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Aug. 15th, 2024 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
between_time_and_42Hello everyone, long time no see, let's get right to the point: over the weekend, I watched Cowboy Bebop and that ending really shook me up, so I wrote some meta about it. Dumping this here now that it's done.
In my initial post reacting to the finale on Tumblr, I said in the tags that given the themes of the show, there was no other way it could have gone. That’s part of what made me so angry (the other part being the fact that we were left wondering throughout the entire show who Julia was, why she had such an impact on Spike, will we ever get to see her… and then we do see her BUT THEN she’s killed, just like that. To me, that just wasn’t fair. I would say “she deserved better” but we didn’t even get to know her long enough to say for sure WHAT she deserved. And again, on one level, I feel like I understand WHY this happened, but… on another level, one could make a case that Julia’s death was an example of fridging (killing off a female character to further a male character’s pain/give a male character motivation) and I hate whenever that happens in a series). The fact that, even if it would have been NICE to see things end up differently, that would be way too idealized and even uncharacteristic of the series. The way it ended made too much sense, and maybe I was angry that I didn’t see it coming. But anyway…
I see a lot of the series as being focused on the past and one’s individual relationship to one’s own personal past, and how the past affects the present. Each of the main characters has to reckon with aspects of their past at certain points in the series. Jet has a mixed relationship with his past as a police officer. There are certainly things he dwells on and regrets, like the loss of his arm, the loss of his lover, and his moral conflict while watching his fellow officers take bribes and sell out to the Syndicate. But I didn’t get the feeling that he really lets his past drive him (or, more specifically, it rarely takes control of his present actions), and in fact several of the people he’s met in the past turn out to be important contacts because of their connections. So while some aspects of Jet’s past haunt him once in a while, it seems to me like he has a relatively healthy relationship with it. This is even emphasized by the parable that he tells at the end about the man who loses his leg in the desert, and his takeaway from it. It seems to me that he hates the thought of dying with regrets, with thoughts of the past. (There’s more to unpack here but this wasn’t supposed to be a meta about Jet, lol…)
As far as healthy attitudes to one’s past go, Ed is... an interesting case. You'd think that not being ruled by one's past and living solely in the present is an admirable trait. Ed takes it to the extreme by not showing any signs of being aware that she even has a past. She doesn't brood over or dwell on past events, nor does she ever talk about what may or may not have happened to her in the past (though I have a feeling that she would if someone asked, she just doesn't feel the need to explain her entire backstory to the people who have taken her in). In fact, she doesn't even seem to form close attachments, or at least she doesn't cling to any connections she may have made and shows no sentimentality when it comes to moving on. Her father left her at a daycare when she was young and instead of letting that loss define her, Ed moved on- literally. She then spent several years at an orphanage and while it's clear when she finds the orphanage again that she's happy to see familiar faces, she doesn't seem to have any real attachment to those people/that place either, having wandered off again several years after coming there and having no qualms about leaving again once she's returned. Then, when she eventually leaves the Bebop crew, she does give Spike a going-away present, and she accepts Ein tagging along with her, but otherwise she doesn't look back. I think it's easy to infer that Ed is going back to her father at the end of this episode, or at least is going to search for him (perhaps based on what Faye told her, to go find where she belongs), but I personally don't think that's the case. While their reunion was unquestionably happy, Ed's father seems to share Ed's trait of not looking back, to the point where he unintentionally abandons his daughter multiple times. For that reason, I think Ed is setting off to do her own thing, and possibly running into her father again is just one of the things that she might end up doing while on her own. This to me is reinforced by how Faye, in that same episode, ends up realizing that where she thinks she belongs is not where she belongs. The same seemed to prove true for Ed. Again- this post was not supposed to be a meta about Ed, but it's important to look at her as another example of how to deal with one's past. Ed doesn't let her past define her at all- she lives fully in the moment, enjoying the time she spends with others but not letting her attachments tie her to any particular time and place. Although I felt upset after watching the episode where she leaves, and I don't think this is a great quality to have in real life, the series seems to frame it as a positive thing, with the show giving her a fond farewell of "See you, cowgirl! Someday, somewhere..." So, Ed definitely falls at one end of the spectrum of "letting the past define your present," while Jet is somewhere past the middle, leaning towards the opposite end of the spectrum.
