I have no idea what the viewing figures were like, but I do know how it was rated on sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and it didn't do great. With critics or users. But I've already written about episode one, Cowboy Gospel, and I really liked it, so is there a chance I'm going to like the rest of it as well? Or am I going to witness it crashing down and exploding into flames? Keep reading to find out!
The season has 10 episodes and I've already seen one of them, so I'll be going through the other 9 stories one by one and then I'll write a bit of about the series overall at the end. There will be SPOILERS here, for this series and maybe the anime as well. What I can remember of it at least.
Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail a little.
| Cowboy Bebop (2021) |
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| 02 | Venus Pop |
6 | ||||||||||||
Spike and Jet are out hunting a terrorist known as the 'Teddy Bomber', when an assassin makes an attempt on Spike's life in a church bathroom. He survives and realises that his old nemesis Vicious knows that he's alive. He goes to see his friend Ana who tells him that Julia, the woman he loves, is married to Vicious now. Meanwhile Vicious is ordered by his bosses to point a gun at Julia's head and pull the trigger (it was unloaded).
The trouble with this episode is that's about Spike visiting an old
friend, which I didn't care about, Vicious dealing with the Syndicate,
which I didn't care about, and Jet trying to figure out what's up with
Spike, which I didn't care about. I especially didn't care about that
long scene at that start where we're introduced to the jazz club by a
bunch of people that had no relevance to anything. I'd say they missed the point with the Teddy Bomber as well, but I don't think there was a point here at all. They took the anime episode where a bomber's trying to send a message about modern society and Spike's too distracted by his battle with a rival cowboy to pay any attention, and they removed the message and the rival! The bomber's only in the story to give Jet and Spike something else they should be doing while they're dealing with their own issues. Plus the plot feels like it's missing an ending. Jet leaves Spike standing on a bomb on a doomed spaceship... and that's it. They even screwed up Big Shot, their TV show within in a TV show. They came so so close to getting it perfect and then had Judy break character over basically nothing. That's a thing you save until the very end of the series, you don't put that in their first episode! Okay to be fair I don't know how the scene would've worked for me if I'd never seen the anime. But I have, and it was jarring. On the plus side Spike and Jet continue to be a great Riggs and Murtaugh pairing here. In fact I think I could really like the rest of this season if it focuses more on those two (and Faye when she turns up again), and saves all the Syndicate and Vicious stuff for special occasions. Make me curious about Spike before spending time exploring his backstory! That goes for Jet as well. Overall this episode was a bit of a disappointment to me. It's failed to get me on board with the Syndicate story arc because I'd much rather watch Spike and Jet go on stand-alone adventures right now, so every scene without the two of them together felt like something I'd rather skip past. Well, except for the fight scene in the bathroom, that was pretty good. |
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| 03 | Dog Star Swing |
6 | ||||||||||||
Jet and Spike visit a series of brothels in search of murderer and dog-kidnapper Abdul Hakim. They finally track him down, but he's killed by the police so they can avoid paying them the bounty. Also Jet was trying to find a doll for his daughter but that didn't work out, and his other plan of giving her the dog he just found works out even worse. Meanwhile Vicious temporarily shuts down his operations.
I've been slowly rewatching the Cowboy Bebop anime series alongside this and the episode
Stray Dog Strut is maybe my favourite of the stories I've seen
so far, so I had my hopes up for Dog Star Swing. I was curious at least to see
how they remixed the elements to create something more suitable for 45
minutes of live-action TV. Well... they kept the dog at least; Ein did make a short appearance near the end. And Hakim was in it too, even though he was an entirely different person here. Though flipping the character around so he looked more like his anime mug shot than his post-plastic surgery appearance for most of the episode is the kind of twist I like. Plus this time we got the Hakim vs Spike fight that the original episode denied us. So that was good. The rest of the episode was just off doing its own thing however. It had so little connection to the original story that I kind of wish they'd just taken Hakim and Ein out of it entirely, along with the word 'dog' from the title. I'm cool with this series telling its own stories, in fact I want it to, as the elements it brings back from the anime are just getting my hopes up for something this show isn't going to deliver. There are three things going on here in this story: Spike's trying to get info about Vicious, Jet's trying to get hold of a comically grotesque doll to give to his daughter, and the writers were trying to see how many brothels they could squeeze into one episode. It got to the point that when it cut to Vicious's evil drug factory (or whatever) and everyone working there was naked my only reaction was 'of course'. I have to admit I wasn't 100% paying attention to what was actually going on in the Vicious side of the story however. I was facing the screen, I was keeping notes, but my brain was filtering it out as being irrelevant. The same with the Julia story. I can't say I'm entirely invested in Jet's story about his daughter either. On the plus side I'm still 100% into the adventures of Spike and Jet, even though there's so much banter between them here it's like the writers were filling time because they couldn't come up with enough plot. Also Vicious's sarcasm made him a little more endearing to me, and the indignities done to that damn doll made me smile. But the episode has me wishing I could skip ahead to a later season, where they've ran out of anime episodes to remix and Vicious has been killed off. |
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| 04 | Callisto Soul |
6 | ||||||||||||
Faye tries to track down the person who conned her but things are complicated by an attack by eco-terrorists. She finds the Bebop crew just down the street and teams up with them to catch the terrorists. Things go well until a terraforming missile is fired, but fortunately Faye sacrifices her ship to save Spike and Jet's life, and earns herself a spot on the crew.
