an even better experience than I thought it would be. The treadmill used to be the dreadmill, in that the pain of the exercise was completely overshadowed by the monotony of staring at the wall or my iPhone on the console deck, waiting for the clock to run out so I could get on with my day. Now I have a 28″ screen at eye level, just a few feet from my face, and I watch three episodes of a show and then I’m done. I don’t have to think about the time anymore, it just passes without me having to consider it much. Building that mount was the best fitness decision I’ve ever made.
That was a lot of buildup that didn’t have much to do with the show though, so now I’m going to talk about my fondest part of Cowboy Bebop.
Watching Cowboy Bebop again has reinforced my belief that I’m not fond of shows that are not structured as single, continuous stories. I can appreciate that Watanabe wanted Cowboy Bebop to be like a bunch of mini-movies, but anymore I find that concept to feel very meandering. I thought the episodic nature was the biggest fault in shows like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Ergo Proxy. I’ve been spoiled and conditioned over the past fifteen years by the absolute wealth of incredible, high-budget Western television shows since Lost that have felt like many-hours-long movies. In the West, we have truly been living in TV programming’s golden age of quality.
Heavy spoilers after the break.
Last chance: anything after this is a spoiler. You should have already finished the series if you continue reading.
My favorite part of Cowboy Bebop is the end of episode 24: “Hard Luck Woman”.
Here’s the breakdown for context.
Faye Valentine has been a woman existing through this series as a lost soul without a past. In her backstory, we learn that she woke up from cryogenic preservation due to an accident fifty-four years ago when a warp gate near the moon exploded, destroying the moon and making Earth’s surface nearly unlivable due to moon debris continuously cratering the planet. Unfortunately, she woke up without her memories; she doesn’t even know who she was before the accident, and the records of her life on Earth have been lost.
Just before this scene, all of Faye’s memories finally came rushing back to her. Finally knowing who she was, she left the Bebop in her private spacecraft and landed near her childhood home on Earth. With hope and yearning, she dashes up the road to her house as she remembers doing throughout her childhood. She reaches the property, but disappointment sets in. It has been destroyed.
Cue the amazing song “Call Me, Call Me” by Kanno Yoko with lyrics by Tim Jensen.
We switch to Spike, sitting at the communal table, staring into the basket given to him by Ed’s father earlier in the episode, sans eggs. Ed pops up behind him, smiling, and gifts him the pinwheel she took from her orphanage earlier in the episode with Faye, and then she tumbles away.
Now we switch to Jet, who prepares boiled eggs from the previously mentioned eggs. Ein, the Welsh Corgi data dog, intuits that something is amiss with Ed. He leaves Jet’s side (where he has usually been found throughout the series when he’s not with Ed) and exits the kitchen. He looks back at Jet one more time before he exits the ship.
Ed walks away in her signature stroll, carrying all of her possessions on her back and on her head. In Ed’s last interaction with Faye, Faye told Ed that she should look for the place where she belongs, that it’s the best thing to be where you belong. After that scene, Ed, along with Spike and Jet met Ed’s father, who then mindlessly abandoned Ed again in pursuit of the next meteorite.
Ein runs out of the ship. He hesitates, turns back to the ship and whimpers, walks back a short ways, pauses, then ultimately turns back around, and runs at full-charge for Ed.
We cut back to the Bebop’s communal room as Jet peers in and announces that dinner is ready. No one is there.
Jet returns to the ship’s bridge to tell Spike about dinner. Spike lights a cigarette as he looks out of the window. Jet approaches to see what he’s looking at. Ed drew a message on the Bebop’s deck: “Bye bye” with her custom smiling emote.
We return to Faye. Using a stick, she draws an outline of where her bed used to be in what used to be her room in the flattened out rubble that used to be her home, and she lies in it.
We’re back on the Bebop in the communal room. Jet and Spike have set heaping plates of boiled eggs for themselves as well as Faye, Ed, and even filled Ein’s dogbowl with eggs. Stoically, they begin to eat.
