From its heavy metal soundtrack, it’s lumbering set of space cruisers, and overall brutal vibe, “Heavy Metal Queen” is an odd but entertaining sidebar in Cowboy Bebop. As always, this is a discussion of the full episode, so beware of spoilers for this session and all the previous ones.
1. Turn Up the Distortion
Thus far, everything about Cowboy Bebop has been heavily influenced by jazz and blues music. So for this session, “Heavy Metal Queen,” a tale of space truckers, the hard energy brings a whole different vibe to the material and a completely different reading of the universe.
For instance, take a look at how those ships move in the cold open. They’re huge, moving through the gateways in one solid line, lacking any of the grace or flow of something like Spike’s Swordfish II. They’re pragmatic and practical, dominating in a way we haven’t seen even out of the Bebop, meant to haul and transport, totally unconcerned with anything that gets in their way. The music behind them gives them this power, this raw force.
Which is fitting for this look at VT, an interstellar space trucker. She big, brash, and well-liked, though isn’t afraid to turn the heat up everywhere. It’s also an episode whose obstacles continue to stack more and more ridiculously atop each other with particularly pyrotechnic results.
2. Meet Your Queen
We’ve talked in previous installments about how Cowboy Bebop deals with a.) people running from their pasts and b.) people’s lives filled with independent motivations intersecting at a crucial moment. Spike may be our main character and our point-of-view into this universe, but he’s often not the protagonist. The story in “Heavy Metal Queen” belongs to V.T. To have a character like V.T., who has her secrets but also treats them with her tongue in her cheek, is a fun alternative. Watanabe provides an ongoing joke where various truckers and bartenders are trying to guess her real name, leaving her with a fat stack of cash while the rest of them are hung out, high and dry.
The people at Sunrise give V.T. a rich characterization with a few simple strokes. There’s that ongoing joke, there’s her hatred of bounty hunters, there’s that cat that’s always with her, and there’s that attitude of not dealing with bullshit. As the session progresses, we learn so much more about her backstory and history, her tangential connection to Spike even. Due to its structure, Cowboy Bebop is filled with these characters we only get to know for 20 minutes but have to deeply care about before the session ends. And Watanabe and crew hit some strong notes when it came to V.T.
3. A Tight Knit Community
Because Spike and Jet and Faye are bounty hunters, this is a show generally revolving around bounty hunting. So another interesting difference comes when the show compares them with the truckers. Like we saw last week, bounty hunters mostly occupy their own little orbit, drifting in and out of each other’s lives only circumstantially. On the other hand, the space truckers are tight knit and communicable. When V.T. needs to track down the fleeing bounty, she puts out a call on her APB and almost immediately someone spots him for her. Not only that, but it’s a dude who has never actually met her but is aware of her through reputation. They know each other, they know about each other, and there’s a certain amount of respect between all of them we just don’t see out of Spike’s crew. Honestly, the Bebop crew themselves are only together out of necessity. It takes like 26 episodes for them to actually start caring about each other.
4. Keep ’Em Laughing
This session is one of the funnier outings. If “Sympathy for the Devil” amped up the eerie elements, this one kind of doubles down on the situational. When Spike sees his trashed spaceship, he turns to the bar girl and asks if she knows who did it. She says she actually saw it happen. “If you saw it happen, why didn’t you tell me about it?” Spike asks dejectedly. “But I did tell you about it,” says the girl with complete sincerity. “I told you about it just now.”
Continued belowOr when V.T. gives Spike and Faye a lift and blasts her music as loud as possible.
Or Spike saving himself by shooting into dead space for the momentum back into the truck, then everything exploding, and Faye sitting alone in her cockpit, just down and out, going, “I need a new gig.”
5. True to Form
Cowboy Bebop has a whole wide solar system to explore with plenty of conflicting motivations and hidden histories. Now that I watch this again, I’m actually more satisfied with the show because it’s more episodic and weekly-based rather than individual chapters in an overall narrative. Each session has a flow and energy that doesn’t necessarily need to be replicated by the following session. Watanabe, Sunrise, and crew are able to branch out, to try out new genres or modes of telling the story. Each session is built on the same broad strokes, but the crew’s playfulness and willingness to experiment, to play with form, to give us a wide breadth of characters, have all contributed to its legacy. “Heavy Metal Queen” is an anomaly, but it works. It has a different vibe and energy, but there’s still a place for it within this system.
What do you think of this one? How does music influence what we’re watching spaceships doing? What were your favorite action scenes? Let me know in the comments and see you next time, space cowboys, when we “Waltz for Venus.”
