Cowboy Bebop: "Brain Scratch" and "Hard Luck Woman"

(This is the 12th 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.)

• “Brain Scratch” (originally aired April 3, 1999 [Wowow], and November 12, 2001 [Adult Swim])
• “Hard Luck Woman” (originally aired April 10, 1999 [Wowow] and November 19, 2002 [Adult Swim])

‎In my time working as a TV critic, attitudes have shifted ever so slightly in favor of shows that "go hard" or "take no prisoners" or insert your favorite euphemism here. When the most recent season of Stranger Things concluded in a way that seemed to suggest a certain degree of sentimentality on the part of its creators, the Duffer Brothers, the Duffers said that their show took place in "Hawkins, not Westeros."

Here's the thing, though: The person leveling that criticism against Stranger Things wasn't some random critic. It was Millie Bobby Brown, one of the main stars of the series.

I agree with Brown more than the Duffers in this specific instance, but I also think they're both missing the point a little bit. What I think we want out of our TV shows right now are series that take big, gutsy risks. And we've come to associate "risk-taking" with "willingness to be brutal" when brutality is about the least risky thing you can offer right now. Yet "here is a show about people who treat each other with kindness" is similarly risk-avoidant. I am not saying "brutal" and "kind" are lousy storytelling strategies, but they miss the mark when it comes to telling TV stories that cut deep.

Anyway, these two episodes of Cowboy Bebop are great examples of what I mean.

I'm talking more about "Hard Luck Woman" than "Brain Scratch," but both episodes prove my point to some degree. "Brain Scratch" is a bitter, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you episode about the dark underbelly of television, the medium that gives Cowboy Bebop its home. Then, at the last possible moment, it swerves into something sentimental and slightly cloying. Yet that ending is also fundamentally optimistic — maybe television can be home to bigger, sweeter dreams than it has been. Maybe there is room for something lighter and more hopeful. And if there's not, well, at least there's room for formal daring.

(Sidebar: I briefly thought "Brain Scratch" would be told entirely via changing channels, an idea so brilliant I couldn't believe every other TV show hadn't done a variation on it. The episode eventually showed why that idea was likely impossible to pull off. Once Faye entered the narrative, it needed a way to pull the other characters in. But for a while there, I thought it would be something unlike anything else I'd seen. Instead, I ultimately found "Brain Scratch" decent, if a bit over-ambitious.)

"Hard Luck Woman," though... "Hard Luck Woman" is some television.

It is undoubtedly no secret by now that Faye Valentine has become a significant character to me. Her combination of barely processed trauma, line deliveries that blithely glide over that trauma, and hyper-sexuality feels to me like one of the more accurate portrayals of a certain kind of CPTSD ever seen on television. And what makes the character work is that the show needs you to spend a few episodes assuming she is around as eye candy meant to offer the TV equivalent of looking down a woman's shirt.

Depending on how you feel about eye candy, the show might be digging a very deep hole that it has to find its way out of. And yet when I look for the "Faye is a misogynist character!!!!" blog posts, they are few and far between. Bebop seems to pull off something absurdly complicated with Faye for the vast majority of the show's viewers. (And if you aren't turned off by eye candy that could be read as exploitative of women, well, I hope that Faye's ultimate character depths worked for you too!)

I also know enough about how TV is constructed to completely fall for the trap this episode sets for me. Since the final two episodes make up the two-part finale — which will surely be primarily about the ballad of Spike, Julia, and Vicious — the fact that Faye goes after the final secrets about her past made me think this episode would be all about that or at least primarily about that. Instead, it's about a mystery the show has barely bothered to nod to, a mystery hiding in plain sight: What's up with Ed anyway?

The audience must know that Ed wandering around the wasteland without a parent or guardian caring for her implicitly suggests a handful of questions about just why she's doing that. But the show so skillfully suggests that the crew of the Bebop has become her parents that you don't think about it after her first couple of appearances. She's just part of the crew, with Spike and Jet as her two dads and Faye as her parentified big sister. Plus, TV shows routinely argue that people who work together form an ad hoc family. It's one of the key underpinnings of the space opera TV subgenre. Every Star Trek show is about how the starship crew creates an emotional unit greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, we are not primed to be thinking about whether Ed will find her "real" family because the show has successfully built the case for her real family being onscreen.

‎When Ed's dad turned up, I was half-expecting something akin to how Avatar: The Last Airbender handles Katara and Sokka's father. He's an important character, but he's not central to the siblings' lives like you'd expect a parent of two teenagers to be. That expectation was thwarted. When Ed's dad shows up, even though he seemingly can't remember her gender (big trans mood), she decides to head off with him. He's been looking for her, after all, and blood ties mean something even in a world where the moon broke into a million pieces.

Yet Ed isn't running off to join a nuclear family unit already in progress. Her dad is an explorer, too, and he's not tied down to any one place or structure. Her experiences on the Bebop haven't made her grow in such a way that she realizes she doesn't need him in her life all the time. No, they've turned her into the kind of person who can have him in her life all the time. He lives a fundamentally nomadic existence, and now she can too.

AND THEN SHE TAKES EIN WITH HER?????? SOB EMOJI.