Faye is different because she doesn’t remember her past, so she can’t let her past choices drive her. But not having a past, and having to take others’ words for it when it comes to who she really is and what her purpose is, influences everything about her. One of the few things she knows about herself is that she owes a debt to the people who put her in cryo-sleep, and so she clings to this one detail because not only will there be serious repercussions if she doesn't pay off her debt, but it's also one of the few things she has to cling to. Her gambling problem can be assumed to stem from her desire to pay off her debt, and I found it very telling when, during the episode where she infiltrates a cult, she contacts the Bebop crew and the first (and only) thing she says is "I finally found a way to pay off my debt..." I know I mentioned in a previous post how reckless Spike is and how that to me points to an attitude of “nothing in life matters!” Meanwhile, for Faye, I feel like she can be reckless too, but when she acts that way, it’s about trying to find meaning in her own life. Spike goes with the flow, while Faye fights against the current, trying to carve out something meaningful, something that will make her life make sense. And even when she does find out more about who she is and the choices she made in the past, ultimately it doesn’t satisfy her. It doesn’t give her life meaning. There’s nothing for her to go back to, because too much time has passed. She realizes that the present life she’s created for herself is much more personally meaningful than trying to grasp at the last few snatches of her past life that remain. So she turns back to her newfound friends, ready to assert her fidelity to them, possibly having found some measure of peace, except nothing will ever be the same for her again, because…
Spike is incapable of moving on from his past. Even in the episodes that don't deal directly with his past, it's still very clear that every choice he makes, and his entire worldview, is influenced by what happened to him in the past. This makes him similar to Faye, who is also affected deeply by her past and lets it define her, but different in that Faye literally can't dwell on her past because she doesn't remember it. To me, it seems that Spike, on the other hand, probably dwells on his past every day of his life. He even says it himself, in his own words, that one of his eyes sees the present, while the other is always looking towards the past. Which, granted, is his way of describing the results of the surgery that gave him an artificial eye, but it rings true in the actions he takes and his "nothing in life matters!" attitude. The first episode where I really noticed this was "Heavy Metal Queen," where Spike ejects himself from his ship's cockpit into space without a spacesuit, and the scene cuts to the titular Heavy Metal Queen's (and I think Faye's?) shocked reaction. That to me didn't read as just another cool move from a badass bounty hunter. That read as an incredible, borderline-unnecessary risk, with the shock that the two onlookers expressed coming not from being impressed, but from being dumbfounded and fearing for Spike's safety. To compare a moment that's much less serious but personal to me, it sort of reminds me of when I was eating at a restaurant once and I was full halfway through the meal, but I ended up eating the whole thing because I didn't want to waste food. The reactions from my friends weren't "oh, that's a good idea!" but "why would you do that to yourself?" After seeing that moment in that episode, every single Certified Badass moment that Spike got just read to me as reckless and foolhardy, possibly even intentionally seeking death. (There's another comparison to be made here with Spike's recklessness and Faye's impulsiveness- the latter of which takes the form of compulsive gambling and sudden jaunts off on her own, plus more instances that I'm probably not remembering right now. I wonder if the reason Faye gets under Spike's skin so much is that they're too similar? It's shown in the episode with Andy the bounty hunter that Spike REALLY hates people who are similar to him. Which may or may not indicate that he hates himself... though I don't think that's the case. I honestly don't think he has much of an opinion on his own self... but that's not the point of this post, is it?)
Once Spike plainly laid out his worldview in the last episode of the series, my first thought was of concern: "How long has he been feeling this way??" Although the specific details of Spike's past are never fully explained, I have to assume that it started with whatever accident it was that caused Spike to lose his eye. One of the flashback voiceovers has Julia asking Spike about his eyes, meaning that he lost it before he met her/started seeing her. What happened exactly is, as I said before, never explained, but I can imagine it was a near-death-experience, or at least very close to one. And by all accounts, experiences like that change people. Spike admits that he didn't feel alive again until he met Julia. That being with her made him feel like he had recovered some part of himself he thought he'd lost a long time ago. One can imagine that he's referring to his soul, or even his sense of humanity. While I think Spike was probably already a member of the Red Dragon Syndicate by the time he lost his eye, the experience probably only enforced his desire to work for them, to buckle down and be the perfect assassin/fighter/whatever they needed from him, for them. Although Julia was already a member of the Syndicate, and thus had probably done some unsavory things herself, meeting her caused Spike to see a different path, an alternative to his nihilism and fatalism. So he banked all his hopes on her being able to join him in escaping from the Syndicate... And she stood him up. Which must have been understandably crushing. (This is not to bash Julia's choices, by the way. She was put in an unenviable position- to say the least- and really the only way to avoid both having to kill Spike and getting killed herself was to presumably lie to Vicious and tell him that she'd finished the job. In the words of a trope, she had to break Spike's heart to save him. Or, in the words of Nick Lowe, "you gotta be cruel to be kind." If anything, what Julia did demonstrates how much she trusted Spike, that she knew he'd be able to convincingly fake his death and lie low instead of risking it all to come back for her.)