Callisto Soul is a nice change of pace for Netflix
Bebop, as the Vicious and Julia subplot barely even interacts with the main plot this time. You could edit those scenes out, get five
minutes back, and miss nothing. The weird thing is though, I assumed
most of my dislike for their side story was due to it being different
to the anime, but I'm actually getting into Faye's new plot. Maybe the real problem with Vicious and Julia's story is that it's just not interesting. I mean who wants to watch an
ongoing mob drama in the middle of a fun episodic bounty hunter show? Faye's story really is a detour from the anime though, as it's only her second episode and we already know that she's an amnesiac who was cryogenically frozen and got ripped off when she woke up. Instead of letting us get to things when we get to them, the series likes to introduce threads early and then drag them out while other things are going on. In this case Faye's story has been bolted onto the general plot of the anime episode Gateway Shuffle, so that she's the one in the restaurant that gets invaded at the start instead of Jet and Spike. They're both in some other restaurant down the road having a dumb conversation about bidets. I'd complain about how she runs in and finds them sitting there by pure chance, but the original episode had her run into the Bebop while she's floating in space and that's perhaps even more unlikely. I mean space is pretty big. The episode rarely lines up with the events of the original story, but it does hit a lot of the same points: Jet and Spike dealing with Faye's betrayal, the eco-terrorist's plot, Faye racing to take down a missile, the eco-terrorists being hit with their own weapon at the end etc. I definitely preferred this to the last two episodes, which had next to zero resemblance to the original stories, and I think the ending was actually much less confusing and unsatisfying compared to the anime episode. It looked fantastic as well; we finally got some proper spaceship action! Also the Bebop crew actually bring in some bounties and stop a devastating planetary attack, which is a definite change of pace for them. The episode gets bonus points for casting Adrienne Barbeau as Twinkle Murdock, leader of the eco-terrorists, but then loses them again for not actually calling her Twinkle Murdock. And it loses even more points for no one pointing out that the eco-terrorists used to be a good group with a decent cause before getting taken over by a lunatic. Without that, the episode has a bit of a 'ugh, environmentalists, am I right?' vibe to it. Faye was definitely the heart of this story and it showed that she does actually have a heart, as seeing the horror at the restaurant made her determined not to let it happen to anyone else. The running joke about Jet and Spike saying she looks like a cosmonaut and her asking what the hell they were talking about was a bit weird, but it kind of won me over by the end. Mostly because it was clear she genuinely did feel left out. Plus her little grin at the end when she realises she's finally found some friends made me smile too. |
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| 05 | Darkside Tango |
4 | ||||||||||||
Jet teams up with his old partner to find the person who framed him. Meanwhile Spike and Faye spend so long deciding what bounty to chase they never actually leave the ship. This is the first episode of the series to be based on an episode I
have absolutely zero memory of, so I don't know how it compares at
all. I had zero conscious recollection of who the dirty cop was
either, though I knew it was Jet's old parter right away somehow.
