"I don't feel a thing and I've stopped remembering"
(Spoilert for Cowboy Bebop.)
As speculative "genre" fiction has been mainstreamed the past couple of decades, we've all gotten more prone to expecting our entertainment to provide entire imaginary worlds instead of single narratives. But fleshing out supplemental material, be it side-quests, backstory chapters or a good, old-fashioned bottle episode is hard to do without diluting or derailing your main plot. So I got to thinking, hey, you know who did a good job keeping its filler filling? That old anime I keep yammering on about!
About a third of Cowboy Bebop's episodes were one-shots having little direct impact on the main character's development arcs, but they're nonetheless remembered quite fondly even when they diverged from the setting's accepted tone and phlebotina. Mushroom Samba set a brisk pace while owning its designation as the most obvious comic relief chapter. Toys in the Attic is a creature feature with a deliberately nonsensical (yet classic!) ScieFie justification. Wild Horses gives a nod to golden age SF rocket jockeying. Cowboy Funk turns a bit of fun at the genre's pretenses, posturing and space western tendencies into a character study of the main protagonist. If fact, even seemingly random "villain of the week" installments tended to reflect somehow on the team's personal fables, like the opening's parallel to Spike/Julia, Waltz for Venus' futile mentorship or Heavy Metal Queen obliquely addressing the free-roaming cowboy mindset.
But let's look at three in particular:
Brain Scratch features a transhumanist Matrix cult promising digital transcendence via Heaven's Gate quality web design.
Sympathy for the Devil an unaging, murderous child.
Pierrot le Fou frequently sneaks its way into ads for the show due to its stylish visuals, being one of the few episodes named not for music but in this case French cinema. Granted, it's hard to do the killer clown routine wrong, as our visually oriented species is quite sensitive to facial disfigurement as a sign of inherent wrongness. However:
Pierrot's character design stands out for its overt simplicity, lacking the usual pancake makeup or any scars or growths or prostheses or the other gimmicks by which Hollywood adorns its horror clowns. His costume, from Penguin-ish top hat, suit and cane to his absurd ruffle, rather than terrifying, looks ineptly buffoonish, failed even as parody. All of which actually enhances Pierrot's intrinsic menace and weirdness, his unselfconscious over-the-hill foppery feeding into his gradually revealed infantile mania.
That infantilism I would argue links all three examples together. The villain in Brain Scratch is a comatose tween hacker cobbling himself a clique by any means necessary without regard for consequences. Sympathy for the Devil's titular devil is frozen not only in time but in sociopathic juvenile entitlement. Whether intended by the various writers or not, you do get a sense of repeatedly calling into question childish innocence. Innocence is also irresponsibility, a misnomer for the harm caused by unfettered id, inherently morally incapable.
That point dovetails nicely with the show's main theme, of the crews facing their pasts. Facing is not the same as regressing, and while Jet shows some basic understanding of this, Faye and Spike can only complete their arcs once they have grown to contain their past selves. You could, if so inclined, see an added comment on this point briefly in the finale, when a former presenter of the cancelled bounty hunter show appears as a background event, in almost unrecognizable calm and mundane counterpoint to his hyperactive stage persona, returning to take care of his family. Boy howdy, for a show about happy-go-lucky gunslingers, Bebop sure carried a hefty dose of "grow the fuck up" didn't it?
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