"Big Shots" Re-Watch: "Waltz for Venus" & "Jamming with Edward"

 Cowboy Bebop

We are nine episodes in and the Bebop has a full crew. We meet the quirkiest crew member here so let's not waste anytime shall we?

[Roco comes at Spike with a knife and Spike sends Roco to the ground]

Roco Bonnaro: "How did you do that?"

Spike Spiegel: "You're tense, I'm calm. You apply excessive force; I control that force through fluid motion. That means relaxing the whole body so it can react instantly without resistance - no, without thought. Do you see now? It means becoming clear like water."

Roco Bonnaro: "Water."

Spike Spiegel: "right. Water can take any form. It drifts without effort one moment, then pounds down in a torrent the very next."

During a job, the Bebop crew finds an even bigger bounty than what they had initially thought. On the flight is a young man named, Roco Bonnaro, who takes a liking to Spike. After a couple of basic self defense lessons, Roco leaves a package with Spike and takes off. The package is a plant that produces grey ash, something that can cure Venus Sickness, a disease that Roco's sister is afflicted with. With gangsters on Roco's tail, what will Spike do?

Gay!

This is an interesting episode. It opens with the Bebop crew getting a much needed, much deserved win. We see so many episodes where the bounty they are chasing gets away or slips through their fingers. You start to wonder how the crew even stays in business. I feel like they have to show them being successful every now and again, even if that isn't the focus of the episode.

This is an episode where we meet another one-off character that makes an impact on Spike's life and just like every other episode where that happens, the episode sort of hinges on how strong that character is or isn't. Roco is just OK. He's not super interesting. He doesn't have a ton of chemistry with Spike. Their couple of scenes together don't really crackle, so it's a struggle, particularly when he dies at the end. It's not a surprise and it's not as emotional as I think the series wants it to be.

Luckily, we meet Roco's sister, Stella, when Spike breaks into their place. She is afflicted with Venus Sickness and has been blind for a while. Venus Sickness is curable, but you have to have the money to pay for the price-y grey ash treatments. Somethings never change and apparently it doesn't matter how far into the future you go, the rich are still bogarting medical treatments and the poor are dying from lack of availability. It's clear from the moment that Spike meets Stella that he is going to help her. He's pretty predictable in that sense. One of the tropes that kind of bugs me in things is the handicapped person who can like sense the goodness in people. It's tired and it's used here. Stella knows that Roco runs with some shady folks, but she just knows that Spike is a good guy. I'm ready for someone to be oblivous.

I do love when Faye gets to go out on her own and wreak havoc. She's routinely underestimated, like when she goes into that shady bar looking for information. The guys there think that she'll be a pushover, but then she starts kicking ass and taking names. I would not be doing my duty as a queer person if I didn't mention the scene where Faye barges in on the two guys having sex. Anime is not known for its nuanced portrayal of queerness so to have this scene not be played for laughs (at least the sex) and it not to be made to seem disgusting is pretty revolutionary, particularly for the time.

The final action scene is a shoot out that we've seen a few times before and there isn't anything happening that really makes it stand out above any of the others that we've seen so far. The episode ends on a fittingly somber note with Spike visiting Stella on the day of her operation. She's so excited for her brother to be the first person she sees and Spike has to deliver the bad news, which she already knows, because of course she does. I am a sucker for that final scene of the spores that caused Stella to be blind falling on Spike.

Grade: B

Jet Black: "Radical Edward's profile: he's a seven foot ex basketball pro, Hindu, guru, drag queen, alien!"

Spike Spiegel: "Jet, do you know that there are three things that I particularly hate?"

Jet Black: "Really?"

Spike Spiegel: "Kids, animals and women with attitudes. S tell me, Jet, WHY DO WE HAVE ALL THREE OF THEM NEATLY GATHERED IN OUR SHIP!?"

A satellite above Earth is carving strange pictures into the ground. The police believe it is the work of the hacker Radical Edward. Edward is trying to figure out what is going on themself and he's trying to get the Bebop crew involved. When they do, they find out that truth is much stranger than fiction.

Edward loves the Bebop.

One of the things that I love about "Cowboy Bebop" is that they don't rush. This is a one and done anime. So, you'd think that they wouldn't "waste time" putting all the pieces on the board. But here we are in episode 9 and they are just completing the crew with the introduction of Radical Edward. I think it's a great decision. We get time to see how the current Bebop crew functions. How they relate to each other. The dynamic they've established before Ed shows up and shakes everything up.

Ed is pure chaos and its the type of chaos that is just what the Bebop needs. Ed is famous on Earth. Everyone thinks they know him, but no one really knows him at all. I love the scene where Jet and Faye are trying to learn about him and everyone has a different description which leads to the classic Jet quote that begins this recap. Edward seems all over the place, but he didn't get to where he is by being stupid. I'm weirdly impressed that Earth police are able to track them down, but Ed is one step ahead. He hacks into the cops squad ship and takes it on a remote controlled joyride before crashing it. 

The animation is killer as always. I love the way that they depict Edward's hacking in the show. It's clearly late '90's computer animation mixed in with the hand drawn animation but it is fitting for this. We get some background on what Earth is like in this future. There was a gate explosion that caused a lot of chaos and now the surface is routinely pelted with meteors from showers caused by the explosion. Because of this, the majority of Earth's population lives underground. There's a lot of shading of the Earth. Jet in particular says nothing of value comes from Earth anymore, which could be true today.

Spike initially has zero interest in going after a hacker. But once Ed contacts the Bebop and lets them know that the satellite is actually sentient and is doing this itself, then he gets interested. This is exactly the off the wall, crazy shit that Spike lives for. Ed's plan is to have them approach the satellite manually, destroy its antennaes and then Ed will copy the AI so it can live on and the crew can still get their bounty. 

The sequence of Faye and Spike trying to get to the satellite is thrilling. Particularly when the other satellites wake up and start firing on them. The red crisscrosses of the lasers against the black of space is stark and different than the ho hum climax of the last episode. Remember how I was talking about the crew actually getting a bounty, well I hope they savored that since, they get none this episode. Apparently, bounties are only able to be cashed in on humans. Sad trombone noise.

Edward becomes a crew member at the end of the episode, much to Spike's chagrin. We learn that Edwards is female at the end of the episode, too. It's sort of a tag on from Faye. I think it would have been cool to keep the ambiguity around Ed's gender for the remainder of the season, but again, this was the late '90's, so I guess we should be thankful we got the gender fuckery for as long as we did.

Grade: A

Next up, Jet meets up with an old flame and the crew takes on their biggest challenge to date... evil fungi.

What do you all think? Do you love Ed? Find her annoying? Ambiguous towards her? Let me know in the comments.