Stink for Venus

Even all these years later, it's weird to rediscover that Waltz for Venus remains my favorite Cowboy Bebop episode -

biostatic

- and I don't know exactly why.

It's melodramatic, sure. I am hardly immune to melodrama. But then Bebop dedicated about a third of its episodes to decomposing lives and lost hopes. What makes this different? I suppose, true to its title, it's slow. Soft. Low key. But more than most, via Spike's reluctant mentorship it reiterated the first episode's likeness of the hunter to his bounty, ensuring the heroes' continuity with the rest of their world instead of elevating them to the status of HEROES writ large and in charge, invincible and unstoppable. There's also something about the deadly weed theme that hits me personally. Several of my own attempts at fiction harp on "suicide by plant" or the terror of vegetative encroachment, of... growth. Growths. Growth-ing.

But I hadn't remembered the ending's pretty good as well. Take a Futurama episode, The Sting, for comparison. The bulk of it revolves around Leela, poisoned, thinking she'd gotten her infatuated subordinate Fry killed, gradually drifting into insanity with recurring fantasies of Fry telling her to wake up. Eventually she does... to discover she's been in a coma all the time since getting poisoned, with Fry never leaving her side. They embrace, we fade to black - and hear their voices whispering to each other:

"You could really use a shower."

"You too."

That's trust. And it puts the whole rest of the episode into perspective, making you wonder how much of Fry's intrusion upon Leela's coma dreams resulted from his calling to her to wake up, and how much merely proves his pre-existing role as her emotional anchor, the trust she did not even realize she held in him, and not merely guilt as she'd thought.

And that's what makes Waltz for Venus doubly tragic. It's easy to assume the hero's wisdom, but ultimately we don't know whether Spike is right or wrong in his final decision not to divulge Rocco's secret. Maybe it would just be needlessly cruel. Letting one sibling hate the other may be a smaller burden than guilt. But truth is a far more important burden with which those close to each other should, ideally, by definition, share. The siblings' devotion is not in question. But Spike's secrecy, if insightful, projects a lack of trust in each other's decisions upon them which in turn calls into question the validity of Rocco's efforts and risks. Were they really that close, or was it all societal guilt and duty and heroic fantasies? Would they trust each other for a sniff test?