Owboy Nobop

I finally finished watching the live action Cowboy Bebop last night. I guess you don't need to me to tell you it's not very good. Everyone's saying it now, in a heart-warming union of normally polarised political camps. The consensus seems even greater than the one for the nigh-universally disliked Thirteenth Doctor era of Doctor Who. Even Screen Rant is talking shit about it, which means they think it's very safe to do so. We can all come together in our disappointment.

A lot of people start by talking about how "cringey" Ed is, though Ed doesn't appear until the last scene of the last episode. Played by non-binary actor Eden Perkins, who, surprisingly, still doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, they come off sort of like a zany '90s Jim Carrey knock-off. Maybe Yahoo Serious. Yeah, they're pretty annoying but it's hard to imagine how else a faithful, live action version of Ed could behave.

A lot of the problems with the show stem from an attempt to apply cartoon logic to live action. The final episode recreates the cathedral action sequence from the anime where Spike falls through the stained glass window, about three storeys up. The anime cuts to him recovering in very cartoonish, full body bandages, with Faye sitting nearby, a shot that plays with Faye's association with bondage as well as the show's cartoon nature. In the live action version, Spike is simply walking normally along the wharf with a barely perceptible limp. It was kind of acceptable in the anime because the cartoon logic is acknowledged and played with--in the live action version, it just seems dumb.

The show goes out of the way to insist it's not kink-shaming, featuring a few scenes of characters literally engaged in bondage. But I guess the writers feel you have to make a very clear distinction between bondage implemented for sexual pleasure and bondage the occurs as part of a fantasy series' plot. This is what happens when you have writers who categorically don't understand fantasy.

Another recurrent problem is the show's diminishing of heterosexual male characters, particularly Spike (John Cho). His skill as a martial artist was a defining part of his character in the anime--in the live action version, he seems to be just average, except in one scene in the penultimate episode where he takes out a whole building of gangsters. Clearly meant to be as impressive as the hallway scene in Oldboy or the one on Daredevil, it suffers again from slowly executed choreography. Spike's face is kept in shadow for much of it so it seems even John Cho's stunt double is a slow-poke. It was particularly evident after watching Shang-Chi.

The sexual chemistry between Spike and Faye (Daniella Pineda) is nervously avoided by making the two of them pals who gab about loofahs. Faye has a one night stand with a woman, a sexy mechanic with pretty much no personality otherwise, who gives Faye her first orgasm. It's all done purely for titillation, which I'd normally be all in favour of except, again, it makes Spike look like chopped liver. Spike can't seem to fight any of his own battles, either, and fights he won on the anime are almost invariably now fights where he's saved by someone, usually Faye or Jet. This leads up to an intensely stupid climax in which the final nail is put in the coffin of Julia's character, or any chance that she'll be as intriguing as her anime counterpart.

For some reason, several stories have been repurposed to be about young women breaking free of their domineering or manipulative mothers. The eco-terrorist episode about the Ma Barker type with three sons is now about a Ma Barker type with two sons and a daughter who finally musters her courage and stands up to the old woman. Faye's con-man love interest, Whitney Haggis Matsumoto, from the anime becomes an older woman in live action who had posed as Faye's mother. They must put aside their differences and work together for one episode in which, at least in spirit, Faye finds she's an apple that hasn't fallen too far from the old con woman tree. It's mildly nice but tonally way out of place.

Well, the turnaround on reboots these days is like two or three years. Maybe next time the property will be exploited by people with talent.

Twitter Sonnet #1496

A challenge tilts the wind beyond the mill.
And here a stalwart crow engaged to stand.
The armour rusts despite an iron will.
He cocked his hat to stir the heartless band.
The scattered snow was like an army lost.
The snakes of smoke adorned the frosty ridge.
Behind the fighter's back he weighed the cost.
A gleaming knight defends a fateful bridge.
The steps were shifting fast beneath her feet.
The reeds were singing songs of names and heads.
Another figure took the vaunted seat.
So feeble dreams defend a score of beds.
We read of ancient fish on glowing books.
And slowly put our mouths to wire hooks.

