Finished.
I have some final thoughts
So, in the end, my final verdict is a solid “B” except that it completely fucked the landing so hard that I’m not sure I want to watch anything else from this team. I’ll likely get over it if there’s a second season, but the note they ended on was so entirely the wrong choice that I’m not sure they understand what made Cowboy Bebop so compelling in the first place.
The plot of the original is, if I’m going to be honest, nothing earth-shattering. It’s a western, there’s a guy with a past who’s trying to run from it, but it keeps coming back to haunt him, and eventually he has no choice but to face it in a final bid to escape from it - and he does, at the cost of his own life. That is a well-trodden story.
The thing that made Bebop so noteworthy - other than being an animation landmark - is in its superlative telling of that story. The anime didn’t give it away up front - it gave us a fun action show, and then gave us drops of the real story, gradually increasing over the course of the show so that by the time we reach the final two episodes, we’re watching something entirely different than where we started. It was an astounding display of storycraft.
So to bring us through the Spike/Vicious/Julia arc and to that bleak conclusion, and then end on a wAcKy ZaNy note with Edward, shows me that the writers don’t understand what made Bebop great in the first place. A great storyteller knows that they must consider the state in which they leave their audience, and emotional whiplash can work as a final note, but only if you’ve set up a sort of punchline. You cannot tone shift from Very Heavy Shit to Wacky Funtime and leave it at that, because that final note tells the audience that everything that came before is a farce, a disposable story meant to lead us back to where we started - wacky hijinx of capering bounty hunters. The intervening character growth is rendered moot because the writers have returned us to where we began, so why did we just go through all of that turmoil?
Edward should’ve been introduced in a previous episode, and they should’ve found a different way to create a season 2 hook that maintained the tone they spent so much time building up. And it’s a shame, because they really had something brilliant going on by the end, and they fucking bungled it.
What do I mean by “briliant?”
I really keyed in on the subversion of the existing plot that comes along with Julia seizing the reins of power. That is the kind of departure from source material that I actively want in reimagined media - tell me something different that makes me think about the source material.
I think that final arc was a commentary on the romantic anti-hero that is Spike and tropes like him. Vicious is clearly a bad guy, but in that climax Julia also shows Spike how much the two of them are alike. “Why didn’t you come for me” followed by Vicious’ line “I told him you chose me” lays bare the truth - Spike isn’t in love with Julia so much as he is with his ego. She realized she was a playing piece being moved around by two men more interested in their relationship to one another than they are in their relationship to her, and she had enough of it. Spike confirms that what Vicious said is true - “I shouldn’t have believed him” means that he did - and so we see that Spike’s romantic pursuit of Julia was entirely self-serving, having nothing to do with her own safety like he promised those years ago.
That’s a terrific indictment of some of the problematic tropes in Spike’s character, and it’s consistent with the main theme of Bebop - that we cannot resolve our pasts by running from them, and that instead of chasing a dream, we need to confront the things we have left in our wake in order to move past them.
Spike and Vicious were caught up in their pasts with each other - this was cemented in the final episode when Spike commented that he only seemed like an angel when he was next to Vicious. Spike’s entire image - the entire identity of Fearless - is a construct that resulted directly from his relationship to Vicious. “Cleaning up” after him, keeping him in check, being his “better half” - everything Spike did to build himself required him to be a counterpoint to Vicious. And so, his pursuit of Julia was an extension of that, whether or not he realized it.
This inability to move on from a past they’ve idealized is present in all of the main men, including Jet. He kept trying to be part of Kimmie’s life, but IMO his real motive was trying to win back his ex by being the father he should’ve been in the first place. And in that final scene where Kimmie calls the other guy “daddy,” we get a gut-punch of truth - sometimes you’re just too late. Jet spent his time chasing a dream that was already dead, idealizing a version of Kimmie, his ex, and a life that no longer existed. He chased the father figure trope - the one that Jet occupied in the anime - and in the end failed to grasp it because he wasn’t invested in the situation as it actually was. A broken man trying to grab ghosts of the past - heart-wrenching stuff, and the show lets us know that he failed because he refused to move on and accept reality.
That’s all meaty stuff right there. Julia literally puts a bullet in all that, showing Spike and Vicious that you have to confront the reality of your past in order to actually escape it. She realized that she could never be free so long as these two remained in their conflict with each other, so she put a stop to it. I cannot state enough how brilliant a subversion that is.
And had the show ended on that, I could be convinced to say it was almost as good as the original, all other problems notwithstanding. I forgive all kinds of storytelling trouble if you take me somewhere emotionally compelling, give me something to think about, and stick the landing - but to have something good and then not understand what makes it good is unforgivable. You have to understand your source material and what makes it great, or else what you will crank out is mediocre at best.
So close. So so close to brilliance.