In the process of watching "Brain Scratch," which features what appears to be a Star of David in a couple of shots, I started googling how Bebop has been interpreted via the lens of Judaism. I was surprised to learn that Spike is seen by many anime fans as one of the few characters in the entirety of anime to be coded as a Jewish person. When I thought about it for five seconds, that reading made sense to me, though it was one that I, a non-Jewish person, would have ever picked up on without the nudge.

Yet just knowing that reading exists made me think about one of my favorite things to do: boiling a show down to one word. Here's how I described this exercise in the pages of Vox in 2019:

I think it’s possible with all TV shows to boil them down to a single word that encapsulates their fundamental ideas about the world. (This idea did not originate with me; I first heard it from the writer Alex Epstein.) In my mind, The Sopranos is about family. Game of Thrones is about power. You might have a different one-word label for either show, but the point is: The best TV shows usually have one central theme they keep ruminating on over and over, putting different spins on it the longer they run.

"Hard Luck Woman" makes clear to me that Cowboy Bebop's core theme is "diaspora." The series takes place in a world where unimaginable tragedy shattered humanity's homeworld, even as we spread out to colonize our solar system, our ingenuity pushing us ever further outward. And yet, as the show goes on, conventional family structures, established settlements, and consistent day jobs are all deemphasized in favor of families of choice, nomadic existence, and jobs full of feast and famine. There surely are plenty of people with established, settled lives in the world of Bebop, but they necessarily have a tragedy that drove them from their homes somewhere in their past. They are defined by their need to keep exploring.

I do not think Bebop intends to tell a metaphorical story about the Jewish diaspora in a sci-fi setting. It is intrinsic to the show's backstory that it would have to dig into what happens when an entire species finds itself outrunning calamity. But I think its fascination with characters who cannot return home because home has been shattered plays into why fans of the show have often read Spike as a Jewish person.

And that, at last, brings me back to Faye, who remembers about as much as she's going to remember about her past. There was a shuttle crash. She was the only girl to survive. She returns home to where she grew up, but it's literally no longer there. As night falls, she goes to sleep among the ruins, drawing herself a rectangle in the dirt that will take the shape of a bedroom. That's where we leave her as the episode concludes. Where Ed finds new freedom in finding her family, Faye finds only further pain in exploring her past. But where Ed's story seems to be complete, Faye is in the "next week on," so I know she'll be back.

It's core to the space opera TV genre — and the workplace TV show more broadly — that having a life of adventure out in the wild blue yonder with your chosen family is one of the most wonderful things a person could wish for. And I get that impulse. I want to fly off into space with my very best friends and get up to all sorts of wild adventures. For most of its episodes, Cowboy Bebop allows viewers to indulge in that fantasy. Who wouldn't want to be Spike, Jet, or Faye, wandering the solar system and narrowly escaping danger?

But the fantasy of this story ignores how families of choice are rarely bound together so tightly that they can't unravel. Most of them are inherently transitory. Yes, you will find some people who are part of your family forever, but most friends you make will pass through your life briefly, then leave it behind. The space opera story offers the ingenious notion of a world where your home can travel anywhere in the known universe, bringing all your nearest and dearest with you. But at a certain point, that might not be enough. At a certain point, you might want to have something more solid beneath you. And what happens when all you can find are ashes?

‎Other thoughts I thought:

• It's very funny to me that while Ed and Faye are having these vast existential climaxes, Jet and Spike are just... eating a bunch of eggs. They're metaphorically significant eggs, but.
• "Call Me Call Me" (the song that plays over the closing montage of "Hard Luck Woman") isn't on Spotify like much of the other music from the series, but you can find it on YouTube here. It has a very specific "driving in the middle of the night in 1998, and there's a Goo Goo Dolls song on the radio" vibe.
• My wife has not been watching this show with me, but when I told her that Ein had left the Bebop, she was infuriated, even when I tried to explain that he had left with his best friend, Ed. "No," Libby said. "I'm his best friend."
• I accidentally spoiled myself that SPOILERS FOLLOW this is, indeed, Ed and Ein's last appearance on the series. (They're in the movie, which is apparently set between "Cowboy Funk" and "Brain Scratch," so there you go.) I'm impressed that the show doesn't contrive a reason to shove them into the finale. Their story is over, and we don't need to check on them again.
• Weirdly enough, the most trans thing in these two episodes isn't Ed's dad forgetting her gender. It's the fact that the "villain" of "Brain Scratch" turns out to be a boy in a coma who creates a strange being of thought energy because his body is a shell and his brain is the only part of him that's real.
• Until I saw the end of "Hard Luck Woman," I was pretty sure I knew what this article would be about. I wanted to talk about how Cowboy Bebop, despite running just 26 episodes, has an example of almost every single episode you'd find in a much longer-running show reaching its ending. These episode types include the playful subversion ("Cowboy Funk") and the "TV SUCKS, BUT WE GET TO MAKE IT WHATEVER" episode ("Brain Scratch"). Anyway, maybe I will write that next time, but I hope the finale gives me more to chew on.
• An interesting thing I'm tracking on heading into the finale: Spike and Faye's arcs are very much up in the air, but Jet's story seems kinda resolved. Maybe I've missed something obvious, but I'm interested to see how the finale pays his story off.

Next time: Join me on July 25 when it's time to talk the two-part finale. (That article may be a day or two late, as I'm traveling that weekend. But I will get it up before the 27th!)