Keepin' On Bebopin'

I'm four episodes in now on the live action Cowboy Bebop and I've just started to realise how much I wanted it to be a good show. I still want it to be good, I fully intend to finish it. I keep focusing on the things that work--the sets, the ships, most of the costumes. Daniella Pineda is actually really good despite her ill-advised video mocking the fans. She has excellent comedic timing. And, you know what, she does show a lot of skin.

I think the awkward truth that no-one can say out loud is that she can't wear Faye's original costume because she's an endomorph. Faye's original costume would simply look really bad on her. If she were Uma Thurman or Bai Ling, it would've looked great. If I were casting the show, I would've looked for an ectomorphic comedienne from Singapore, then it would also match the anime Faye's ethnicity. But, on the other hand, Pineda's sense of timing is great so maybe it's worth changing the costume and her character.

Adrienne Barbeau as the eco-terrorist leader Maria Murdock was perfect casting. And I applaud her for taking such an unflattering role. I didn't like how the poison gas turns people into trees instead of monkeys, though. The monkey thing wasn't just hazardous for your health, it was embarrassing. I suspect that the idea of any physical attribute being embarrassing is too politically incorrect now, though.

This show is definitely diminished by some ideological leanings. The cops, the ISSP, who were corrupt in the original anime, are now ridiculous caricatures, right out of a "defund the police" wet dream. But the worst flaws in the show's writing aren't necessarily political.

The writers don't understand cool. Or they suspect cool is fascist. Spike in the anime was cool. Like Steve McQueen or Kowalski in Vanishing Point or Cary Grant in Notorious. A man of few words, seemingly relaxed, often when things around him are in turmoil. Live action Spike cracks stupid Revenge of the Nerds jokes, cackling with Jet about some Cosmonaut that Faye reminds them of. He makes you want to beat him up and take his lunch money.

My suspicion that they've simply removed his expertise in martial arts seems to have been accurate so far. It's kind of sad. It's like, the writers couldn't bring themselves to include it because they just couldn't muster that much faith in their own fantasy. Vicious (Alex Hassell) suffers from a similar problem. The cold badass from the anime is now a man who pathetically whines to Julia about how he is a real man. And Julia (Elena Satine) is petty and manipulative. Which is especially disappointing because Elena Satine is really beautiful in the role.

Spike has a scene with Ana--who's so different from the anime she's basically a whole new character--where he explains to her he can't tell Jet about his syndicate past because he's afraid Jet won't understand. And, he tells Ana, that would break the both of them. Ugh. This is like Chris Chibnall territory--a character actually explaining his motivation. It's also a shit motivation--and definitely not cool. Spike didn't tell Jet about it in the anime because he didn't need to and dredging up the past was a painful prospect in itself. That was clear without Spike ever once having to say it.

The head writer on this live action Cowboy Bebop is Christopher Yost. The good press for Yost touts him as the writer of Thor: Ragnarok and The Mandalorian. He was a writer, of three writers, on Thor: Ragnarok, and he also worked on the infamous Thor: Dark World with two other writers. He co-wrote one episode of The Mandalorian, a teleplay I hated, for an episode I only liked because of the presence of Bill Burr. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised his Cowboy Bebop would turn out this way.

Even so, like a sucker, I'm going to keep watching. The idea that Cowboy Bebop could ever be resurrected has always seemed impossible but that very impossibility has always made it the more tantalising.

This live action version is available on Netflix.

Cowboy Rebop

The already infamous live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop premiered last night on Netflix. The whole season was dropped but I've only watched one episode because I have a life. But actually I didn't hate it. It has a lot of flaws but I wouldn't call it a shit show.

Almost everything brought over from the anime works. The plot about the Red Eye fugitives, the design of the ships, the world building, and Yoko Kanno's music all work. The new material Kanno's recorded blends smoothly with the old stuff and it's really cool seeing the old ships in live action simulating cgi.

The action sequences so far don't work at all. As I expected, John Cho moves too slow (we could call him "John Slow"). As an actor he's decent, though, and I'm warming up to the idea of an older Spike. It makes the fact he's already built a new life subsequent to a tragic past make a lot more sense.

