And here we are: the finale of Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop. This was clearly intended to be the season 1 finale, but since it wasn’t picked up for a second season, well, it’s what we’ve got. So let’s see how it all ends, and take a look at the series as a whole.
1. The Truth Comes Out
For pretty much the entire season, there’s been this underlying concern of what Jet would do when he learns that Spike is ex-Syndicate. Well, we see it now, as Jet gets a call from Vicious. Kimmie, his daughter, was kidnapped, and they’ll only give her back in exchange for Spike/Fearless.
Suffice to say, he doesn’t take it well. However, it is true to his character that the thing that bothers him the most isn’t Spike’s past, but rather that he lied about it, and let Jet believe that he was ex-military. Perhaps things would have gone differently if Spike had explained in advance, but it’s too late for that now.
This appears to be the moment that shatters their partnership, as Spike’s past has not only put the crew in danger, but Jet’s daughter as well. Presumably they’d get the band back together next season, but that’s not going to happen now.
It also brings parts of Spike’s two lives together as Jet and Faye meet Ana and Gren. Of course, it starts with them all pulling guns on each other, in part due to timing and in part to just really sloppy gun safety.
(Seriously, Ana, if you’re going to hand Spike a gun, don’t hand it to him barrel-first. Always assume that a gun is loaded and don’t point it at something you’re not prepared to shoot.)
At any rate, this raises the stakes and brings that plot point home. Now the gang’s all there for the final fight. Except Jet initially isn’t going to fight, and Faye leaves rather than give Spike over to the Syndicate.
2. Final Showdown
Thus we get the showdown the entire series has been leading up to. Spike vs Vicious, finally tying off all those loose ends. Spike and Jet are captured, beaten, and tied up, and Vicious is going to kill them all, plus Jet’s daughter, just to be a jerk.
Of course, Vicious also gets to deliver some of his anime counterpart’s iconic lines, like the bit about angels becoming devils when they’re forced out of the heavens. But coming from this live action version, and all that we’ve seen from him, it doesn’t have the same impact. Sure, he’s trying to prove that Spike is no angel either, but, well, it doesn’t add anything we don’t already know, and Vicious’ constant chewing of the scenery doesn’t help.
But Faye comes back for a dramatic rescue, shooting down several Syndicate agents as she does. (Although was “Welcome to the ouch, motherfuckers” really the best line they could come up with for that situation?) With Jet wounded and protecting his daughter, that just leaves Spike.
We get the iconic song “Rain” as Spike makes his way to Vicious, and once again, the original anime’s soundtrack adds so much to the moment. The showdown would be woefully incomplete without it.
Spike’s fight through the remaining Syndicate members to get to Vicious isn’t exactly a battle against impossible odds – he just kills two guys and then Vicious is all that’s left. But their fight is actually pretty good. Sure, they do that weird thing where the character with a gun uses it like a melee weapon to block swords (gun-kata!), but the cinematography and fight choreography are fine. We even get Spike using an improvised tonfa until he can get his gun back, leading to another iconic shot: Vicious and Spike, in front of a massive stained glass window, pointing their weapons at each other.
This gives us another recreation of a key anime moment, where Vicious talks about how they both have the blood of a ravenous beast, and Spike replies he’s bled all that blood away. Now, John Cho’s line delivery is great, but once again, this version of Vicious just doesn’t do it. Between his ridiculous expressions and large ham of a line delivery, it doesn’t have the same impact.
Continued belowStill, it delivered as faithful a recreation of those moments as possible.
Anyways, they stab and shoot each other, Vicious gets Spike’s gun… and then Julia shoots him.
3. Julia
After spending most of the series as more of a prisoner to Vicious than his wife, Julia has had enough. She somehow convinces the Syndicate member guarding her to turn on the Syndicate and sacrifice herself to save Julia, survives a massive car crash, then finds Spike and Vicious just in time.
While the anime Julia escaped from Vicious and was living safely but in hiding, the live action Julia turned out differently. She instead wants to take over the Syndicate for herself.