So, all of this leads to Spike not only feeling half-trapped in the past (though to me, it seems like he's a lot more than halfway there), but- even more than that- he feels like the rest of his life, everything after Julia failed to show up for him, has been a dream from which he's bound to wake up one day. He even refers to Julia's perceived betrayal as "being killed" by her. And that's not without reason. As I mentioned before, Spike himself said that he only really felt alive when he was with Julia, and I believe that the part of himself that he felt she had helped him recover refers to his own soul. (Side note: by the time Spike admits this, he's traveled and arguably bonded with Jet, Faye, and Ed for a good long while now... Which means that even his friendships with them didn't make him feel alive. Which is just so sad to me. Of course, given that this is "Everyone Avoids Talking About Their Feelings: The Show," and Spike has demonstrated his own version of care/concern for his friends multiple times (mostly complaining that they should know better than to get in the way of danger, or claiming that he's helping someone because he wants something from them), I have a feeling that he's just afraid of admitting how close he really is to them. Then again, there's also something to be said for The Power of (Romantic) Love(TM), I guess. To once again relate to myself, I've definitely been through a similar situation of having friends, but not feeling super close to them until I fell for another friend and suddenly I could not get enough of his presence, as opposed to my other friends with whom I only desired to hang out with for a night every few weeks). So with that in mind... "Dead man walking" would not be a totally inaccurate description. (This is even reinforced by the vision that Spike experiences while tripping on mushrooms in “Mushroom Samba.” He imagines that he’s climbing a stairway to Heaven- fitting for someone who claims to not be sure if they’re alive or dead. I think it’s telling that after the mushroom experience, Spike is the only member of the Bebop crew who seems to have had a bad trip and been shaken by the experience, hence his immediate surrender of the mushrooms to the cop investigating their whereabouts.) Then everything about Spike's behavior begins to make sense. His risky behaviors, as mentioned before, are more due to his feelings of "nothing matters/I don't care about my own life" than general badassery. His laid-back attitude isn't just confidence/suavity- it comes once again from feeling like his life is but a dream. Unless you're a lucid dreamer, one generally has no control over what happens in a dream, and just like a person in a dream, Spike just kind of goes with the flow of what's happening to him (though that doesn't mean he doesn't have agency in his own life, or that he doesn't assert himself when he needs to, it's more to do with his unfazed approach to damn near everything). If Ed is all the way on one side of the scale of "letting the past define you," Spike is alllll the way on the other side. He has every opportunity to move on and try to deepen the connections that he forms with the people with whom he lives and works- as much as he and Faye bicker, as much as Ed bemuses him, and as much as he and Jet sometimes clash in personal philosophy, he really does care about them. But as long as Vicious and particularly Julia are still out there, Spike will continue to favor the eye that looks towards the past. The closing credits of the show only add fuel to this fire- no matter what happens in the episode, every single episode ends with a montage of scenes from Spike’s past. He just keeps returning to it, to the point where everything he does revolves around it (whether directly or indirectly). It's such an interesting take on what could have been a generic interpretation of the "cocky badass with a gun" archetype around whom so many action movies/series revolve. What would actually MOTIVATE such a character? What could truly make a man not fear death?
SO. That finally brings us to how these themes of how the past affects the present and the various relationships one might have with their own past influence the ending of the series. Spike and Julia finally meet each other again. Julia tells Spike that she wants to run away with him- for real this time. Unfortunately, the Syndicate is on the tails, and when they get caught in a shootout, Julia is killed. Her last words are directed to Spike: "It's all a dream." And he agrees with her.
The loss of someone so beloved could have been the catalyst to "awaken" Spike from the dream he perceived himself to be trapped in. However, Julia's last words only reinforce his beliefs. Call it a coping mechanism, maybe Either way, he returns to the Bebop as smiling and carefree as ever, and over dinner, he shares with Jet a parable of his own that displays his own philosophy. After telling Jet a children's story about a cat who lived and died a million times, then settled down with a female cat, only to die once more after the female cat had died and never come back to life afterwards, Spike tells Jet that he hates that story... because he doesn't like cats. Leaving aside how that completely destroyed my headcanon that Spike doesn't like dogs because he's a cat person (and cats certainly seem to feel differently about him, if the behavior of V.T. the Heavy Metal Queen's cat around him is any indication), his literal takeaway from the story just goes to show that his mind is already made up, that he already knows how his story is going to end, and he's probably been resigned to, perhaps even accepting of such a fate for a long time. (His surface-level takeaway from that story is also very similar to how he perceives the lesson of the situation in "Toys in the Attic" to be "Don't leave stuff in the fridge." There's no deeper meaning to him for why what happened in that episode happened. And there's no deeper meaning to the story he tells in this final episode, or at least he doesn't want to read it that way.)
Off Spike goes, and on his way out, Faye confronts him. She rightfully calls him out for being a hypocrite, telling her to let go of her own past when he can't let go of his. For the first time, she actually takes a stab at opening up to Spike and tells him about how she went to find the remnants of her past, only to realize that she didn't belong there. She knows where she belongs now- it's right here on the Bebop with her friends, probably the first friends she's had since she woke from cryo-sleep who haven't betrayed her in some way, who gripe about her and with her but always have her back because they care about her, dammit, and she cares about them. And this confrontation just killed me because here is a person who is very significant to Spike's present, who is begging him, to the extent that she can beg (since Faye is pretty emotionally constipated in her own way), to stay *here* and find meaning *here* and forget about the past, who makes it clear that she does not want Spike to die, and what does Spike do? He tells her:
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to find out if I'm really alive."
And it's like. DUDE. The evidence that you're really alive is RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU!! Spike's life didn't end with Julia, as much as he might feel like it did. He might not have realized it himself, but he did make connections with others after leaving the Red Dragon Syndicate. He made connections with Jet, with Faye, with Ed, even with Ein. But the only connection that ever really mattered to Spike was the one he had with Julia. Because he never allowed himself to form deeper connections with anyone, or even admit that he had, after losing her. Because he’s stagnant, trapped halfway in the past, and now that she's gone, he's ready to change “halfway” into “all the way.” Because, as Fiona Apple puts it in her song "Heavy Balloon," "We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row, the bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that we know." No wonder Faye sends Spike off by firing her gun multiple times. She can’t force him to stay with her words, and she can’t directly shoot him because she cares about him- she’s not going to hurt her friend, even if it means potentially saving his life. All she can do is vent her frustration, perhaps in the vain hope that the loud shock of the gunfire will finally wake Spike up. But it doesn’t, and I truly fear for Faye, as this is where the series leaves her. Although I see her relationship with Spike as being a comrade/team mate/sibling in arms and not romantic, her reaction to his leaving makes me fear that his memory could end up being for her what Julia’s memory was to Spike. I did mention before that Faye and Spike are similar… Will Faye now end up trapped in a dream of her own, unable to move on from the past?