Mustafa Shakir will take some more getting used to. He gives a good performance and his eyes are really striking but he has a vulnerability about him that jives oddly with the tough guy dialogue. He always seems on the edge of cracking. It's awkward with the dialogue, especially some of the oddly sadistic stuff he and Spike say now. That's a big difference from the anime--Spike and Jet never gloated and laughed about putting a bullet into some small time thug before. It's particularly odd with Jet who's supposed to be more mature but it also robs Spike of a lot of his cool.

It seems like they might have made Spike less skilled at martial arts to compensate for Cho's lack of ability. He actually has a fight with Faye at one point and it actually seems almost even. We also don't get the cool moment where Spike is the only one who's able to fight Asimov under the influence of Red Eye.

The show does a lot of Sin City-ish emulation of animation that mainly just undercuts the sense of reality. Daniella Pineda's not bad though I still don't like her costume, especially her generic leather jacket. I'll keep watching.

Cowbop Beboy

Netflix has released the opening for their upcoming live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.

The attempt to wed live action with a two dimensional style is strongly reminiscent of Sin City. Sometimes it's really awkward, like the first shot of John Cho smoking, in which it seems like his arm was digitally moved about to fit the timing. Though I'm surprised they're actually portraying him smoking.

The original opening for comparison:

The obvious difference is the lack of the fourth lead in the Netflix trailer, Edward. Edward had previously been announced as appearing in the Netflix series but for some reason Netlix has been coy about her. Her actress hasn't been named and no pictures published.

A lot of negative reaction on the internet has been generated around Faye, played by Daniella Pineda. Despite the costumes on Spike and Jet hewing very close to the anime, Faye's costume is notably more conservative and generic. It covers more of her body and also aesthetically looks more like Guardians of the Galaxy than the tweaked 1950s style of most of the characters in the original series. Pineda added a lot of fuel to the backlash by posting a video in which she mocks the fans for their dislike of her costume as well as mocking the idea that she physically doesn't match the animated Faye in the bust department, something I don't remember seeing anyone complain about.

The fact that the makers of this show and many others feel women need to be more covered now makes me feel more sad than outraged. The change in her aesthetic, though, seems like a sign they really didn't understand what the original series was trying to do.

Recently, more images of the supporting cast were released:

Julia and Vicious, on the top left and right, look pretty much the same as they do in the anime. Ana and Gren, on the bottom left and right, make me think that if I ever need to go into witness protection and look inconspicuous I should hope Netlix wouldn't be in charge of giving me my new look. Ana was an apparently ordinary woman working at a corner drugstore and now she's another badass in a leather coat. Gren was a man whose body started to take on female attributes against his will. He was a saxophone player in a small dive bar and dressed in plain slacks and a button down shirt, unsurprisingly inconspicuous given he lived on a world populated almost entirely by men, and dangerous men. Now it looks like he's a flamboyant cabaret performer, which makes me wonder if they're drastically changing his whole story. This seems like a sign of either the clumsiness of wokeness or a clumsy pretense at wokeness (depending on whether you consider "woke" a good thing). Someone trying to show a more positive portrayal of a transgender character clumsily put one in a more stereotypical role in the process.

I'll certainly be watching this show. But so far the boldest things about it are things it directly copies from the original series, which is not a good sign.

The Last Real Folk

In the final episode of Cowboy Bebop we suddenly find ourselves in a very long story established in a very brief space of time. There were hints to and reflections of it throughout the series but all those elements come together finally in a single piece presenting a completion in the final episode simultaneously terribly sad and strangely, deeply satisfying.

Session Twenty Six: The Real Folk Blues Part 2

"Everyone has lost sense of where they want to be . . . Just like kites with no strings." Annie (Miyuki Ichijo), a character reintroduced in this episode, someone from Spike's (Koichi Yamadera) past, says this in reference to Spike's old society of friends and colleagues in the syndicate, but she could as well be talking about Faye (Megumi Hayashibara). Despite Spike's positioning as the central figure, Faye has surprisingly become the closest to being the show's main character by the end.

