Time to look at another episode of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop. But before that, I need to bring up something I overlooked during last week’s episode. As a friend pointed out, some of the changes or additions to Jet’s backstory tie in to stereotypes about Black men, such as being an absent father with a criminal record. That is absolutely a problem that I should have mentioned sooner, and something we certainly will circle back to.
For now, let’s look at episode 6 and see how it goes.
1. Radical Ed
When Jet got a message from a “Radical Ed” at the start of the episode, I thought “So this is it. The episode where Ed appears.” But no, it wasn’t. Instead, Radical Ed is a famous hacker that Spike and Jet have heard of before, and reached out to them with information about a bounty.
Of course, the message also included Ed’s signature smiley face, as seen in the anime, so that’s a nice detail.
And frankly, I think introducing Ed this way before we actually meet her is a good call. It establishes the character in advance, so we’re aware of her reputation before she actually appears.
However, a twist later on raises questions as to why Ed would send Spike and Jet after Londes in the first place…
2. Londes Center vs SCRATCH
The bounty Spike and Jet go after this episode is Dr. Londes, formerly known as Cy-Baba, the “Let Go” Guru who got 3,000 people killed. He changed his name and now runs the “Londes Center,” which is allegedly designed to let people free their minds and move on from past regrets.
But as we learn later in the episode, there is no actual Cy-Baba or Dr. Londes – it’s an AI that went mad and started killing test subjects. It makes people give up their “emotional tethers” and devours their consciousness… and it’s not really clear why or what it does after that. Just, y’know, absorbing brains and murdering people. As evil machine intelligences do.
One thing I did notice: the smiling video receptionist that led Spike down the hall (jumping monitor to monitor as she did to direct him on) was named Beatrice. Is that a reference to Dante’s “Divine Comedy?” In that, Beatrice is Dante’s long-lost love who died and sends Virgil to guide him through hell until she meets him in paradise. Of course, in this, Beatrice just guides people to a room with a particularly suspicious chair and VR headset. So maybe it’s just a coincidence.
Anyways, let’s compare this Londes to the anime’s version. In there, he was the leader of SCRATCH, the migrate to electronics movement. It took the post-humanist idea of humanity moving beyond physical bodies and taking on virtual lives and turned it into a cult, complete with members committing suicide. This includes hypnosis and scanning brains, similar to the live action adaptation.
The anime version of Londes isn’t an AI, but rather, a young hacker in a vegetative state who can only only interact with the world through his brain being connected to computers.
Though they do both use a large stack of television monitors.
So once more we have some similarities and some differences between the live action and anime versions. The anime version certainly had more in terms of character motivation and in exploring science fiction concepts.
Also, in the anime, Faye pretends to join SCRATCH to get close to Londes and get the bounty for herself. That doesn’t happen in this episode, so what’s she up to instead?
3. More About Faye
So hey, live action Faye discovers she’s into girls, that’s nice. In fact, the post-hookup scenes between her and Mel the mechanic shows one of the healthier relationships we’ve seen in this show. There’s some mutual respect going on between them, and they both seem to be on the same page with where things go and close by the episode’s end. Compared to what we’ve seen of Vicious and Julia, or how things are with Jet and his ex-wife, this is downright wholesome.
Beyond that, the hookup is used to delve a little more into Faye having to re-learn everything after being woken up from cryo sleep. Her amnesia was so bad she had to re-learn things like “don’t touch a hot kettle,” so if she knew her sexuality before getting frozen, she certainly didn’t remember it after (or if she ever had an orgasm before, as the show takes time to focus on). Did she even remember how to speak, or did she have to re-learn that too?
Continued belowIt sets up some interesting concepts, so hopefully the show will delve into that a little more later down the line, along with the concepts of medical debt and fraud that came up in the anime. So far it’s just been briefly touched on and deserves to be explored more. But it’s a start.
4. Quick Trip to Earth
While Spike is stuck in a virtual reality loop and is getting his brain scanned, Jet has to try to save him, along with a scientist who helped create the AI. But the plot conspires to make it more and more difficult, so Jet has to get to Earth and destroy the AI’s mainframe.
Yes, apparently the Internet is good enough that the AI can control a computer system and manage brain uploads all the way across space.
So we get a scene where Jet has to rush the Bebop through the space gate and all the way to Earth while it’s falling apart and trying to work with a jury-rigged coil made for an entirely different kind of ship. It’s pretty action-y, yes, though I have to wonder how they managed to crash land on the exact spot on Earth to let them find a hidden bunker hosting an AI in so little time.
Frankly, it reminded me of the latter seasons of Game of Thrones where travel time suddenly became flexible and people can go running off in one scene to return with dragons ten minutes later. It just added extra stakes where none were necessary and without consideration of how large a planet Earth is.
I mean, it let Faye put her handheld railgun to use, but that’s about all.
5. Spike Can’t Let Go
So let’s go to the main character-driven aspect of the episode: what Spike sees when he’s trapped in the Londes AI’s virtual reality.
The AI’s goal is to make him give up his “emotional tether” – to put his biggest regret behind him and move on. In his case, of course, it’s Julia.
So we learn a few things:
– Three years ago, he waited for Julia to run away with her, but she never came
– She was with Vicious at the time
– He can’t let go of what they had
– He killed a lot of people at Blue Crow, including a girl
This all lines up with what we’ve seen and know from the anime version (give or take a little more blood on his hands than we thought). So as we go through each loop, we see the Londes AI get more and more desperate to break him down. It has Julia plead with him to move on, it tries having her give it to him directly, eventually it breaks down into violence and her shouting “I could never love a monster like you” to tear him down psychologically.
Well, Spike is too stubborn for that, no matter how many times he and the virtual Julia get shot. In this case, it saved his life, but in the real world, you really should listen to someone when they say “I don’t love you, leave me alone.”
You’d also think that after the first loop or so he’d figure out that something is up, especially as the audio and visual quality of the virtual world break down as things continue to loop or get more intense. But no, he’s caught up in it until the end.
And somehow, Vicious still manages to be ridiculous even without saying a word. Because when he appears to shoot Spike in virtual reality, he has the most ridiculous looking smile on his face I’ve ever seen.
So overall, this episode is not one of the better ones. Yeah, it tells us more about Spike and his backstory, as well as how he’s holding on to the past, but the delivery wasn’t the best. There was some good material in there, but it got bogged down with a script that didn’t think everything through.
And after all this, the biggest question I have about the episode is: what is “4D Printing?”