During Spike’s last stand against the Red Dragon Syndicate, another character is shown who apparently can’t move on from the past. This is Shin, with whom Spike is familiar from their past work together and who briefly becomes an ally during this final battle. The last thing that Shin tells Spike before he runs off to find Vicious is that he always wished that Spike would return to the Syndicate and take over as their leader. When Shin presents this information, he uses the term "we," meaning that this is a sentiment shared by the majority of the Syndicate. Not only can Spike not escape his past, but his past doesn't want to let him go. His former comrades still see him as befitting a role that he gave up/passed on years ago, which has a touch of fatalism to it, in my opinion. They always wanted Spike to return, and eventually he did, as if he were fated to do so.
So then there's the final confrontation between Spike and Vicious, which results in both of them being badly wounded- Vicious in particular dying instantly after Spike shoots him. Spike still has enough life left in him to make his way down the stairs, face the gathered members of the Red Dragon Syndicate, and pretend to shoot at them with a finger-pistol- "Bang." My initial interpretation of Spike's last word was that he's only pretending to shoot at the Syndicate members because he knows he can't fight against them. He's too badly wounded and he's run out of ammo with which to reload his gun. And he doesn't care. He got what he wanted. He knows, now that he's on the brink of death, that he truly WAS alive. There's nothing these people can do to him, no power they can wield over him- not that they seem to be eager to fight him, if anything they seem too shocked to move, or maybe they're refraining from attacking because they want Spike alive to take the place of Vicious? To put it simply, Spike won, and he knows it, and he's going out with a smile- and with a bang. I still do interpret the ending this way, but I also remembered after watching it that Spike had done the same thing in an earlier episode (made a finger-pistol and pretended to shoot at something, saying "Bang!"), and in that episode, he did it in response to someone who was dying asking him if he understands what it feels like to be at peace at the time of one's death. At the time, Spike said "As if!" because in his mind, he might as well already be dead, and it doesn't feel like peace to him. But now that he himself is on death's door, he realizes that that guy was right. It *is* a relief. And then he collapses. And that's where my anger really flared up.
I'm still angry that Julia met such an unceremonious end. I'm still angry that Faye couldn't get through to Spike (though I'm angry at him rather than her for that). But most of all, I'm angry because the writers were too damn good at their jobs. I'm sure there are a thousand fix-fics for the end of this series where Spike (and maybe Julia) survives. I'm sure there are fics where they talk about their feelings. But as much as I would enjoy a happy ending for this series, I can't buy it, and I will never read those fics, because Spike (and everyone else) is characterized so consistently throughout the series that I simply can't imagine a version of the story where he actually listens to Faye, or where surviving Vicious' attack is a fitting ending for him. As I mentioned before, Spike feels as if his fate is sealed, as evidenced by the story he tells Jet during their last conversation together. And it IS, because the show made it that way. There is literally no other way that the ending could have gone without doing a disservice to the characters. I have to wonder if anyone who believes Spike survived the ending believes this because they think it fits the themes of the series, or because they're just attached to the character and don't want to see him die. I have a feeling it's the latter (but if anyone disagrees here, feel free to debate your position!).
Anyway. Great series! I'm glad that the only two anime series I've ever watched have both been good ones (well, okay, I also watched a few episodes of Fairy Tail with someone back in college and I couldn't get into it, but two out of three ain't bad!). To close out this post, I want to write some quick character headcanons that I didn't want to have to make another post to write about.
-Julia was a stone-cold badass just like Spike. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I mean, she was a member of the Red Dragon Syndicate herself and I highly doubt it was JUST because she was romantically entangled with one (or two) of the members. She and Spike were probably a major power couple when they were together.
-Spike's line to Vicious, "Have you been seeing Julia behind my back?" is what Vicious said to him when he found out that Spike and Julia were an item. Because Julia and Vicious had been together, too (side note: this whole plot point reminded me of Dale Cooper, Windom Earle, and Caroline Earle from Twin Peaks. And speaking of Twin Peaks, both it and Cowboy Bebop had similar themes in their respective finales of "living inside a dream...).
-Spike is unable to shed tears from his artificial eye. There weren't any opportunities to showcase this in the series, but I think it would have been a striking image if the writers had seen fit to include it.
-Faye's mushroom trip in "Mushroom Samba" was just as significant as Spike's. She perceives herself to be swimming underwater because the watery exterior of the Earth was the last thing she saw before she was injured in the accident that forced her family to put her in cryo-sleep. Or she could be remembering the ocean near the town where she used to live on Earth.
-Faye was the middle child of her family, and the dynamic she falls into with Spike and Ed unconsciously mirrors the one she had with her lost siblings. (I'm kind of iffy on this one because she's never shown tracking down any siblings when she's tracing her past memories, so maybe she was an only child, but then again, she also doesn't track down her parents, and even if they would have been dead by that time, a scene where she visits their graves certainly feels like it would have been warranted, so maybe Faye just didn't have any interest in finding what remained of her family.)
-Ed doesn't leave the ship often not only because all of her tech gear is on the ship and messing around in cyberspace usually takes precedence to outside explorations, but also because she's used to living underground and holing up in her little hideout and being Outside just isn't her jam. She also liked to burrow under things and squeeze herself into tight spaces, resulting her contorting her body into weird positions that would make the rest of the Bebop crew go "how is that comfortable??" I feel like Faye in particular would feel weirdly distressed when she sees Ed doing this, although she can't explain why it's so distressing.
