Present Day; Present Time

"It's about bounty hunters."

"What's she supposed to be, the bait?"

 

So snarked I upon being introduced to Cowboy Bebop via Faye Valentine's cleavage. But Bebop's well-earned fame for raising the bar on not just anime but TV series in general also applies to gradually redeeming an otherwise flat bombshell fanservice extra to a memorable protagonist.

I'd forgotten, until rewatching the series in order, the Faye is initially presented in one-shot episodic fashion riding off into the proverbial sunset at the end... until the Bebop unceremoniously fishes her back up out of space in the next episode. I addressed her character advancement vis-a-vis cyberpunk's crucial "loser" aesthetic, but for my first run through the show in 2001 I didn't think much of her, having seen many other such cartoon characters go absolutely nowhere... until this:

call me, caall meee.....

Along with Jet, Faye's character arc blows into focus mid-series, Speak Like a Child revealing not only that her past is not entirely lost, but that her pre-amnesia peppy teen personality had been drastically, unrecognizably different from her current rough cobble of hair-trigger temper, devil-may-care compulsive gambling, alternating nihilism/vanity/greed and petty vandalism. It's not just a convenient linking mechanism from a series writing perspective, but a neat little twist that in contrast to Jet (the stalwart leader who deals with both of his blasts from the past by slightly passive yet unflinching direct confrontation) Faye dithers and hides away and seems to avoid thinking about her newly recovered information for several episodes, or at least avoid letting on it's affecting her.

 

Another of the series' quirks, if you pay attention, is that it ends before the end. To allow the two-parter Real Folk Blues to focus on resolving Spike's plot, Hard Luck Woman serves as the true dissolution to the main routine of space cowboying. Though Faye appears later, it's solely as messenger and obviously no longer full participant. It's in Hard Luck Woman that the gang breaks up. Ed follows her father, taking Ein with her, and Faye overnights in the past. In a bookend to the first episode and their repeated concern with food expenses, the two men are shown silently drowning their sorrows in albumen, having secured subsistence at the loss of their companions.

That brilliant four-minute montage has stuck in pretty much everyone's memory, not only for its bittersweet tone but for not striking a single tone. Independent individuals instead strike their own courses. The men are grimly resigned, Ein's just happy to be with a now hopeful and more focused Ed, and Faye... stops to think. For the first time since we've seen her. Discovering the past hollow, she finds that hollow no less a part of herself for it. Does all that could have been belie her personal fable as a hot-to-trot damsel of fortune? If it's the future that matters, then what matters when you've been prematurely catapulted into it? Is it even worth having an identity conflict over a barely remembered and now irrevocably ruined past, a virtual life that never was?

As single scenes go, Faye laying to rest in the ruins of her life is a world-class classic, not least because instead of being performed by some personification of either wisdom or innocence, it instead falls to an energetic but uncertain clever fool, a mind caught in the moment of becoming.