There wasn't any hope of the dirty cop being the person he wanted it
to be, so I kept waiting for other possibilities to be introduced on
screen instead of just in dialogue, and they weren't, so that reduced the
suspects to one. Maybe I remembered reading about it somewhere, maybe it was
just incredibly obvious, all I know is that waiting for the inevitable
conclusion was kind of painful for me. The switch to a film noir detective movie tone for the Jet story was an interesting idea (he even changed his clothes for once) and if the whole episode had maintained that style I might have been able to get into it more. But it has two other plots going on, one a mob drama, the other a comedy about two people who utterly fail to leave the house, and they feel like they're from different TV series that have been edited together. In a bad way. This kind of thing can work great, WandaVision's the first example that jumps to mind of a series that pulled it off, but there's nothing going on here to make it all feel like a coherent whole. It just feels padded out. It's a shame, because I think the Spike and Faye B plot could have worked okay in an episode that suited it. They didn't feel like a whole lot like the characters from the anime series here but I like these characters as well and the actors did well with the weird dialogue they were given at times. I think my main issue with the plot is that it keeps you hopeful that they're going to get out and go on a bounty hunting adventure for too long. If I'd known from the start that they were going to be stuck inside the ship for the whole episode I could've enjoyed it more I reckon. I mean, it's a beautiful set to be stuck inside. And then there's the Vicious and Julia story, which I have no interest in. I can't judge it fairly because I wasn't giving it much attention, but I did appreciate that Julia didn't visit the jazz club this time. Unless she did and I missed it. I have to be honest, this was probably my least favourite episode of anything that I've seen in a long while. It bored the crap out of me. |
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| 06 | Binary Two-Step |
6 | ||||||||||||
Spike goes after a bounty and finds himself trapped in a VR world where he has to keep trying to convince Julia to come with him or else the computer will eat his brain. Meanwhile Faye has a fling with their mechanic. Jet eventually discovers that the evil computer is located on Earth and they race there to save him, despite the Bebop's engines exploding around them.
I have no memory of the anime story this is based on either, but I'm
pretty sure it didn't have a subplot where Faye has a brief lesbian
fling that mostly just works out and there's no twist. I was waiting for the moment where she got punished for trusting someone,
but nope. Unless there's a twist coming up in a later story, the
mechanic here was exactly as she appeared. Meanwhile, in the Spike plot, nothing was as it appeared. Unfortunately once the twist was revealed there wasn't much to it. It teased that it was going to be a time loop story, which are often a highlight of a series, but what we ended up getting was lots of scenes of Spike determined not to leave Julia again. Which is good, because if he let her go his brain would be eaten by a computer, but bad, because she was giving him more than a subtle hint that she didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Dude, she's not into you, stop being an obsessive creep! The plot was also kind of dull, as we already knew that Spike hadn't gotten over Julia (I think) and there was nothing else there to hold my attention except for an irritating video filter and cowboy music. On the plus side it meant that Julia and Vicious were far better integrated into the episode than they have been in most and they never visited that bloody jazz club. I did get my hopes up a bit when I saw the monument Spike and Julia took cover behind, because it looked like a gravestone and I thought Spike's memories might be getting remixed by the VR system. Turns out it was just a memorial foreshadowing the awesome shot of the ruined Earth we get at the end of the episode. To be fair that reveal probably would've been a real 'oh crap!' moment for me if I hadn't already known about what happened to Earth from the anime. The Bebop's mad dash to Earth establishes three things about the ship: its engine room is very Firefly, it's tough enough to survive slamming into the ground, and it's fast enough to leave one planet, reach orbit, fly down the hyperspace tunnel, then re-enter real space and make the 240,000 mile trip from the Moon to the Earth quicker than Spike can win a shootout. With a broken engine. I'm not sure I've ever seen a spaceship physically take off from one planet and land on another so quickly before, even with the aid of hyperspace. Though I suppose it's even more impressive that they managed to get the smoking wreck of the ship back in the air afterwards and all the way over back to the other planet again. It's a shame all that damage turned out to have zero consequences, but I'd still put it on my 'Top 10 Scenes where a Hero Spaceship Slams onto a Planet' list. I was left wishing that I'd liked the episode more than I did, but I definitely didn't dislike it. The Spike scenes weren't all that interesting and the Faye scenes were a bit weird (shouldn't the writers establish that she can't get a break before finally giving her a break?), but Jet heroically racing to the rescue was great. Anyone else would've said "The signal's coming from another planet? We don't have a chance." But nope, he ran for the cockpit and went for it. The moral of the story: don't lie down in mysterious creepy chairs. |
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| 07 | Galileo Hustle |
5 | ||||||||||||
Faye's fake mother makes her lie to the crew in exchange for information about her mysterious past. Jet sees through her con but he and Spike have to go on the run to lure goons away, just when he wanted to attend his daughter's recital. He has to settle for ducking into a building and watching a live hologram while Spike fights all the goons by himself outside. Meanwhile Faye discovers that her fake mother was lying about being on the run, she's just doing some role-play with her arms dealer lover, and she decides to steal her spaceship in retribution. But the only info she found about her mysterious past was a tape she recorded as a child.