Jet (Unsho Ishizuka), as usual, is having trouble acknowledging the love he has for his shipmates, telling Faye angrily it's Spike's business if he goes off on his own. But he finally asks her what kind of woman Julia (Gara Takashima) was. And what Faye tells him has enormous meaning now for Faye; "A normal woman . . ." she says; "普通の女よ." . . . "A beautiful, dangerous but normal woman that you can't leave alone . . ." The last thing Faye is is a normal woman. At one time, she didn't mind so much. Her "Lesson" she gave us in "Toy is in the Attic", that nothing good ever happened when she trusted someone, is not something she could say now so glibly. She tells Spike in this episode that she's recovered her lost memories from the time when she was a different person but they've done her no good. She's learned the value of attachment but all of her adult life has made her a person adapted only to avoiding and occasionally exploiting attachment.

Seeking attachment is arguably anti-Buddhist as much as anti-post-modern. We return to religious imagery as Faye describes Julia as a devilish angel or an angelic demon. The worst thing about her is how compellingly normal and, oddly, innocent she is.

Spike adapts the idea to a fable when he meets when Jet for the last time, telling him about a couple cats who meet, fall in love, grow old and die together. But now that Julia's been killed by a stray shot that's not a story Spike can buy into. Or could he?

Spike and Faye's last meeting is brief but potent. She tells him the Bebop is the only place she can go back to after her desperate attempt to find the place where she used to belong. Can't this be Spike's new dream too? He tells her why it can't be and she responds, afraid; "Don't tell me things like that. You never told me anything about yourself. Don't tell me stuff like that now." Spike's old story is a new one to Faye and it's another thing that disrupts her attempt to see the Bebop as familiar, as home. More than that, it creates an arc with a foreseeable end. Like a noir, there's ambiguity about whether Spike has any choice. He talks again about how he has one artificial eye which was implanted after an "accident" years ago; "Since then, I have been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. I had believed that what I saw was not all of reality."

He feels himself forced into a permanently unstable state, ironically making his experience similar to Faye's, but while here's has led her to seek a new home his has compelled him to return to his past. He could never truly cast off old attachment or embrace new attachment because he was always aware of not seeing a concrete picture. Now he's going off to die for Julia and it's natural he tells Faye he's doing the opposite; "I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to see if I really am alive." Making this his story might mean his death, but at least it will mean something. That way it's heroic. But it could be tragic if you consider he might have been able to build something else with Faye. He's advised people before to forget the past; maybe therefore on some level he wishes he could.

Naturally, fans have wanted new episodes of Cowboy Bebop for years but this is one of the few classics in Japan or the U.S. that hasn't gotten a reboot or revival. I suspect largely because of how perfect the ending is--it's hard to imagine anything that wouldn't do it a disservice. But there's so much life in every episode of the series it stands as a continually rewarding closed loop, an elegant statement on change and stasis, of destruction and creation, and the complicated and tortuously ambiguous ways in which these manifest in people's lives.

...

This entry is the final in a series of entries I’ve written on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I reviewed each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Session Twenty Three
Session Twenty Four
Session Twenty Five

Real Folks

Carrying over from the previous episode, questions about the real nature of home and family underlie the action in the penultimate episode of Cowboy Bebop.

Session Twenty Five: The Real Folk Blues Part 1

The title comes from the title of the show's end theme which, in turn, comes from the title of Muddy Waters' 1966 compilation album, The Real Folk Blues. The first track of which is "Mannish Boy", an intriguingly unstable concept.

Moving from eggs to alcohol, Spike (Koichi Yamadera) and Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) are still trying to get over the departure of their crewmates. Jet tries to put up a front, saying the others only got in the way, while Spike remains quiet. The uncertainty of how much the crew of the Bebop means to each other makes the character drama especially effective in the last few episodes.

After Jet gets shot in the leg, Spike calls Faye (Megumi Hayashibara), demanding she come back to help out. Faye is indignant, pointing out there's no reason for her not to go off on her own if she decides to. When she does come back, Spike spots her hesitating at his door, and presumes she wants money for information. There's a back and forth with both characters, one moment instinctively reaching for the crew as a family, the next moment treating their relationship as casual and opportunistic as the terms on which it had been introduced. They've grown fond of each other but, lacking the confirmation of traditional expressions and labels of affection and family, their relationship is unstable. Anyone could just walk out any time like Edward did.