In fact, she’s pissed at Spike for never coming back for her, even though he says he thought of her all the time. Vicious says it’s because he told Spike “she chose me,” but that just gets her even more pissed that he believed it.
While the anime Julia died saying “it’s all a dream,” this Julia tells Spike “you’re nothing more than a dream I needed to wake up from.”
Then she shoots him as well.
So Spike gets another iconic moment, as he falls out a shattered stain glass window in slow motion while “Green Bird” plays. This time, however, the setup and payoff are entirely different.
Still, Julia finds an appropriate punishment for Vicious. He got what he wanted: he’s an Elder of the Syndicate now. But no one is allowed to see the Elders, so as his wife, she’ll be delivering his orders. Meanwhile, every day she’ll point a gun to his head, just like we saw him do earlier in the series, and see if that’s the day the bullet in the chamber comes up and kills him.
It’s an appropriate end for these versions of the characters, for what that’s worth, but it’s still a radical departure from the source material. So whether that’s a good or bad thing will depend on how much of an anime purist you are.
4. Parting of the Ways
With all that business around Vicious and Julia taken care of, what’s next for the crew of the Bebop?
Faye has found more clues about her past, so she’s going to follow those on her own. Sure, Jet said they’d do it together once they got Spike back, but considering what happened between him and Spike, he’s probably in no condition to do it. (Though the fact that a computer could somehow take an image from a VHS tape and “extrapolate” what the surrounding scenery would look like, complete with filling in missing street signs, is a tad absurd.)
And poor Jet gets the shortest end of the stick. His partner lied to him, which put his daughter in such mortal peril that he’ll probably never get to see her again. He doesn’t even get to talk to his ex or say anything to his daughter before they leave. He’s been shot in the leg, so that’s going to make mobility tricky, and he tells Spike he’ll kill him if their paths cross again. It’s not a good note to end things on for him, even after his entire story this season focused on him making an effort to be in his daughter’s life in spite of everything. It’s just a downer.
As for Spike? It sucks for him as well. He’s wrapped up all the loose ends from his past, sure, but it cost him everything else. We just see him stumbling out of a bar, completely plastered, until he passes out in an alleyway. It’s a far less impressive end to the series than the anime’s “Bang.”
Worse yet, they still haven’t gone back for Ein!
And yet, the credits haven’t rolled quite yet…
5. Ed?
Ever since I first saw the internet explode with nerd rage over how the live action anime handled Ed, I wondered when she was going to show up. With the episode nearing its end, I started to wonder if I’d somehow missed an episode, because what could they possibly do with Ed now?
Well, it turns out she appears right in the last minute, I guess as a sequel hook character? Yes, as Spike passes out in an alleyway, it’s Ed who wakes him up, starting with a shot of her face right up in the camera.
Continued belowSo, a few things about this moment:
Now, it is a poor shot to introduce the character with. Just getting Ed screaming Spike’s name at us is a bit jarring, to say the least. So that certainly contributed to the reception
Eden Perkins, who plays Ed, did still manage to capture Ed’s energy and body language. Their costume is pretty spot-on too, except for the hair, which is significantly more… let’s say “triangular” in live-action. The problem isn’t with the actor at all, and honestly, with all the backlash Ed has been getting, I hope they’re doing okay.
The problem is twofold: Ed’s random and goofy nature doesn’t translate the best to live action, whereas animation allows us to stretch our disbelief a bit more for this type of character. There’s a balance that needs to be struck. The second part of the problem is the timing: it’s a complete mood whiplash after everything we’ve just seen the characters go through, so it ends the series on a note of “What was that?”
Maybe it would have worked better as a post-credits scene, and maybe there were big plans for Ed in the season 2 we never got. I suppose we’ll never know. But one thing is certain: angry fans on the internet made this a much bigger and worse deal than it needed to be.
Final Thoughts
Phew… it’s been a long ten weeks, but we made it through. Now let’s take a look back and see how Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop was overall.
One thing I’ve been saying a lot in these reviews is that it has a lot of ups and downs. That remains very true.