Galileo Hustle has got me thinking about adaptations and
whether people want to just be told the same story over again or given
something new. Because this is technically an adaptation of the anime
story where Spike and Jet go on an expedition into an ancient ruined
department store on Earth to get a VHS player so that Faye can watch
her mysterious video... except they took out the department store plot
and had Jet attend his daughter's recital instead. So that was a
disappointment. But we did get the video tape from the anime, with
the message from teenage Faye, and that didn't land on me as hard as
it could've done because I'd seen it before. So either way the series is doing it wrong! It can't win. Though I think that scene of Jet doing a comedy routine with a daughter he didn't even have in the anime while Spike had an elaborate fight scene behind him kind of sums up this remake for me. It focuses on a bunch of new stuff I don't quite care about while an episode of Cowboy Bebop is happening in the background. The characters are often distracted from the bounty hunting content I crave by the things going on in their own lives. I didn't hate the Jet and Spike plot though. The two of them are fun characters and they even got a couple of laughs out of me this time. The Faye plot on the other hand... I didn't hate either! In fact I feel like my main problem with it is that it seems to be written for the wrong Faye. The live action Faye isn't really a deceitful person, but the scenes with her con-artist mother feel like they're supposed to be revealing where that side of her comes from. Especially when she joins in with her cons. At least she's finally gotten hold of her spaceship from the anime. Maybe now she can attempt to take down a bounty with the others sometime. I feel like episodes like this would likely work better if Jet, Spike and Faye had already done some work together to catch some fugitives. When Faye tells her mother she's a cowboy my reaction was 'when?' and Spike's epic fight scene in the background was a cruel tease of the fights we haven't been getting in the foreground. Though at least he won this time. We also got 8 minutes of the Julia and Vicious subplot this story, which is technically moving forward I suppose. Julia knows Spike's alive, Vicious is arranging to make his move. Trouble is I still don't care about any of it, maybe because Jet, Spike and Faye aren't in the scenes, maybe because they're not very good, I can't say for sure. I just treat the scenes like an ad break at this point and focus on something else until they're over. |
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| 08 | Sad Clown A-Go-Go |
6 | ||||||||||||
Faye's birthday bowling night is spoiled when an assassin clown comes to kill Spike. He decides to go after him alone. Meanwhile Vicious takes over the Syndicate.
I'm starting to understand other people's criticisms about Faye now. I still
like her as a character, I just feel like I'd like her more if her
dialogue was slightly less cringeworthy. Though I suppose "This game
sucks balls," is actually pretty apt, seeing as the episode begins with the crew
bowling. I like
how they're bonding and hanging out, and giving Faye a surprise birthday was really sweet of them. In fact it would've been a nice break
from the constant bounty hunting if they ever actually went out and did
some bounty hunting. This is the Pierrot le Fou episode with the creepy clown assassin and fortunately it's been ages since I've seen the original anime story so I can pretend this is actually a very faithful adaptation, even though that's probably not true. I definitely don't remember Ein playing a movie from his eyes in the original story, or them kicking him off the ship and leaving him behind. That was really cruel! I guess the episode reveals what Ein really is in this version of the story: a surveillance and communication device. Plus he's got the assassin's memories in him perhaps? I didn't really get what was going on there. Though I did pick up a moral in the story: don't keep dogs in an operating theatre. Also it turns out that the episode that first introduced Ein (Dog Star Swing) also set up something else for later in the series: the fake holographic face technology. It's very useful tech if you're planning to double cross your leaders with the help of a team that's planning to double cross you, and it works even after the user's head is cut off. I knew it couldn't have really been Vicious's own head rolling in that scene as the opening credits show that he lives long enough to fight Spike, but it would've been a nice twist. Something very strange happened this episode though: I started to care more about the Vicious plot than I did about the Bebop plot. Probably because most of it was a flashy fight scene. Also we got the reveal that John Noble was in the show, and he's playing Vicious's dad! Adding John Noble to the Vicious side of the story was a sneaky low-down trick to get me to give a damn about what happens there, so I'm glad he was immediately killed off so now I can go back to daydreaming about something