Cowboy Bebop Session #1: Asteroid Blues

I'm going to keep going with my FF7 posts, but I've developed a hankering to re-watch "Cowboy Bebop", far and away my favorite anime, and indeed one of my favorite TV series regardless of its country of origin or whether its animated or live action. The show has a certain brilliance in a way that it melds a bunch of different genres and themes, yet also exudes a style all its own. Its not like Kill Bill, which is almost just four hours worth of Tarantino coming up with random B-movie references (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I really like Kill Bill as well). The movie builds off of a lot of other things: film noir, westerns, science fiction, martial marts movies; but in the end it isn't a hodgepodge collection of all of these things. The sum total of it is something more. As egotistical as the tag line--which you see in some of the background of the bumps coming in out of the commercial break and elsewhere--may sound its kind of true: "The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called 'Cowboy Bebop.'"

Basically my plan is to just start watching and write down my thoughts as I go. Some of it may pertain to what I'm watching at that exact moment, other times it may be larger themes of the whole series. At any rate, let's start with episode 1.

Session #1: Asteroid Blues

The series shows its noir influence from the very outset. The scene that serves as our introduction is a rainy alleyway. Everything is a muted blue color, almost making it look like a sepia tone. Our first glimpse of Spike is of him standing, nursing a half-smoked cigarette, with his head down and his eyes obscured in shadow. We hear a very melancholy sounding music box playing. Music boxes are a pretty widely used storytelling device, I think. The first thing that comes to mind for me is A Few Dollars More, where you'd hear the same sort of music box tune every time there would be a flashback of Indio, the villain, and his ex-lover. I don't know if the usage in "Bebop" is a direct homage or if Dollars inspired it, but I know that Shinichiro Watanabe, Bebop's director, and the rest of those involved with the series know their Man with No Name movies, because there's a more obvious The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly reference later in this episode. Spike drops a rose in a puddle as he walks away. The red in the rose stands out against the bluish-black background. We start to see quick cuts of Spike in a bloody shootout with a group of gunmen who we don't know anything about right now. Again, the color red stands out in the washed out looking scene. I think the color red is tremendously important in the series. Already, I can think of a bunch more places that it comes up. The music box tune comes to a stop, and we cut to the series's standard opening, complete with its theme song, "Tank", which I have nothing to say about other than its one of the coolest damn openings ever.

After the opening, we get the title screen and see that we're watching "Asteroid Blues" and get treated to, appropriately enough, blues music on a harmonica. We meet Spike and Jet, cruising through space on their way to Earth, and, inbetween Spike complaining about the lack of beef in Jet's bell peppers and beef dinner, we deduce that they're bounty hunters. Jet has their next target lined up, who's hiding out in Tijuana. In the future, its hard out here for a bounty hunter, and Spike and Jet are broke, as they are pretty much perpetually throughout the series. Jet and Spike, as we'll pick up on throughout the series, started out on opposite sides of the law and kind of met in the middle. Jet was an ex-cop, Spike is a ex-crime syndicate member, and now they're both bounty hunters. They're both sort of half "flawed": One of Jet's arms is prosthetic, and, we find out much later, one of Spike's eyes is fake as well.

Down on the surface, in a dusty old bar in TJ, Asimov walks in, looking a bit like Antonio Banderas in Desperado, with his pregnant lady friend, the femme fatale of the episode. Asimov follows the bartender in the back and is trying to sell him some "red eye" or "bloody eye" (again, the color red shows up), evidently the street drug of choice in the future, which you spray directly into your eyes. Asimov's whole vision turns red, and the drug seems to give him superhuman reflexes as he literally dodges bullets when a gang of men start shooting up the bar. Spike, meanwhile, having landed, is consulting a Native American mystic regarding Asimov's whereabouts. The mystic is a character who sort of bookends the series. He's here at the beginning, shows up again in the middle, and is there again at its very end. He tells spike that the "red-eyed coyote" will appear north of town, and then: "death." Spike, nonchalantly, says "he was killed once before, by a woman." As Spike turns to leave, says somewhat ominously, "Wakan Tanka, guide his spirit," and we get a close-up show of him blowing away a lump of sand from the palm of his hand. We're far removed from the unpleasantness at the series's end, but even here Spike seems to be a character whose fate has been sealed.

Jet, meanwhile, visits the now-destroyed bar, and gets some information out of two guys who show up mentioning that they need to get the bloody eye back. Spike, landing to get gas, happens to run into Asimov in passing in the bathroom, and then--much more literally--runs into his lady friend, and gets caught stealing a hot and a bunch of her other groceries. Evidently she finds a certain charm in this, and they speak flirtatiously for a bit as Spike gasses up. Eventually, Spike reveals that he's a bounty hunter. Turns out, Asimov was right behind Spike listening in, and almost chokes him to death but stops at the behest of the woman. They get in their ship and fly away and the girl tells Spike as he's laying on the sidewalk, "Adios, cowboy." Jet finds Spike, still laying on the ground, passed out, and after Spike comes to announces that the job's not worth it, but Spike knows that Asimov is going to Mars after he sells his bloody eye, and he stole a sample of it during their tussle. Spike, in disguise, sets up a deal to buy bloody eye from Asimov, and Asimov tries to pull out the vial of it that he no longer has. Spike pulls off the goofy sombrero he's wearing, reveals the vial he has, and asks Asimov, "Do you know how much you're worth?" He's wearing a poncho that looks a lot like Blondie's from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and that's what Blondie asks of Tuco in the movie. Spike and Jet are a lot like detective characters in a noir crime story, but they're also not at all unlike gunslingers in a spaghetti western movie. The episode "Cowboy Funk" much later on in the series, will pit Spike against a literal cowboy, and gives us more of the spaghetti western influence on the series, complete with music that sounds a lot like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

Spike and Asimov have another tussle, but their interrupted by more gangsters trying to gun down Asimov. In the chaos, his girlfriend is nicked by a bullet and we she that she's the one carrying the big stockpile of bloody eye because the vials all come spilling out onto the ground. Asimov is furious that she almost lost them, and, looking into his eyes, the girl realizes that he doesn't really care about her at all, just the drugs. With a somber jazz saxophone tune playing, Asimov, drugged up to all hell, flies up off planet and into space, tailed by Spike. With a blockade of police ships looming ahead, the girl decides enough is enough, and shoots Asimov as Spike, his ship now side-by-side with theirs, watches, horrified. Before she dies, she tells Spike again "Adios." Their ship gets riddled full of bullet holes, and the girl drifts out into space, leaving a trail of red eye vials. At the end of the episode, Spike and Jet are again aboard the Bebop, Jet again making up some "bell peppers and beef." They're back to where they were at the start of the episode. C'est la vie.

The episode first and foremost introduces us first and foremost to two of our main characters, Spike and Jet, the original Bebop crew. Jet is more of a wiser, calculating man, Spike is more wreckless and impatient, yet also has this dark, somber aura about him. It also establishes the noir overtones that are going to pervade the series. It tells a self-contained story where the protagonists track down the antagonist they're seeking, and make it out of a fight with him alive, but the resolution is anything but happy. Spike, already having been "killed by a woman once," here watches as a woman dies needlessly, her only crime seemingly being hooking up with the wrong guy. Their brief flirtation suggests that maybe, had she escaped and fled with Spike, maybe she could've been happy, but in a noir story, characters always seem bound by their fate, and dreams can never really manifest themselves into reality.

The next episode is a much more light hearted one, and one of my favorites--Stray Dog Strut--where everyone's favorite Pembroke Welsh Corgi makes his first appearance.