-Not a headcanon, but Ed is Peak Weird Girl Representation and I love her so much for that. I'm also in awe of her (English) voice actress for bringing the character to life so well.
In my initial post reacting to the finale on Tumblr, I said in the tags that given the themes of the show, there was no other way it could have gone. That’s part of what made me so angry (the other part being the fact that we were left wondering throughout the entire show who Julia was, why she had such an impact on Spike, will we ever get to see her… and then we do see her BUT THEN she’s killed, just like that. To me, that just wasn’t fair. I would say “she deserved better” but we didn’t even get to know her long enough to say for sure WHAT she deserved. And again, on one level, I feel like I understand WHY this happened, but… on another level, one could make a case that Julia’s death was an example of fridging (killing off a female character to further a male character’s pain/give a male character motivation) and I hate whenever that happens in a series). The fact that, even if it would have been NICE to see things end up differently, that would be way too idealized and even uncharacteristic of the series. The way it ended made too much sense, and maybe I was angry that I didn’t see it coming. But anyway…
I see a lot of the series as being focused on the past and one’s individual relationship to one’s own personal past, and how the past affects the present. Each of the main characters has to reckon with aspects of their past at certain points in the series. Jet has a mixed relationship with his past as a police officer. There are certainly things he dwells on and regrets, like the loss of his arm, the loss of his lover, and his moral conflict while watching his fellow officers take bribes and sell out to the Syndicate. But I didn’t get the feeling that he really lets his past drive him (or, more specifically, it rarely takes control of his present actions), and in fact several of the people he’s met in the past turn out to be important contacts because of their connections. So while some aspects of Jet’s past haunt him once in a while, it seems to me like he has a relatively healthy relationship with it. This is even emphasized by the parable that he tells at the end about the man who loses his leg in the desert, and his takeaway from it. It seems to me that he hates the thought of dying with regrets, with thoughts of the past. (There’s more to unpack here but this wasn’t supposed to be a meta about Jet, lol…)
As far as healthy attitudes to one’s past go, Ed is... an interesting case. You'd think that not being ruled by one's past and living solely in the present is an admirable trait. Ed takes it to the extreme by not showing any signs of being aware that she even has a past. She doesn't brood over or dwell on past events, nor does she ever talk about what may or may not have happened to her in the past (though I have a feeling that she would if someone asked, she just doesn't feel the need to explain her entire backstory to the people who have taken her in). In fact, she doesn't even seem to form close attachments, or at least she doesn't cling to any connections she may have made and shows no sentimentality when it comes to moving on. Her father left her at a daycare when she was young and instead of letting that loss define her, Ed moved on- literally. She then spent several years at an orphanage and while it's clear when she finds the orphanage again that she's happy to see familiar faces, she doesn't seem to have any real attachment to those people/that place either, having wandered off again several years after coming there and having no qualms about leaving again once she's returned. Then, when she eventually leaves the Bebop crew, she does give Spike a going-away present, and she accepts Ein tagging along with her, but otherwise she doesn't look back. I think it's easy to infer that Ed is going back to her father at the end of this episode, or at least is going to search for him (perhaps based on what Faye told her, to go find where she belongs), but I personally don't think that's the case. While their reunion was unquestionably happy, Ed's father seems to share Ed's trait of not looking back, to the point where he unintentionally abandons his daughter multiple times. For that reason, I think Ed is setting off to do her own thing, and possibly running into her father again is just one of the things that she might end up doing while on her own. This to me is reinforced by how Faye, in that same episode, ends up realizing that where she thinks she belongs is not where she belongs. The same seemed to prove true for Ed. Again- this post was not supposed to be a meta about Ed, but it's important to look at her as another example of how to deal with one's past. Ed doesn't let her past define her at all- she lives fully in the moment, enjoying the time she spends with others but not letting her attachments tie her to any particular time and place. Although I felt upset after watching the episode where she leaves, and I don't think this is a great quality to have in real life, the series seems to frame it as a positive thing, with the show giving her a fond farewell of "See you, cowgirl! Someday, somewhere..." So, Ed definitely falls at one end of the spectrum of "letting the past define your present," while Jet is somewhere past the middle, leaning towards the opposite end of the spectrum.