else whenever Vicious is on screen. Things I liked about this story: Faye's relief when it turned out that it was one of Spike's enemies coming after them with a grudge and not one of hers. Plus we got a bit of a Star Trek III reference here (after the NCC-1701-B locker number last episode) as Spike leaves a message saying "Good morning captain" when he sabotages the Bebop. Things I didn't like: Jet forcing the team to keep saying the plan in unison. I probably should've found it amusing how the actors had got themselves synced up so well, but I was too busy cringing. Overall I'd probably rank this as my second or third favourite so far, after the Desperado episode and the eco-terrorist one. The Vicious plot had a good action scene, the Bebop plot had a good action scene, and the episode managed to make me smile a few times. Sometimes because it was funny, sometimes because they got Faye a cake and that was really nice of them. The writers were really rushing to make the crew a family though. Couldn't they be co-workers for a bit first? Or at all? |
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| 09 | Blue Crow Waltz |
5 | ||||||||||||
A flashback to how Vicious and Spike met Julia and fell out.
Some episodes have had me wondering if the writers even wanted to do
Cowboy Bebop, this one has me wondering if they even wanted to do science
fiction. This is just a gangster story. These are just Yakuza or
Mafia. The episode doesn't even feature the main character with the robot arm! In fact there
isn't any Jet or Faye in this entire story and Spike never wears his
iconic suit. Though despite that I could still tell almost immediately that
I'd put the right series on, even before I could see who was talking,
because of the first bit of dialogue is a guy talking about how he shaves his balls with a knife.
"That's it," I thought, "that's the Cowboy Bebop (2021) that I know!"
Man, what were they even thinking with this writing? I still enjoyed the episode though, I think. In fact I respected the fact that they went full flashback with it, with an appropriate shift in tone. Plus it's made me realise something about Vicious: I actually do like the actor and I think he does a decent performance in the show. It's just that I don't want him to keep interrupting my space bounty hunter series. I cared way more about his story here than I have in any other episode because everything in this story belonged to his world and his genre. Cowboy Bebop is known for mixing genres, but this series' particular blend hasn't been working out for me. The story is all about how Vicious and Spike's friendship and how it fell apart, and it was strangely sad to see. I could actually buy them as inseparable brothers and get why they'd want to hang out together, despite Vicious being an absolute psychopath. And then Spike went and cheated with Vicious's girlfriend the first damn chance he got! Man, I was feeling bad for Vicious after that. I was also distracted by the flashy editing, with how the spilled bottle transitioned to the petrol that Vicious was pouring over his victim. Yes they still use petrol in the year 2171, don't question it. Spike kind of redeemed himself a little by the end, with how he single-handedly massacred a whole cartel for his bro. I say 'kind of' because he did get a bit murdery: gunning down a witness in the back after telling her to run. I guess he had to finish them off in their entirety to avoid any possibility of revenge. Unfortunately Vicious and Spike failed to finish each other off, so revenge is definitely still on the table for the two of them. I'll give the episode points for featuring John Noble (despite killing him off in the previous story), plus they had the shot of the flower in the puddle like in the anime! I can't remember what actually happened in the anime series though, so I can't compare the two this time. This is a pretty well-made version of what it is in my opinion, I don't know how 'prestige' the series is, but it's certainly got enough production value for me. The trouble I'm having is that this isn't the series I was sold by the marketing (or the name) and if they'd promoted the show with a more honest trailer focusing on the ongoing Vicious story I probably wouldn't have watched it in the first place. There's only one episode left though so I have to keep going. |
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| 10 | Supernova Symphony |
5 | ||||||||||||
Vicious kidnaps Jet's daughter to get him to turn Spike over to him. Jet does it without hesitation, as his friendship with him has been shattered by the revelation that he was once a Syndicate hitman. Jet and Spike end up held captive as well, but Faye shoots up the place with her spaceship and frees them. Spike goes after Vicious but Julia arrives and shoots them both, spending Spike falling out of a window. Julia explains to Vicious that she'll be keeping him locked away out of sight from now on so that she can claim his place as leader of the Syndicate. Meanwhile a wounded, miserable and drunk Spike collapses in an alleyway... but is woken up by Radical Ed.