This is underlined by two chance encounters Faye has when she's wandering alone. When she's at a space port, she happens to overhear a conversation between a man and his mother--he's trying to convince his mother that he really wants to live with her and help her out in her old age, though she feels guilty for imposing on him. The man turns out to be none other than Punch (Tsutomu Tareki), one of the hosts of the hyper, post-modern TV show Big Shot. A show that provided information on bounties for bounty hunters, it featured Punch and Judy (Miki Nagasawa), named for the traditional European puppet show, dressed in ridiculous, stagey cowboy attire. We'd seen the show cancelled two episodes earlier, in "Brain Scratch", and now Faye is understandably taken aback to see this zany fellow has a normal family. Much more normal than hers, as we know from her vain attempt in the previous episode to reconnect with the home on Earth she grew up in.

The other chance encounter Faye has is with Julia (Gara Takashima), the love of Spike's life, who finally has a speaking role in this episode. Faye doesn't even know who she is when she instinctively decides to help her fend off some black suited syndicate gunmen. It's a nice car chase, with Faye carefully firing off single shots to pop their pursuers' tyres instead of randomly blasting away.

This is another sudden physical manifestation of a reality behind a story, though Faye at least had some idea of who Julia is from Spike's few words on the subject. Everything's coming to the surface now. Meanwhile, Vicious (Norio Wakamoto) is taking over the syndicate, Spike's old family, and Spike finds he has one ally there in Shin (Nobuyuki Hiyama), the brother of Lin, who'd died in "Jupiter Jazz". Another sudden reappearance representing a family. All of these things forcing the characters to evaluate their places and their relationships move events into the final episode.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Session Twenty Three
Session Twenty Four

See you, Space Cowgirl

Some people might define home as any place you go to sleep at night. Most people wouldn't be satisfied by this definition--Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, for one, though Edward just might. The underlying symbolic conflict of the series as a whole becomes clearer than ever before as Edward accompanies Faye in a search for the woman's home.

Session Twenty Three: Hard Luck Woman

We find Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) has become obsessed with the ancient video tape of her younger self, the girl she can't remember being who lived on an Earth long gone. She's startled to find Edward (Aoi Tada) watching the video with her but is intrigued when the young girl hints she knows the location pictured in the video tape--based on a lion mermaid statue.

It's never mentioned on the show but this is a real statue, the famous Merlion statue in Singapore. So in this series where all symbols of culture and race are jumbled and reconfigured, we actually learn one old nationality--Faye was from Singapore. Though, of course, the statue itself, based on an image designed in the 60s, is itself a reconfiguration, combining a lion's head with a fish's body, a configuration that doesn't seem like it could possibly be conducive to an animal's survival. And yet, like all the other scrambled signs, the statue has survived.

This is Edward's final episode. She was introduced late, Session Nine, and leaves early, in the third to last episode. It makes sense--beginnings and endings have too much intrinsic meaning for Edward. This episode proves, more than any other, just how much Edward destabilises symbols, even as we learn that she was partly raised by a figure who assigns very literal meaning to symbols, a Catholic nun.

Not that there's any mention of transubstantiation. But it's not unlike the subtle bond between Edward and Jet--as the post-modern character, Edward, needs the old or traditional to react to and subvert in order to have any semblance of meaning herself. In the crater where the nun lives, Faye meets several other kids rather like Edward. There's a girl who collects toenails for no particular reason and a boy holds up a mangled toy robot for Faye and just says, "Kore, kore, kore!"--"This, this, this!"

We also meet a man who's apparently Edward's father, his name another signifier jumble, Appledelhi Siniz Hesap Lutfen (Kenji Utsumi). He's engaged in an utterly pointless occupation, traversing the landscape in an attempt to manually map the surface of the Earth which constantly changes due to falling meteors. Naturally, even though he says this is vital for the future of the Earth, he's focused on a project that's all reaction and builds nothing permanent or lasting. Spike (Koichi Yamadera) and Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) try to capture him, mistakenly believing there's a massive bounty on his head, but he's not just a match in a fight for master martial artist Spike, he barely seems to acknowledge Spike is attacking him.