Faye is different because she doesn’t remember her past, so she can’t let her past choices drive her. But not having a past, and having to take others’ words for it when it comes to who she really is and what her purpose is, influences everything about her. One of the few things she knows about herself is that she owes a debt to the people who put her in cryo-sleep, and so she clings to this one detail because not only will there be serious repercussions if she doesn't pay off her debt, but it's also one of the few things she has to cling to. Her gambling problem can be assumed to stem from her desire to pay off her debt, and I found it very telling when, during the episode where she infiltrates a cult, she contacts the Bebop crew and the first (and only) thing she says is "I finally found a way to pay off my debt..." I know I mentioned in a previous post how reckless Spike is and how that to me points to an attitude of “nothing in life matters!” Meanwhile, for Faye, I feel like she can be reckless too, but when she acts that way, it’s about trying to find meaning in her own life. Spike goes with the flow, while Faye fights against the current, trying to carve out something meaningful, something that will make her life make sense. And even when she does find out more about who she is and the choices she made in the past, ultimately it doesn’t satisfy her. It doesn’t give her life meaning. There’s nothing for her to go back to, because too much time has passed. She realizes that the present life she’s created for herself is much more personally meaningful than trying to grasp at the last few snatches of her past life that remain. So she turns back to her newfound friends, ready to assert her fidelity to them, possibly having found some measure of peace, except nothing will ever be the same for her again, because…
Spike is incapable of moving on from his past. Even in the episodes that don't deal directly with his past, it's still very clear that every choice he makes, and his entire worldview, is influenced by what happened to him in the past. This makes him similar to Faye, who is also affected deeply by her past and lets it define her, but different in that Faye literally can't dwell on her past because she doesn't remember it. To me, it seems that Spike, on the other hand, probably dwells on his past every day of his life. He even says it himself, in his own words, that one of his eyes sees the present, while the other is always looking towards the past. Which, granted, is his way of describing the results of the surgery that gave him an artificial eye, but it rings true in the actions he takes and his "nothing in life matters!" attitude. The first episode where I really noticed this was "Heavy Metal Queen," where Spike ejects himself from his ship's cockpit into space without a spacesuit, and the scene cuts to the titular Heavy Metal Queen's (and I think Faye's?) shocked reaction. That to me didn't read as just another cool move from a badass bounty hunter. That read as an incredible, borderline-unnecessary risk, with the shock that the two onlookers expressed coming not from being impressed, but from being dumbfounded and fearing for Spike's safety. To compare a moment that's much less serious but personal to me, it sort of reminds me of when I was eating at a restaurant once and I was full halfway through the meal, but I ended up eating the whole thing because I didn't want to waste food. The reactions from my friends weren't "oh, that's a good idea!" but "why would you do that to yourself?" After seeing that moment in that episode, every single Certified Badass moment that Spike got just read to me as reckless and foolhardy, possibly even intentionally seeking death. (There's another comparison to be made here with Spike's recklessness and Faye's impulsiveness- the latter of which takes the form of compulsive gambling and sudden jaunts off on her own, plus more instances that I'm probably not remembering right now. I wonder if the reason Faye gets under Spike's skin so much is that they're too similar? It's shown in the episode with Andy the bounty hunter that Spike REALLY hates people who are similar to him. Which may or may not indicate that he hates himself... though I don't think that's the case. I honestly don't think he has much of an opinion on his own self... but that's not the point of this post, is it?)
Once Spike plainly laid out his worldview in the last episode of the series, my first thought was of concern: "How long has he been feeling this way??" Although the specific details of Spike's past are never fully explained, I have to assume that it started with whatever accident it was that caused Spike to lose his eye. One of the flashback voiceovers has Julia asking Spike about his eyes, meaning that he lost it before he met her/started seeing her. What happened exactly is, as I said before, never explained, but I can imagine it was a near-death-experience, or at least very close to one. And by all accounts, experiences like that change people. Spike admits that he didn't feel alive again until he met Julia. That being with her made him feel like he had recovered some part of himself he thought he'd lost a long time ago. One can imagine that he's referring to his soul, or even his sense of humanity. While I think Spike was probably already a member of the Red Dragon Syndicate by the time he lost his eye, the experience probably only enforced his desire to work for them, to buckle down and be the perfect assassin/fighter/whatever they needed from him, for them. Although Julia was already a member of the Syndicate, and thus had probably done some unsavory things herself, meeting her caused Spike to see a different path, an alternative to his nihilism and fatalism. So he banked all his hopes on her being able to join him in escaping from the Syndicate... And she stood him up. Which must have been understandably crushing. (This is not to bash Julia's choices, by the way. She was put in an unenviable position- to say the least- and really the only way to avoid both having to kill Spike and getting killed herself was to presumably lie to Vicious and tell him that she'd finished the job. In the words of a trope, she had to break Spike's heart to save him. Or, in the words of Nick Lowe, "you gotta be cruel to be kind." If anything, what Julia did demonstrates how much she trusted Spike, that she knew he'd be able to convincingly fake his death and lie low instead of risking it all to come back for her.)
So, all of this leads to Spike not only feeling half-trapped in the past (though to me, it seems like he's a lot more than halfway there), but- even more than that- he feels like the rest of his life, everything after Julia failed to show up for him, has been a dream from which he's bound to wake up one day. He even refers to Julia's perceived betrayal as "being killed" by her. And that's not without reason. As I mentioned before, Spike himself said that he only really felt alive when he was with Julia, and I believe that the part of himself that he felt she had helped him recover refers to his own soul. (Side note: by the time Spike admits this, he's traveled and arguably bonded with Jet, Faye, and Ed for a good long while now... Which means that even his friendships with them didn't make him feel alive. Which is just so sad to me. Of course, given that this is "Everyone Avoids Talking About Their Feelings: The Show," and Spike has demonstrated his own version of care/concern for his friends multiple times (mostly complaining that they should know better than to get in the way of danger, or claiming that he's helping someone because he wants something from them), I have a feeling that he's just afraid of admitting how close he really is to them. Then again, there's also something to be said for The Power of (Romantic) Love(TM), I guess. To once again relate to myself, I've definitely been through a similar situation of having friends, but not feeling super close to them until I fell for another friend and suddenly I could not get enough of his presence, as opposed to my other friends with whom I only desired to hang out with for a night every few weeks). So with that in mind... "Dead man walking" would not be a totally inaccurate description. (This is even reinforced by the vision that Spike experiences while tripping on mushrooms in “Mushroom Samba.” He imagines that he’s climbing a stairway to Heaven- fitting for someone who claims to not be sure if they’re alive or dead. I think it’s telling that after the mushroom experience, Spike is the only member of the Bebop crew who seems to have had a bad trip and been shaken by the experience, hence his immediate surrender of the mushrooms to the cop investigating their whereabouts.) Then everything about Spike's behavior begins to make sense. His risky behaviors, as mentioned before, are more due to his feelings of "nothing matters/I don't care about my own life" than general badassery. His laid-back attitude isn't just confidence/suavity- it comes once again from feeling like his life is but a dream. Unless you're a lucid dreamer, one generally has no control over what happens in a dream, and just like a person in a dream, Spike just kind of goes with the flow of what's happening to him (though that doesn't mean he doesn't have agency in his own life, or that he doesn't assert himself when he needs to, it's more to do with his unfazed approach to damn near everything). If Ed is all the way on one side of the scale of "letting the past define you," Spike is alllll the way on the other side. He has every opportunity to move on and try to deepen the connections that he forms with the people with whom he lives and works- as much as he and Faye bicker, as much as Ed bemuses him, and as much as he and Jet sometimes clash in personal philosophy, he really does care about them. But as long as Vicious and particularly Julia are still out there, Spike will continue to favor the eye that looks towards the past. The closing credits of the show only add fuel to this fire- no matter what happens in the episode, every single episode ends with a montage of scenes from Spike’s past. He just keeps returning to it, to the point where everything he does revolves around it (whether directly or indirectly). It's such an interesting take on what could have been a generic interpretation of the "cocky badass with a gun" archetype around whom so many action movies/series revolve. What would actually MOTIVATE such a character? What could truly make a man not fear death?