When I saw the title Supernova Symphony I immediately wanted this to be the Britpop-themed episode, with a soundtrack inspired by
songs like Champagne Supernova and Bittersweet Symphony. I didn't get
my wish. To be honest I'd already been spoiled about Julia taking over the Syndicate and becoming the new villain, it's one of the few things I knew from early on, so that wasn't a huge shock when it happened. I also knew that one way or the other Spike was going through that massive window. One thing I didn't expect was that Vicious survived Julia's vengeance. I kind of figured that Vicious and Julia were going to be the season one arc and this subversion of the original story was supposed to wrap up their plots early and allow the series to move beyond the anime, but neither of them get a definite ending here. It almost seems like a definite ending for the Bebop crew though, now that a massive wedge has been driven between Jet and Spike. The episode goes out of its way to make the contrast between Jet's attitude towards Spike before and after the reveal as big as possible, almost ridiculously so. He goes from giving him a huge hug to putting a gun to his head, and even at the end of the story he's telling him he'll kill him next time they meet. Uh Jet, I think murder's still illegal. I can kind of see where Jet's coming from though, as his best friend neglected to tell him he left the Syndicate on bad terms, his daughter was about to be shot, and his ex-wife ain't going to let him anywhere near the girl from now on. His wife doesn't even talk to him when she comes to pick up her daughter. Jet is destroyed at the end of this story and I'm not just talking about his arm. In fact it's a really depressing place to leave the series! Though before the end we finally get a glimpse of Ed. She's found Ein after they abandoned him, and she does some extreme Malcolm in the Middle face-right-up-in-the-camera acting to tell Spike that Cowboy Bebop (2021) doesn't end here and there are adventures yet to come! It seems like a lot of viewers took issue with her introduction (that's why they spoiled it for me all over the damn internet), and I can see where they're coming from. Her role in the final scene was to be the weird and annoying stranger that drunk depressed Spike doesn't want to deal with right now, and the director didn't go out of his way to make her endearing. Which is a bit of a problem when she's also the hook to get people hyped for season two. It's a real shame that the actor won't ever get the chance to make a better impression on people in the role. I definitely like Faye in this episode though, despite the dialogue they gave her. Her plot confused me at first however. She manages to 'enhance' a screencap from her VHS tape to reveal the missing side of a street sign outside her old house... and it's the same street as on a billboard in the theme park Spike was fighting in last episode! Uh, what? But after double checking it I realised that the street in the theme park was Greenacre Avenue and she lived on Greenvale Avenue. So the billboard was just reminding her that signs exist. Speaking of things that were ridiculous in this episode, Spike just keeps soaking up damage like a video game character. He turns around to take a bullet in the back to protect Jet's daughter as he's carrying her out of the church, then he strolls back inside to fight Vicious. This leads to him getting shot again and sent out a window! He still manages to walk back to the Bebop no trouble, not all that inconvenienced by all the bleeding he's probably doing. He was already injured at the start of the episode after the fight in the theme park... which happened when he was already injured after being set on fire. He's a tough guy, I can see him being less inconvenienced by giant holes in his torso than most people, but the guy just walks to a bar after being shot multiple times and falling out of a window, and then gets drunk? Seriously? In the anime version (Ballad of Fallen Angels) he was in a bad way after a single shot. He definitely wasn't in any condition to have a whole fight scene with Vicious at the end like he did here! This took a lot of inspiration from the anime episode though, with the shootout in the church and the confrontation with Vicious in front of the window. It even had the same song playing (Rain), it just played during the fight instead of before it this time. Plus they went with the Steve Conte version from the soundtrack album instead of the Mai Yamane version from the anime. Incidentally this was a beautiful looking episode I thought. I know some people say the series looks cheap, and they're probably right, but it's pretty enough to impress me. Sure I feel like the anime did the same sequences better, but it's a bit more of a challenge to pull it off in live action. The episode was watchable I thought but it's paying off a lot of things from earlier stories I didn't really care all that much about so I wasn't as invested as I could've been. It's the epic resolution to the parts of Cowboy Bebop (2021) I didn't like and it doesn't even resolve them fully. |
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CONCLUSION
The thing about adaptations, is that if you put the name of the thing you're adapting onto your adaptation, then you're going to attract fans of the original and they're going to be hoping for something that resembles it. No one was ever that bothered that The Magnificent Seven doesn't feel the same as Seven Samurai, or that Last Man Standing strays from A Fistful of Dollars, but when you use the same title you're begging for people to come judge your story by what it's not just as much as by what it is.
