Last week, Cowboy Bebop introduced Faye Valentine to the crew. And now it’s time to bring her full aboard. “Gateway Shuffle” is a stuffed episode, with ideas about the environment, terrorism, and cultish devotion. There’s a whole wide world out there, and our central crew are only a small part of it.
1. Mixing Up the Formula
So far, Cowboy Bebop had adhered to a fairly basic structure: Jet and Spike are pursuing a bounty, everything goes wrong, and they end up losing their target for one reason or another. With “Gateway Shuffle,” everything gets mixed up a bit. The episode actually opens with Faye, out of fuel and drifting in space, trying to hail down anyone who will answer her call. Then, before the session title appears, she spots a downed ship sending out a distress beacon.
We cut over to Spike and Jet at a Ganymede restaurant, about to nab this new bounty when a group of eco-terrorists attack. Everything is turned on its head as, once again, the Bebop crew are thrown right in the middle of another crew’s plight. After a series of circumstances, they end up with the leader of the terrorist organization, Mother, and try to collect her bounty while also dealing with her organization and reach. And also before she releases a virus on Ganymede that will turn people into monkeys or something.
2. Throw It All Out, Something’s Bound to Stick
There are a lot of elements Watanabe and crew throw on the screen in this session and not all of them work. While it’s a clever fake out to have the bounty shift in the first third of “Ganymede Shuffle,” they do spend somewhat longer with this plot line. And I can see needing to get Faye back into the action, but the distressed ISSP ship feels more like a missed opportunity than a story beat. The action here plays out differently, too, pressing more for body horror and gnarly transformations. For this session, Watanabe and crew just kept stacking pieces of story on top of pieces of story, and the overall session feels a little looser and sloppier than some of the others before it.
Once it gets grounded though, right when Spike and Jet apprehend Mother, the session finds itself.
3. Mother Cultist
I sort of love the dynamic Mother has between the rest of her crew. She surrounds herself with men whose incompetence and ineptitude go on to cause her more and more problems. One of my favorite moments of “Gateway Shuffle” is near the end, when the gate is about to close on them, everyone’s panicking, and Mother’s just standing there in the middle of her ship, her eye slightly twitching.
Tangent: I’m in the middle of the third season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and there’s an episode where one of Kimmy’s fellow Mole Women tries to start a cult of her own. She does everything the same way a man might, including taking child brides. Somehow she ends up with a cabin full of teenage boys and by the time Kimmy shows up, she’s ready to blow them all sky high. That episode had all sorts of echoes of this session.
4. What’s the Point?
Unlike a lot of space operas, the crew of the Bebop have little, if any, effect on what’s going on within the star system. This is most evident in the scene where Jet reviews the Space Warriors’s history, how Mother took over, and the more extreme measures the group began using for the supposed benefits of the environment. Even after they apprehend Mother and are there at the end of their crusade, Spike, Jet, and Faye are mostly in the way until those last moments.
This also clues us in to more of the ways the system developed, the conflict and strife taken by building these star gates and connecting the solar system. Watanabe and Sunrise did admirably about slowly unraveling the history and information of this world, at letting us see how it all turned to shit.
But these are characters who are important to us. They are the ones leading us through this universe, our eyes and ears and access. Without them, we would have never touched on this story at all. Everything in Cowboy Bebop is temporary, drifting in and out of its existence. Yet nothing else matters when it comes around.
Continued below
5. Hyperspace Chase!
Coolest part of the session? After the Space Warriors release their missiles and Spike and Faye are trying to shoot them down through the Astral Gate. Every time they get closer to the bomb however, it splits into more parts. The hyperspace stars whisk by as things explode around the two bounty hunters. Add Kanno’s score to the scene, some Star Wars references, and an expert rhythm to the edit, and this is an exciting conclusion to an oddly structured episode.
What did you think? How does this session stack up with the others so far and how do you feel about how Cowboy Bebop reveals its history and lore? Sound off in the comments and see you next time, cowboys, for “The Ballad of Fallen Angels.”