SO. That finally brings us to how these themes of how the past affects the present and the various relationships one might have with their own past influence the ending of the series. Spike and Julia finally meet each other again. Julia tells Spike that she wants to run away with him- for real this time. Unfortunately, the Syndicate is on the tails, and when they get caught in a shootout, Julia is killed. Her last words are directed to Spike: "It's all a dream." And he agrees with her.
The loss of someone so beloved could have been the catalyst to "awaken" Spike from the dream he perceived himself to be trapped in. However, Julia's last words only reinforce his beliefs. Call it a coping mechanism, maybe Either way, he returns to the Bebop as smiling and carefree as ever, and over dinner, he shares with Jet a parable of his own that displays his own philosophy. After telling Jet a children's story about a cat who lived and died a million times, then settled down with a female cat, only to die once more after the female cat had died and never come back to life afterwards, Spike tells Jet that he hates that story... because he doesn't like cats. Leaving aside how that completely destroyed my headcanon that Spike doesn't like dogs because he's a cat person (and cats certainly seem to feel differently about him, if the behavior of V.T. the Heavy Metal Queen's cat around him is any indication), his literal takeaway from the story just goes to show that his mind is already made up, that he already knows how his story is going to end, and he's probably been resigned to, perhaps even accepting of such a fate for a long time. (His surface-level takeaway from that story is also very similar to how he perceives the lesson of the situation in "Toys in the Attic" to be "Don't leave stuff in the fridge." There's no deeper meaning to him for why what happened in that episode happened. And there's no deeper meaning to the story he tells in this final episode, or at least he doesn't want to read it that way.)
Off Spike goes, and on his way out, Faye confronts him. She rightfully calls him out for being a hypocrite, telling her to let go of her own past when he can't let go of his. For the first time, she actually takes a stab at opening up to Spike and tells him about how she went to find the remnants of her past, only to realize that she didn't belong there. She knows where she belongs now- it's right here on the Bebop with her friends, probably the first friends she's had since she woke from cryo-sleep who haven't betrayed her in some way, who gripe about her and with her but always have her back because they care about her, dammit, and she cares about them. And this confrontation just killed me because here is a person who is very significant to Spike's present, who is begging him, to the extent that she can beg (since Faye is pretty emotionally constipated in her own way), to stay *here* and find meaning *here* and forget about the past, who makes it clear that she does not want Spike to die, and what does Spike do? He tells her:
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to find out if I'm really alive."
And it's like. DUDE. The evidence that you're really alive is RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU!! Spike's life didn't end with Julia, as much as he might feel like it did. He might not have realized it himself, but he did make connections with others after leaving the Red Dragon Syndicate. He made connections with Jet, with Faye, with Ed, even with Ein. But the only connection that ever really mattered to Spike was the one he had with Julia. Because he never allowed himself to form deeper connections with anyone, or even admit that he had, after losing her. Because he’s stagnant, trapped halfway in the past, and now that she's gone, he's ready to change “halfway” into “all the way.” Because, as Fiona Apple puts it in her song "Heavy Balloon," "We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row, the bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that we know." No wonder Faye sends Spike off by firing her gun multiple times. She can’t force him to stay with her words, and she can’t directly shoot him because she cares about him- she’s not going to hurt her friend, even if it means potentially saving his life. All she can do is vent her frustration, perhaps in the vain hope that the loud shock of the gunfire will finally wake Spike up. But it doesn’t, and I truly fear for Faye, as this is where the series leaves her. Although I see her relationship with Spike as being a comrade/team mate/sibling in arms and not romantic, her reaction to his leaving makes me fear that his memory could end up being for her what Julia’s memory was to Spike. I did mention before that Faye and Spike are similar… Will Faye now end up trapped in a dream of her own, unable to move on from the past?
