The first time I heard that “Tank!” opening, with the horns blasting and the screen cutting fast between silhouettes and colors, I knew this wasn’t going to be just another anime. It wasn’t going to hold my hand, it wasn’t going to explain every rule. It was going to drop me into a smoky bar at 3 a.m. and let me figure out the rhythm on my own. And man, that rhythm—lonely, violent, tender, cool to the point of freezing—never let up.
The arrangement appears straightforward: a bounty hunter crew floating through space, who are litterally broke most of the time, hunting down criminals that they can never cleanly kill. Nevertheless, plot is not what makes Bebop what it is, it is that it feels like a collage of human experiences, thrown across planets and space stations, surgically glued together with hunger, desperation, longing. Each episode is like a song on a record, a contained narrative that in some way develops into this silent sadness that you cannot shake.
Spike Spiegel--where shall we begin there? Spike is the type of a character who appears nonchalant, who is hunching, his hands are in his pockets, he is smoking like the world is but one long smoke that he has not finished yet. But behind all the movement, all the thrown away lines, there is a burden of something broken. He is fleeing his history with the Syndicate, from Julia, Vicious, but he cannot escape himself. He dances as though he were fighting, seamless and fluid but there is always that flicker in his eyes--as though a part of him were already dead, just waiting to be overtaken.
His opposing side is Jet Black and his anchor. The former law enforcer, burly and crass, who was always preparing something down to earth in the Bebop kitchen, who was always preaching to Spike about responsibility. But the past of Jet trickles into the narrative as well betrayal, scarring, the feeling that even the strongest ones deserted. He is this paternal figure that is unable to quite acknowledge that he is lonely, the one who stuffs the vacuum with responsibility and order since otherwise it would eat him up.
And Faye Valentine. Faye is anarchic in purple clothes and red lipstick, God. She is, at first, the femme fatale character, seductive, manipulative, selfish. But you can see the cracks episode by episode. She is a woman out of time, literally- cryogenically frozen and brought back in a future she is not necessary. She is acting as a gambler, playing every card, but behind, you find a person who is terrified of belonging and scared because you can get hurt. The episode in which she finally trips back to the ruins of her childhood house, the tape of her young self playing--it broke me. All the sharp edges of Faye made sense because all of a sudden. Armour they were, And nothing under it was gain.
And then Ed. The boy genius hacker with infinite energy, Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, jumping all over the Bebop, without the law of gravity. Ed is an odd, senseless, comic relief- until you notice that she is lonely too, her own abandoned but acting like that was not her business. Her friendship with Ein, the overly smart corgi, may be one of the purest, loveliest story lines of the entire show. And when Ed goes, when she has finally slept off to seek her own way, the vacuum that she leaves seems larger than anything else.
However, Bebop is not only about the crew. It concerns the ghosts they bump into, all the bounties mirrors. The jazz feel of the performance is not merely the music but the rhythm of the show, the rhythm in the way in which silence is stretched between the instances of violence, the rhythm in which laughter transitions to tragedy unexpectedly. Similar to that episode with Gren, the war veteran saxophonist in Jupiter Jazz. The melancholy of his voice, how the snow lay on his frozen planet--had I ached in my bones.
Or “Ballad of Fallen Angels,” when Spike walks into that cathedral to face Vicious, glass shattering around him, gunshots echoing like church bells. That scene didn’t just play like anime—it played like cinema, like poetry in blood and smoke.
The thing about Cowboy Bebop that is so raw is that it claims that it is cool yet is heart-shatteringly sad. These people aren’t heroes. They’re running. Jet, betrayal, lost time, Faye, Spike, love and death. And after all they can never save each other out of themselves, however close they are. They eat noodles, laugh and argue, fight half-heartedly over money. But when the past is knocking at the door, all the one had to do is to face it by themselves.
I will always remember Speak Like a Child, when Spike and Jet locate an ancient Betamax tape, only to find it was a video of young Faye, smiling and innocent and sending herself a message in the future. And seeing Faye crumple in front of that screen--it was as though you were seeing the soul of someone cracking. Or The Real Folk Blues, the last two episodes, when all is suddenly falling to pieces. Julia is killed, Spike arrives to take on Vicious and that last scene, the steps, the shooting, Spike falling with his fingers in the air, mumbling, Bang. That wasn’t just an ending. That was a requiem. It left me hollow.
Cowboy Bebop does not provide you with closure. It doesn’t give you comfort. It brings you bits--memories, regrets, passing pleasures. It gives you the impression of a crew that discovered each other and then broke up, as perhaps that is all they could do. Now and then but not always.
And the music--Yoko Kannos sound track is fifty percent the heart of the show. Jazz, blues, rock, experimental-- it is not just background, it is storytelling. My chest aches with the same color, and all the loneliness of the show, Blue is in such a voice. Each song seems like it belongs to a smoky bar somewhere on Mars, in which drowning people come together, and attempt to avoid drowning in silence.
What Cowboy Bebop did to me was beyond entertainment. It carved something out of me. It enabled me to experience how people pass through life and bump into each other creating marks, and then proceed. It also came to my mind, regretfully, how we sometimes run and not because we believe that we will win, but because we do not know what to do. The entire philosophy of Spike, I lived in the past, walked like a dream, died like he knew he was going to die in writing that all stayed with me.
I simply sat there when the credits rolled in the last episode. Quiet. Just like you sit after a song that tore you apart, and there is an echo left. Cowboy Bebop is cool, yeah. Sleek, glamorous and memorable. But below that cool are woe. Beneath the jazz is silence. And under the tale of bounty hunters is the tale of shattered souls that, in a short period of time, had discovered family in the stars.
And that’s why I can’t stop thinking about it. Because Bebop doesn’t tell you everything. It just leaves you with a feeling—a hollow, aching beauty. And that feeling doesn’t fade. It lingers, like smoke in your lungs, like music in an empty room.
See you, Space Cowboy.
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