Of course nothing Spike or anyone could do, particularly anything based on a discipline mastered over time, could have any meaning for Appledelhi. He has an assistant whose name he constantly gets wrong ("Macintosh!" "Macintyre!" "Mackey Mackey!" "Macintyre!!") and when he sees Edward he calls her "Francois" and can't remember if she's a boy or a girl.

Edward calls him "Chichi" or "Chichi-hito". "Chichi" does mean "father" but, as my Japanese teacher explained it, it's not what you would normally call your father. Typically, one calls one's own father "Otosan", "Chichi" is a more formal word one uses when talking to someone else about one's own father. So it's bizarre that Edward addresses her father with this word and suggests the emotional disconnect. When Ed leaves at the end of the episode, it seems to be a much more difficult decision for Ein, who follows Ed. Ed doesn't seem like she's leaving for any reason other than that Faye told her to.

For Faye, the idea of finding one's home and family has become a desperate goal. Incredibly, when she finds the Merlion, she does run into someone she knew, a classmate who's an old woman now, but of course Faye doesn't remember her. The episode ends with a powerful juxtaposition of images, the sad image of Faye drawing a rectangle in the dirt in a ruined building, where she imagines her bed was, and the strange image of Spike and Jet cramming hard boiled eggs into their mouths.

What are they doing? The eggs were a gift from Appledelhi who seems to survive only on eggs. I think the eggs symbolise youth and energy. The post-modern essence of Appledelhi and Edward is like youth--because the young don't have past experiences, they can only react to the manifestations of experience from others. Having a past is both a strength and a vulnerability. Spike and Jet are eating all those eggs in a vain attempt to capture some of that strength of youth to stave off the pain of loss, loss being something that can only be felt by people who have a past.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Session Twenty Three

The Dream of an Itch

Following an episode that parodied itself as a television series, Cowboy Bebop brings us a more sinister story about television as a medium and the dangers of media in general. Owing a considerable debt to David Cronenberg's Videodrome, this story nonetheless is a crucial point in the overall narrative of the series and its particular statement on art and culture.

Session Twenty-Three: Brain Scratch

The episode begins with television. We're introduced to Londes (Chikao Ohtsuka), the leader of a cult, "Scratch", via a television being watched aboard the Bebop by Spike (Koichi Yamadera). Londes, with his hypnotic, unblinking stare, promises freedom and purity to the viewer in contrast to the ugliness of the physical body. "What is the body?" he asks. "The body is a mere physical object. It is an existence all too impure to store the gods within us called souls."

He condemns the entirety of human history and asserts there is no future. He advocates a reality divorced from the physical plane and also exhorts the viewer to abandon all other religions which he recognises as illusion. He's another very potent manifestation of the postmodern--he advocates an existence entirely within media. As we find out by the end of the episode, the concept has a lot in common with Videodrome, David Cronenberg's 1983 Science Fiction film about a professor named Brian O'Blivion, his idea that television has become the essential concourse of human consciousness, and the shadowy political entities that exploit this pathway in the human mind to provoke manipulative hallucinations, eventually using a VR helmet to create assassins. Cronenberg was influenced in part by the writings of Marshall McLuhan.

The hero of "Brain Scratch" turns out to be Ein, the dog, who's able to hack into the cult's VR software much faster than Ed (Aoi Tada). This is because Ein, as established back in episode two, is the product of an experiment and is secretly a genius but the fact that it's Ein who cracks Scratch seems more significant because, as an animal, the dog is the perfect opposite of Londes' philosophy. Even more than Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) Ein's nature is defined by physical reality and his pack. Londes, who turns out to be a kid in a coma, selfishly hopes to draw other people into his static world.

He defeats Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) who'd infiltrated his group and he's about to render Spike helpless, too, before Edward and Jet stop him at the source. Jet and Edward don't have a chance to reveal to Spike what they learned about Londes but Spike has his number anyway--he intuits the cult leader is a kid, and says so, which pisses Londes off. Of course it would--it's not just a reminder of Londes' physical reality, it's a sign that his physical nature can be recognised by an observer without his intent. Internet trolls glory in their anonymity, nothing irritates them more than being pegged.