During Spike’s last stand against the Red Dragon Syndicate, another character is shown who apparently can’t move on from the past. This is Shin, with whom Spike is familiar from their past work together and who briefly becomes an ally during this final battle. The last thing that Shin tells Spike before he runs off to find Vicious is that he always wished that Spike would return to the Syndicate and take over as their leader. When Shin presents this information, he uses the term "we," meaning that this is a sentiment shared by the majority of the Syndicate. Not only can Spike not escape his past, but his past doesn't want to let him go. His former comrades still see him as befitting a role that he gave up/passed on years ago, which has a touch of fatalism to it, in my opinion. They always wanted Spike to return, and eventually he did, as if he were fated to do so.
So then there's the final confrontation between Spike and Vicious, which results in both of them being badly wounded- Vicious in particular dying instantly after Spike shoots him. Spike still has enough life left in him to make his way down the stairs, face the gathered members of the Red Dragon Syndicate, and pretend to shoot at them with a finger-pistol- "Bang." My initial interpretation of Spike's last word was that he's only pretending to shoot at the Syndicate members because he knows he can't fight against them. He's too badly wounded and he's run out of ammo with which to reload his gun. And he doesn't care. He got what he wanted. He knows, now that he's on the brink of death, that he truly WAS alive. There's nothing these people can do to him, no power they can wield over him- not that they seem to be eager to fight him, if anything they seem too shocked to move, or maybe they're refraining from attacking because they want Spike alive to take the place of Vicious? To put it simply, Spike won, and he knows it, and he's going out with a smile- and with a bang. I still do interpret the ending this way, but I also remembered after watching it that Spike had done the same thing in an earlier episode (made a finger-pistol and pretended to shoot at something, saying "Bang!"), and in that episode, he did it in response to someone who was dying asking him if he understands what it feels like to be at peace at the time of one's death. At the time, Spike said "As if!" because in his mind, he might as well already be dead, and it doesn't feel like peace to him. But now that he himself is on death's door, he realizes that that guy was right. It *is* a relief. And then he collapses. And that's where my anger really flared up.
I'm still angry that Julia met such an unceremonious end. I'm still angry that Faye couldn't get through to Spike (though I'm angry at him rather than her for that). But most of all, I'm angry because the writers were too damn good at their jobs. I'm sure there are a thousand fix-fics for the end of this series where Spike (and maybe Julia) survives. I'm sure there are fics where they talk about their feelings. But as much as I would enjoy a happy ending for this series, I can't buy it, and I will never read those fics, because Spike (and everyone else) is characterized so consistently throughout the series that I simply can't imagine a version of the story where he actually listens to Faye, or where surviving Vicious' attack is a fitting ending for him. As I mentioned before, Spike feels as if his fate is sealed, as evidenced by the story he tells Jet during their last conversation together. And it IS, because the show made it that way. There is literally no other way that the ending could have gone without doing a disservice to the characters. I have to wonder if anyone who believes Spike survived the ending believes this because they think it fits the themes of the series, or because they're just attached to the character and don't want to see him die. I have a feeling it's the latter (but if anyone disagrees here, feel free to debate your position!).
Anyway. Great series! I'm glad that the only two anime series I've ever watched have both been good ones (well, okay, I also watched a few episodes of Fairy Tail with someone back in college and I couldn't get into it, but two out of three ain't bad!). To close out this post, I want to write some quick character headcanons that I didn't want to have to make another post to write about.
-Julia was a stone-cold badass just like Spike. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I mean, she was a member of the Red Dragon Syndicate herself and I highly doubt it was JUST because she was romantically entangled with one (or two) of the members. She and Spike were probably a major power couple when they were together.
-Spike's line to Vicious, "Have you been seeing Julia behind my back?" is what Vicious said to him when he found out that Spike and Julia were an item. Because Julia and Vicious had been together, too (side note: this whole plot point reminded me of Dale Cooper, Windom Earle, and Caroline Earle from Twin Peaks. And speaking of Twin Peaks, both it and Cowboy Bebop had similar themes in their respective finales of "living inside a dream...).
-Spike is unable to shed tears from his artificial eye. There weren't any opportunities to showcase this in the series, but I think it would have been a striking image if the writers had seen fit to include it.
-Faye's mushroom trip in "Mushroom Samba" was just as significant as Spike's. She perceives herself to be swimming underwater because the watery exterior of the Earth was the last thing she saw before she was injured in the accident that forced her family to put her in cryo-sleep. Or she could be remembering the ocean near the town where she used to live on Earth.
-Faye was the middle child of her family, and the dynamic she falls into with Spike and Ed unconsciously mirrors the one she had with her lost siblings. (I'm kind of iffy on this one because she's never shown tracking down any siblings when she's tracing her past memories, so maybe she was an only child, but then again, she also doesn't track down her parents, and even if they would have been dead by that time, a scene where she visits their graves certainly feels like it would have been warranted, so maybe Faye just didn't have any interest in finding what remained of her family.)
-Ed doesn't leave the ship often not only because all of her tech gear is on the ship and messing around in cyberspace usually takes precedence to outside explorations, but also because she's used to living underground and holing up in her little hideout and being Outside just isn't her jam. She also liked to burrow under things and squeeze herself into tight spaces, resulting her contorting her body into weird positions that would make the rest of the Bebop crew go "how is that comfortable??" I feel like Faye in particular would feel weirdly distressed when she sees Ed doing this, although she can't explain why it's so distressing.
-Not a headcanon, but Ed is Peak Weird Girl Representation and I love her so much for that. I'm also in awe of her (English) voice actress for bringing the character to life so well.
