Edward the Indestructible

Whatever the world or solar system comes to, folks still gotta eat. This is a chronic problem for the characters on Cowboy Bebop but for one member of the crew its questionable how truly crucial it is.

Session Seventeen: Mushroom Samba

Once again, there's no food to speak of on the Bebop and the crew are looking at each other suspiciously after the emergency rations have disappeared. One thing leads to another and the Bebop crash lands on Io, one of Jupiter's moons, which has been terraformed, apparently designed to be a "Western World".

But as Edward (Aoi Tada) discovers, this is another sign that can't be trusted. The world seems to be populated by characters from a Blaxploitation film, though even that's not an adequate categorisation as one man is dragging a coffin seemingly in reference to the 1966 Spaghetti Western Django.

Like everyone else on the ship, Ed wants to find food. Or does she? As she's about to leave the ship, she starts putting on socks before abruptly changing her mind and deciding she wants to walk slowly across the desert barefoot.

Maybe her feet are really calloused but I think even a Hobbit would find this rough. Despite her theatrical screams, there's little since of urgency in what Edward does; a montage of images of her wandering the desert seem like she's consciously collaborating with director Shinichiro Watanabe, more interested in finding poses than food.

She decides to try on being a bounty hunter for size. When she actually manages to find a bounty, a dealer in hallucinogenic mushrooms, she sabotages herself with a gas gun she attempts to use on him. But it's okay; she's indestructible, she's too postmodern for hunger or injury.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Bebop crew, on whom Ed has tested the mushrooms, are having a series of amusing hallucinations. The most interesting is Spike's (Koichi Yamadera) who thinks he's walking up an endless staircase. He encounters a frog who warns him it's a path to heaven, a "stairway to heaven" according to the English subtitles. It's funny yet it also foreshadows the end of the series as Spike continues on the path despite the warning. Ed, the postmodern agent, has given Spike a sort of premonition. But as a more realistic, mortal character, it's dangerous for him.

There's a nicely animated action climax to the episode involving a train chase but with Ed as the protagonist it functions more like Loony Tunes than anything else.

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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

Finally Edward

It's not until the ninth episode of Cowboy Bebop we finally meet the last member of the Bebop crew featured in the opening theme. A much broader and more cartoonish character than the others, Edward also represents a personification of the chaotic reconfiguration of landscape, culture, and society that characterises the universe depicted in the series.

Session Nine: Jamming with Edward

Nearly all anime series in the late 90s, and to a large extent even to-day, were influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's harder to see on Cowboy Bebop but it's there, too, and it would be fair to compare Edward (Aoi Tada) to Evangelion's Asuka Langley Sohryu: Asuka, when she's introduced, is also a much broader character than the others and she doesn't appear on Evangelion until eight episodes in (compared to Edward's nine). Like Edward, she's a redhead and represents a mixture of cultures, in Asuka's case Japanese and German.

Edward's racial and cultural background, though, remain a mystery throughout the series, a mystery brought no closer to a solution when we learn Ed's full name is Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. And, of course, she's a girl with a boy's name so there's not one cultural signifier we can trust about her. When Jet seeks Ed in the episode and talks to a number of people, we get even more significantly jumbled information as one person seems to believe the mysterious Radical Edward is a tall man, another believes she's a beautiful women, another believes she's an alien.

A kid offers Jet a "well-known speciality of Earth" and acts surprised that Jet doesn't recognise it. It's some kind of processed snack food called Piyoko. Is this just part of the kid's sales pitch or is this some tenuous manifestation of a new Earth culture? I love all the background details in the depictions of people Jet interviews.

As with Spike (Koichi Yamadera), Jet (Unsho Ishizuka), and Faye (Megumi Hayashibara), Ed's first episode is more about the bounty than Ed which turns out to be an old satellite computer whom Ed names MPU (Joji Nakata). MPU begins the episode speaking to itself, lamenting that it is "always alone", and later we learn more about how it uses orbital lasers to carve images into the battered face of the Earth just in the effort to relieve some of its loneliness. The computer tells Edward how the images are an imitation of the ones humans used to make on the planet before constant meteor showers turned the planet into a constantly changing, dangerous place. The drawings aren't an attempt to change the Earth but to put it back the way it was. The computer is looking for some way to establish connexion with a lost culture, the last time it wasn't lonely, which represents a theme that will become more and more prominent as the series continues: a desire to go home and recover what was lost.

Ed represents the opposite, the personification of the constant change in place and identity but she offers friendship and help to the computer. She's quite comfortable in this shifting world, though by the end of the episode it seems as though MPU and Ed are incompatible, however much the two might like to be friends. But throughout the series, as here, we'll see very little evidence of sentimentality in Edward. She seems to want to help MPU, but is just as happy to hand MPU over to the police for a bounty without a second thought.

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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