Spike goes further, once again invoking the concept of a dream that recurs with him throughout the series. "If you want to dream," Spike says to Londes, "dream alone." After Londes has given a speech about how people are controlled by television, no longer able to tell fantasy from reality, Spike rightly observes this is more true of Londes than for anyone else and whatever Londes says its not freedom from the physical body that he glories in but the feeling of dominating other people.

This explains the subtle contrast presented between Londes and Edward. They're both kids, they're both representatives of the postmodern, but Edward is more perfectly detached. When she poses as Jet's daughter, she calls him "Papa" as naturally as she greets her real father in the next episode--in fact, more naturally, as I'll go into further when I talk about Session Twenty-Four. She gives one last look to Londes' hospital room as she and Jet walk away, wishing him better dreams, perhaps hoping he finds the serenity she was born with.

There's an amusing scene in this episode where Spike and Edward are eating while Jet is busy with the computer. Edward pours milk on her bowl of beans, unhesitatingly reconfiguring ingredients outside tradition and seems unperturbed by the result. Spike, following her example, pours beer his meal but when he tastes it he finds it disgusting. But he has to finish it anyway because, after all, he's hungry and it's still food. He needs it.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two
Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Bebop's Pale Shadow

In 2001, four years after the television series débuted, Cowboy Bebop returned as a feature film with a story set just before Halloween, in between episodes 22 and 23. It has many good qualities but on the whole the unique magic of the original series is only echoed by the film. It's not exactly bad but, taken as an episode, it's easily my least favourite.

Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

It makes sense to set the movie before episode 23, which is the first episode where permanent changes occur precipitating the series' conclusion. But setting it after episode 22 is curious given that 22 pokes fun at a ridiculous terrorist called the Teddy Bomber. The villain of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Vincent (Tsutomu Isobe), is also a terrorist, of the more deadly serious variety.

But he's the second dullest character in the history of Cowboy Bebop. He's basically an amalgamation of other characters--he acts kind of like Vicious and his past, as a soldier on Titan where he was experimented on, sounds a lot like Gren's backstory. But Vincent lacks Vicious' cooler character design and background connecting him to Spike, and he lacks Gren's sexual and relationship issues. He ends up feeling very default.

But not as default as Elekra (Ai Kobayashi), the dullest character in Cowboy Bebop history. This is the first time I managed to remember her name after the end of the movie and only because I made a point of doing so because I knew I'd be writing about the film. On top of her plain character design, her almost entirely utilitarian dialogue (unlike the other main characters, she never comments on anything not directly related to the plot), all we learn about her is that she feels sorry for Vincent. But we're supposed to accept that this is the woman the self-possessed Spike (Koichi Yamadera) opens up to about Julia? He even says he'd ask Elektra on a date. Why? He says it after she says she felt sorry for Vincent for being alone so much as a child. I guess we have to assume that's what draws Spike to her.

The film makes an effort to connect Spike and Vincent. Vincent talks about his dreams, his difficulty in determining what is and isn't dream, and this hints at Spike's dilemma over the course of the series. But nothing is really contributed to the theme, it just sort of recaps it.

All the elements from the series look odd beside everything introduced in the movie. The stylised outfits the crew of the Bebop wear seem bizarre in the Martian city which suddenly looks like modern day New York. Except for the part that looks like Morocco.

According to the Wikipedia entry, director Shinichiro Watanabe visited Morocco in preparation for the film and this is a case where research definitely detracted from the finished product. Instead of the mishmash of cultural information, reconfigured into a new reality . . . we just have Morocco, reproduced, seemingly in tact, with a guy named Rashid based on someone Watanabe met in Morocco (voiced by rock star Mickey Curtis).

With the designedly plain new characters and the opening credits which seem like they were partially rotoscoped from real people in an American city it seems like the plan with this film was to prove Cowboy Bebop could be flawlessly ordinary. This isn't fully achieved, thank goodness. The movie has some really effective action sequences, particularly a fight on an elevated train and a tussle between Spike and Elektra where he improvises with a broom. Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) looks sexy, back to being tied up for fan service, in this case by Vincent, and Ed (Aoi Tada) is funny wandering the city, but both moments feel like retreads of "Ballad of Fallen Angels" and "Mushroom Samba", respectively. Maybe we should be glad the series hasn't been revived.

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This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two