The casting was great for the most part. John Cho and Mustafa Shakir were excellent as Spike and Jet, and Daniella Pineda wasn’t bad as Faye, but the script didn’t do her many favors by stripping away so much of the character in exchange for “I’m a badass who curses a lot.”
I get that they didn’t want to over-sexualize Faye, and I respect that, but the anime still had so much more for her character while maintaining the femme fatale aspects. Although in the Netflix version’s favor, I did like how part of her character arc involved rediscovering her sexuality, so again, credit where it’s due.
On a note about Jet, though, a lot of the changes they made to his character (estranged from his daughter, having a criminal record, etc) unfortunately fall into stereotypes associated with Black men. This is a problem that others have brought up far more eloquently and in far more detail than me, so I recommend checking out the discourse around that.
And again: they never went back for Ein! How dare they?
Vicious was probably the biggest misstep. I’m not going to pin it all on the actor, because directing is important as well, but there wasn’t a single moment where I could take the character seriously. The extra screentime they gave to the character ended up doing more harm than good, as it made all his motivations and drives come down to “fragile masculinity and daddy issues.” Talking about fallen angels and the blood of a beast doesn’t hit the same when we know he’s just upset his dad never loved him. Plus, he had the most ridiculous facial expressions every time he was trying to emote, there’s just no working around that.
And I always figured there would be some moment where Gren would play a bigger role so I could talk about the character, but that never happened. So let’s take a quick moment to compare: anime Gren was a veteran who fought alongside Vicious during the Titan War who was betrayed by Vicious and sent to prison as a spy. There, they were made to take experimental drugs, which had the side effect of making them grow breasts. After escaping, they hid out in Blue Crow and played the saxophone, became friends with Julia, and eventually died fighting Vicious.
The live action Gren works at Ana’s bar, is basically her right-hand person, occasionally chimes in to situations involving the cast, and that’s about it. Now, I like that nonbinary characters are getting more representation, and with nonbinary actors at that, but Gren was not the right choice for that character, given the entire concept behind the anime version’s backstory. They could have just made up an entirely new character and I wouldn’t have to be saying this at all – I’d just be happy that they’re expanding the universe to be more inclusive and including nonbinary representation. So that was a missed mark there that I wish was handled better.
Continued belowCinematically, the live action version did a lot to copy the visual stylings and aesthetics of the anime, which worked in some ways, but not in others. For a good example, we can look at how they handled the visual representation of the Red Eye and Spike’s fight scene around it. For a bad example, we have how Ed was introduced.
And of course, the music was outstanding as always. Yoko Kanno just doesn’t miss, and Cowboy Bebop just wouldn’t be the same without her score. If nothing else, the soundtrack was spot-on.
They also worked in plenty of memorable and important scenes from the anime (I know I’ve been saying “iconic” a lot, but that’s what they are), including plenty of verbatim lines. Yet with those as well, the setup and execution behind them can change a lot, so some worked well (Faye’s tape) and others didn’t have the same impact (Vicious’ dialogue in his fight against Spike).
Yet there were also times when the show got far too horny for its own good, between a decent amount of gratuitous nudity, sex clubs, and every single line Woody ever said. I get that Netflix gives them the freedom to do that, but it didn’t add anything at all.
It would be easy to just say “this is a good adaptation” or “this is a bad adaptation” and leave it at that, but the truth falls somewhere in-between with a lot more nuance. It’s a flawed adaptation, but one that still tried and has a few successful moments to point to. Yet it also made plenty of missteps, some done with good intentions, others as foolish oversights, and others still that are entirely inexplicable.
Honestly, while there were plenty of moments here I didn’t like, I didn’t hate it either. There was still clearly plenty of love from at least the main actors, and I feel like a second season to iron out all the missteps and fix the first season’s mistakes would have done the show some good. I suppose we’ll never know now, since it didn’t get picked up for a second season, so this is what we’ve got, for however much that’s worse.
So that’s about it. Thanks for joining me on this wild ride through the series, and I hope you found my thoughts insightful. Let me know what you thought of this live action adaptation, and we’ll see if Netflix learns from this the next time they adapt an anime into live-action. I guess all that’s left to say is…
Bang.