This version of Cowboy Bebop is about three bounty hunters called Spike, Jet and Faye on a ship called the Bebop. So far so good. In fact they all look and dress more or less like the anime characters, and if you squint a bit they even act the same. Sometimes. This also works for me, as I liked this interpretation of the characters and the actors all nailed it in my opinion. They weren't always given the best dialogue (especially poor Daniella Pineda), but I could watch a series about these guys for years. If it was about them going around hunting bounties.
I'll get back to that thought in a minute, but first I want to talk about the writing for a bit. People have accused the series of having "Whedon Speak" dialogue like a Marvel movie, with lots of dumb quips and bad comedy. I can agree with the second part, not so much with the first part. Whether you think they managed it or not, Joss Whedon shows like Buffy, Angel and Firefly were always trying to be witty, not just jokey. Some of Cowboy Bebop's conversations sound like they were written by teenagers who'd just seen their first Quentin Tarantino movie. The series is also weirdly mean, seedy and cynical, and doesn't do much to portray its world as anything but a grim dystopia. It's like it takes place in the same satirical universe as RoboCop or a Grand Theft Auto game; even the doll Jet gets for his kid is a grotesque joke.
Alright, the original Cowboy Bebop anime was a series about bounty hunters going around hunting bounties. There were story arcs, but episodes were fairly stand alone and about all kinds of different things. This new Cowboy Bebop is a 21st century series created for Netflix however, so they had to tweak that structure to better suit binge-watching. The series seems to be telling separate stories at first, but the Vicious and Julia plot grows and grows until by the end that's pretty much all there is. That's my biggest problem with the series: my fun space bounty hunter series kept getting interrupted by some other TV show I didn't want to watch, and when the two series collided at the end it just left everyone miserable. I've got nothing against the actors playing the characters, I thought they did a good job, but man I got sick of seeing Vicious and Julia. And Ana. And Gren.
Despite all my negativity, I didn't hate the series. It often looks pretty good despite its presumably average budget, it makes good use of Yoko Kanno's soundtrack from time to time, and it's technically about fun space bounty hunters with awesome spaceships! I seriously love all the spaceships in this, they did a great job slightly updating them while staying true to the original designs. That goes for the interiors as well. They also stayed true to some of the original shots from the anime, which comes off as kind of strange when so much of the story has been remixed until it's unrecognisable.
A couple of months ago I said I found episode 1 (Cowboy Gospel) more entertaining than the anime episode it was based on, and I think I'd stand by that. Even if it did cheat by basically swiping the opening of the movie as well. But the rest of the episodes all went in bizarre new directions. The Cowboy Andy/Teddy Bomber story didn't have any Cowboy Andy! The dog chase episode was all about brothels and sex shops! Watching this series made me feel like I was down the pub listening to a drunk friend trying to remember the plots of as many Cowboy Bebop episodes as they could, but getting it mixed up with some other crime drama they watched. I don't think the stories benefitted from that kind of reinterpretation.
I think my hope for the series was that it could almost take place in between episodes of the original show, so it was more of a continuation than a remake. I didn't want to see a new take on the classic villains, I wanted the classic premise and new villains. What I got instead was a Cowboy Bebop series that was familiar enough to make me feel like I'd seen it all before and different enough to lose its appeal for me.
My top three episodes:
Bottom three episodes:
Next time on Cowboy Bebop:
Cowboy Bebop's over, it's cancelled. But what would I have wanted from season 2? Something very different from the writers it seems. Seeing Vicious alive at the end was the final nail in the coffin for me to be honest. I would've come back for a brand new story arc in season 2 (or even better, no story arc) but I've zero interest in a continuation of the Vicious/Julia/jazz club plot, so this would've been the end of the series for me even if it hadn't been cancelled.