Switch back to Ed. She stops walking as she notices Ein’s barking. Ein catches up to her and runs around her a bit. Ed tells him that he can’t come with her, that she is going somewhere far away, and that she may never return. Ein lowers his head and whimpers. After a brief pause, Ed asks him if he wants to come with her. Ein barks once to say yes.
Back to Spike and Jet. They have finished their own plates and have moved on to Faye’s and Ed’s. They shove egg after egg into their mouths aggressively, as if in defiance of their feelings of loss.
Switch back to Ed. She looks back longingly at the ship once more. Ein whimpers at her, as if he’s concerned that she’s changed her mind about bringing him. Ed turns back to him smiling, and says, “Let’s go, Ein.” He barks once in compliance, and then they start running into the distance. Two meteors streak across the sky over them.
We switch to the outside of the Bebop. Spike has apparently taped Ed’s pinwheel to the front of the ship.
The screen switches to black with a statement: “See you cowgirl, someday, somewhere!”
I swear it’s like cheat codes to get me blubbering if you use an animal for a sad scene. Every time I watch the part where Ein looks back at the Bebop and has to choose between staying with Jet or going for Ed I get completely shook. Or when Ein lowers his head in front of Ed because she tells him that he can’t go with her. I’m crying just writing this because I have to think about it.
What a powerful moment, and I didn’t see it coming. For some reason, I expected character resolutions to happen only at the end. I thought even if Spike died (which was my spoiler), that Jet, Faye, Ed, and Ein would stay together like a little ad hoc, space cowboy family.
Faye’s departure was temporary, because she thought she had a place where she belonged, but that place is gone and the people that made it home are gone or have matured beyond her stage in life, like her highschool friend Sally Yung now being an elderly grandmother. This place is a ghost town to Faye, and Faye is a ghost to this place.
Where Ed left for is not made explicit.
Maybe she went off in search of her father. I don’t think so. I think Ed’s motivation for joining the Cowboy Bebop crew (remember that she sought out the Bebop when it came to Earth, their encounter was not a coincidence) was indeed to eventually help her find her father. When she did find him, he very quickly proved that he didn’t care much for her or anyone else, he only cared about his ambitions. He ran off without her without a second thought. She brought him joy in the instant that she was in front of him, but she ceased to exist in his mind the moment his attention shifted elsewhere, as if she were ephemeral.
I think it’s more likely that Ed left to return to the orphanage, but I don’t think that’s where she went either. She told Ein that she would be going somewhere far away, and the orphanage wasn’t exactly hard to reach. If anything, the orphanage will continue to be a pitstop for her journeys, but never a destination.
I think Ed left to chart her own course and discover for herself where she belonged. The rest of the crew cared about her, but she was a misunderstood misfit aboard the Bebop.
I found it heartbreaking that Ein was forced to choose who to follow, but I think he made the more logical choice. Sure, Jet would provide a greater amount of stability as an adult that is better equipped to earn money to feed and shelter them, and Jet obviously cared for Ein and Ein for him. However, Ein was a lab modified dog with enhanced intelligence, capable of operating controls in a car, playing shogi chess, computer hacking, and possessed some unknown aptitude in understanding language, but Jet and Spike thought he was just a regular dog. Any demonstration of Ein’s intelligence was written off by Jet and others as coincidence or fluke, like when Ein made strategic shogi moves for Jet. While Jet would provide stability and be a loving master, Ed was the only one that understood Ein and treated him like an equal.
It’s amazing how even the egg eating scene has so much dimension. Through most of the show the crew has had to suffer a shortage of food, sometimes going days without eating or getting by on scraps. For the first time, they have a bonafide bounty of food, but it doesn’t provide satisfaction because Spike and Jet don’t have their friends to share it with. Regardless, they shovel those eggs into their mouths aggressively, trying to out-eat the pain that both of them refuse to let come up to the surface. They can’t admit to each other and maybe even to themselves that they miss their dog and female comrades.
I thought I had Cowboy Bebop all figured out before I committed to finally finishing it, but now that I know what I was missing, I can say that I now understand why the show is truly something special.