Cowboy Bebop: "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui" and "Cowboy Funk"

(This is the 11th installment of my biweekly recaps of Cowboy Bebop, the TV Tokyo animated series that ran from 1998 to 1999 to cult fascination and critical acclaim. I’ve never seen it! These recaps are only available to paid subscribers.)

• “Wild Horses” (originally aired March 20, 1999 [Wowow], and November 12, 2001 [Adult Swim])
• “Pierrot le Fou” (originally aired March 27, 1999 [Wowow] and February 15, 2002 [Adult Swim])

‎Every time I near the end of a show I'm recapping, I like to imagine a reader coming to these pieces years later and having a satisfying experience following along with the show, getting both my thoughts on the series and how it relates to the TV medium.

As you've surely noticed, we're nearing the end of Cowboy Bebop. The Hulu plot blurbs for the next two episodes strongly suggest the show will dive deep into the character conflicts before the two-part finale. So naturally, I want to start making grand, sweeping statements about the show, the better to provide an overarching meta-narrative that will knit these recaps into one cohesive whole. This article would be the time to do that, ideally.

But I can't, not really. Both of these episodes are absolute nonsense. In a good way, mind, but still. Absolute nonsense.

I've remarked several times throughout this series that one of the strengths of Cowboy Bebop is its elasticity. One episode doesn't necessarily follow another, and the character arcs are developed a bit haphazardly. My favorite TV shows often follow that format, which may be why I've come to love this show so much. Yet even accounting for the show's willingness to take big chances, I don't know if I would have bet on it having an entire episode where the premise is, "This cowboy's name is Andy."

"Cowboy Funk" reminded me of an episode I covered as part of a previous series: "The Ember Island Players," which is the half-hour immediately preceding the four-episode finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Both episodes offer broad winks to the audience. "This is all a bit ridiculous, don't you think?" the episodes seem to say. They're also both positioned right before the point where the plot action begins to resolve itself. I don't yet know if "Cowboy Funk" is also meant to provide a quick chuckle before the heavier events to follow, but I would bet anything that it is. I've watched television before.

What's fascinating about "Cowboy Funk" is how devoted it is not just to undercutting the show it's in but the genres the show exists within. The Teddy Bear Bomber is a wholly bizarre invention. The plot of the episode is borderline farcical. And then there's Andy.

Cowboy Andy isn't just a subversion of the character of Spike so much as he is a subversion of the idea of a taciturn loner hero altogether. In many ways, the character exists to be the kind of hero we might get in another show, the kind of hero we might have assumed Spike was at the start. He undertakes daring stunts. He briefly seems like he might get Faye to fall for him. He is stylish and cool, and his exploits might seem effortless from the outside.

But because this show is about Spike and his friends, Andy's actions aren't cool or helpful. Instead, they're a massive obstacle, if a fundamentally humorous one.

"Boogie Woogie Feng Shui" doesn't feel like the show winking at itself, but it similarly abandons the Bebop usual in favor of what amounts to the plot of a YA novel. Here, Jet encounters the teenage daughter of a former compatriot, now deceased, and she enlists him in a plan to follow a breadcrumb trail to her dad's final location. When they get there, the episode contrives a way to have the girl talk to her dad one last time, and everybody on board the Bebop seems strangely moved.

‎Of the four main characters, Jet is the one the series seems most interested in sending off on solo adventures. Even when Faye was untangling the many threads of her past, the story kept dragging her into the orbit of the show's other characters. Jet, however, seems to often end up in stories that send him off to hang out with the guest character of the week, stories that largely sideline the rest of the cast. That's especially true of "Feng Shui," where the other three Bebopketeers barely appear for much of the episode's running time.

The reason for this seems simple to me: Faye and Jet are mirrors of each other. Jet wants to lose himself in his ship and the crew that works on it, but what he really needs to do is confront some of his personal issues on his own. Faye wants to confront some of her personal issues on her own, but what she really needs to do is more fully embrace the community she finds herself in. And when you consider that Meifa, the teen girl searching for her daughter, has a lot of story resonances with Faye (missing past, weird quest to uncover a secret, etc.), the connections become even more interesting. This show isn't going to come out and say Jet is everybody else's dad, but, well... he's everybody else's dad. (Yes, even Spike.)

Where "Cowboy Funk" was ridiculous in precisely the right way for me to have a blast, "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui" was... I mean, it was okay? Meifa and Jet's quest ultimately feels a lot like something out of a Dan Brown novel. While the conclusion — in which Meifa gets to talk to her father for a few moments via a hiccup in spacetime — is surprisingly moving for involving a character we've just met. But the journey there tips over the weird, invisible line between when the Bebop crew members get really involved in the guest star of the week's adventures and when they're just dragged along for the ride.

I can extrapolate from Jet and Meifa's adventures to his paternal feelings for the other crew members. But I have to do a lot of my own work to get there, and it's not immediately clear anybody working on the show had similar thoughts to mine. In contrast, "Cowboy Funk" wastes no time telling us exactly what Spike thinks of Cowboy Andy. (He thinks he's a super chill guy, and he'd love to hang out because who wouldn't want to hang with Cowboy Andy??)

I'm not saying that I need the show to tell me what to feel at all times, but as these seem like the last two guest star of the week episodes of the whole run, I'm finally able to put my finger on why some of these episodes work better for me than others (though I don't think this show has had a bad episode yet). When the characters have an emotional point of view on that week's guest star, then the episodes tend to sing; when they don't, then the plots of these episodes can feel a little like busy work.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Jet and Meifa's investigation into her dad's disappearance is solidly plotted. Yet I struggle to remember its finer points shortly after watching, while "Cowboy Funk" has stuck with me in most particulars. That, of course, is the fate of all episodic shows like this, and it's kind of nice that Cowboy Bebop threw two perfect examples of both poles of episodic adventures as it wraps up this portion of itself.

See? I tied it to my overarching theories about the show, after all! We all knew I could do it! I just had to believe in myself!

‎Other thoughts I thought:

• I think one reason "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui" suffers a bit is because it's, like, the fourth "Jet has a mysterious partner he hasn't seen in a while return in some capacity" episode. At a certain point, that character device loses its juice. Early in the episode, when Jet and Meifa realized that he had gotten a note from her dad when she hadn't seen him for 10 years, the plot had some real momentum, but it got waylaid by the attempts to offer Jet an emotional reason to care that didn't feel strained.
• On the other hand, I'm glad Ein tried to eat the sunstone.
• I am willing to admit I might be more into this episode if I knew anything about feng shui. As it was, the episode's attempts to exposition dump left me feeling slightly behind the curve.
• "Cowboy Funk" was the last episode of Bebop to air in the U.S., delayed until February 2002 because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. You can see how the Teddy Bear Bomber's attacks on the enormous skyscrapers would make Adult Swim worry a bit about audience response.
• Another thing I love about "Cowboy Funk" is that it gets the Big Shot duo to comment on the action in a way that winks to just how unlikely this whole setup is as a plot device. (How on Earth is everyone in the solar system watching this seemingly live broadcast simultaneously? You know what? Never mind! I love it!)
• Andy taking over the next week on at the end is an entertaining touch. I like that I now know nothing about the next episode.
• "Cowboy Funk" rolling its eyes at how Andy's adventures are all a rich guy's affectations is very funny. It's also a pretty succinct encapsulation of the show's class politics: The rich can buy the good feelings they want. Those who think that's ridiculous are too often drowned out by applause.

On July 11: Wow! We're almost done! We're gonna spend more time with Faye in "Brain Scratch" and "Hard Luck Woman," so be prepared for me to write 5,000 words next time.