This version of Cowboy Bebop is about three bounty hunters called Spike, Jet and Faye on a ship called the Bebop. So far so good. In fact they all look and dress more or less like the anime characters, and if you squint a bit they even act the same. Sometimes. This also works for me, as I liked this interpretation of the characters and the actors all nailed it in my opinion. They weren't always given the best dialogue (especially poor Daniella Pineda), but I could watch a series about these guys for years. If it was about them going around hunting bounties.
I'll get back to that thought in a minute, but first I want to talk about the writing for a bit. People have accused the series of having "Whedon Speak" dialogue like a Marvel movie, with lots of dumb quips and bad comedy. I can agree with the second part, not so much with the first part. Whether you think they managed it or not, Joss Whedon shows like Buffy, Angel and Firefly were always trying to be witty, not just jokey. Some of Cowboy Bebop's conversations sound like they were written by teenagers who'd just seen their first Quentin Tarantino movie. The series is also weirdly mean, seedy and cynical, and doesn't do much to portray its world as anything but a grim dystopia. It's like it takes place in the same satirical universe as RoboCop or a Grand Theft Auto game; even the doll Jet gets for his kid is a grotesque joke.
Alright, the original Cowboy Bebop anime was a series about bounty hunters going around hunting bounties. There were story arcs, but episodes were fairly stand alone and about all kinds of different things. This new Cowboy Bebop is a 21st century series created for Netflix however, so they had to tweak that structure to better suit binge-watching. The series seems to be telling separate stories at first, but the Vicious and Julia plot grows and grows until by the end that's pretty much all there is. That's my biggest problem with the series: my fun space bounty hunter series kept getting interrupted by some other TV show I didn't want to watch, and when the two series collided at the end it just left everyone miserable. I've got nothing against the actors playing the characters, I thought they did a good job, but man I got sick of seeing Vicious and Julia. And Ana. And Gren.
A couple of months ago I said I found episode 1 (Cowboy Gospel) more entertaining than the anime episode it was based on, and I think I'd stand by that. Even if it did cheat by basically swiping the opening of the movie as well. But the rest of the episodes all went in bizarre new directions. The Cowboy Andy/Teddy Bomber story didn't have any Cowboy Andy! The dog chase episode was all about brothels and sex shops! Watching this series made me feel like I was down the pub listening to a drunk friend trying to remember the plots of as many Cowboy Bebop episodes as they could, but getting it mixed up with some other crime drama they watched. I don't think the stories benefitted from that kind of reinterpretation.
I think my hope for the series was that it could almost take place in between episodes of the original show, so it was more of a continuation than a remake. I didn't want to see a new take on the classic villains, I wanted the classic premise and new villains. What I got instead was a Cowboy Bebop series that was familiar enough to make me feel like I'd seen it all before and different enough to lose its appeal for me.
My top three episodes:
- Cowboy Gospel (8)
- Sad Clown A-Go-Go (6)
- Callisto Soul (6)
Bottom three episodes:
- Supernova Symphony (5)
- Blue Crow Waltz (5)
- Darkside Tango (4)
Next time on Cowboy Bebop:
Cowboy Bebop's over, it's cancelled. But what would I have wanted from season 2? Something very different from the writers it seems. Seeing Vicious alive at the end was the final nail in the coffin for me to be honest. I would've come back for a brand new story arc in season 2 (or even better, no story arc) but I've zero interest in a continuation of the Vicious/Julia/jazz club plot, so this would've been the end of the series for me even if it hadn't been cancelled.
NEXT EPISODE
While you're waiting for that you could leave a comment in the box below and share your own thoughts about Netflix Cowboy Bebop. Was I too harsh to it? Too kind? Is it a shame that it got cancelled or were they just putting the show out of its misery?
I know what you mean. I liked it enough that I feel it's a shame there won't be any more, but not enough that I will miss it.
ReplyDeleteI thought there leads were great and I'm sad we won't see more of them. This version of Jet was really good, and John Cho is always good to watch.
(My other half is researching Charmed at the moment and Cho turns up as a ghost in one early episode. He was the best thing in the episode.)
I think you're right that if they'd done more bounty hunting and less big narrative threads, it may have worked better. Or a big narrative thread that wasn't Vicious and Julia, because it wasn't compelling enough to carry so much narrative weight. Faye's mysterious past was much more interesting, and would have been a good thing to explore and, because the anime wasn't super interested in it, it was something the live action version could have made its own.
But yeah, it is a shame that there won't be more, because I liked these versions of Faye, Jet, and Spike.