Cowboy Bebop: "Jamming With Edward" and "Ganymede Elegy"

(This is the fifth 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.)

• “Jamming With Edward” (originally aired May 1, 1998 [TV Tokyo], December 19, 1998 [Wowow] and October 1, 2001 [Adult Swim])
• “Ganymede Elegy” (originally aired May 8, 1998 [TV Tokyo], January 2, 1999 [Wowow] and October 1, 2001 [Adult Swim])

‎After eight episodes of Cowboy Bebop, I felt as though I knew almost nothing about Jet Black, beyond the fact that he and Spike were close. I knew that he flew the Bebop, and we had picked up some spare facts about him and his relationship to the other characters and the world along the way. But I felt like he was slightly elusive as a character, more a vibe than a person.

Then again, the deeper I get into this series, the more I realize "more a vibe than a person" describes almost all of the characters, and I'm starting to figure out that this approach to creating characters is a strength of this show. "Ganymede Elegy" is the first episode of the show to be "Jet-centric," as we might call it on a modern TV series, and it reveals a character whose overall vibe is consistent with the woundedness at his core. It's not an episode that explains everything about him (though it gives us a pretty hefty dose of back story). It's an episode that lets us see him in just different enough of a context to feel like we're getting to see the real him. But it also shows us how much of the version of who he is on the Bebop is the real him.

One thing I love about this show is how its characters are revealed mostly in sketches. There are no gigantic monologues where they explain their motivations, and even in "Ganymede Elegy," where Jet's ex provides us with some useful information about who he was before the Bebop, we're not getting an answer about who he is. We're just seeing another face of him.

Really, both of these episodes allow viewers to get a better understanding of the characters of Ed (whom we're just meeting) and Jet (who's been quietly biding his time in the background). These are my favorite kind of standalone episodes, too, because they use the case of the week to provide insight into characters we could maybe know better. But there's also never a singular moment when I feel like I "know" Jet better than I did before. I just have a better sense of him, and the more I learn, the more elusive he is. It's neat.

I hate to keep comparing this show to what it might look like in 2022 (and I do play to watch the Netflix 2021 series as the final installment of these recaps, before you ask). But so many similarly serialized shows have big moments when we learn everything about the characters via a tear-jerking monologue or something. To choose a roughly similar series to this one (and a rough contemporary of it), Firefly immediately lets you know just why Malcolm Reynolds is the way he is. (He lost the Civil War, more or less.) He's more complicated than his tragic back story, but that series foregrounds the tragic back story in a way that Bebop is reticent to do with any of its characters.

There's something very... American television about the idea that to truly understand a character, you have to know the single worst thing that ever happened to them, because that is the pain they are trying to outrun. What I like about Bebop is that we do have reasonable answers to "what is the worst thing to ever have happened to Spike and Jet?" at this point, and while both of their stories involve a true love who betrayed them in some fashion, the show gets away with leaning into this cliche because we never get the sense that they are solely defined by the worst things that happened to them. The bad things that happened to them still mark them, sure, but they have so many other facets to them. And by backloading the tragic back stories, the show lets us get to know these two at their best before we see their worst nightmares.

Anyway, let's talk about Radical Edward.

Ed and when gender is a binary just cuz

‎When Ed first popped up in "Jamming With Edward," I knew that she was going to be A Lot. Everybody had prepared me for that. What I wasn't aware of was that she would be A Lot in a way that mostly made sense and somehow wasn't so annoying as to make me want to stop watching. Ed is a grating character, but the show knows she's a grating character. It provides two key ways to inform us that it's on our side: the other Bebop crew members can't stand her, and it's always clear that some percentage of Ed's whole deal is an act.

I want to be clear that I am supposed to be an expert at TV stuff, and I have no idea how the show pulled this off. Ed should be Scrappy Doo. She should come in and annoy viewers so much that they turn off the television. And it's not like the show does something obvious like give Ed a big sob story. No, she's just an annoying kid who is, regrettably, one of the best hackers to ever have lived.

That choice is where Bebop succeeds in making Ed more than just a grating newbie. Ed is so good at what she does that we have to be a little bit impressed, no matter how grudgingly, and when she ends up on board the Bebop, it's because she hijacked the ship's flight plan and dragged it back to her. It's a neat way to give viewers who are impressed by Ed's competence and viewers who wish the Bebop would leave Ed far, far behind a nod. No matter how you feel about the character, the show wants you to know it agrees.

I think if I didn't know that Ed was joining the crew full-time, I might have thought she was another character along the lines of VT, who joins the show for an episode, takes over that episode, then doesn't recur. But about halfway through "Jamming," when it became clear Ed was the only person who had any idea what was going on, I like to think I would have realized that she would be joining the show full-time, simply because of how much effort the show was putting into making her pop, whether for good or ill.

And here we must return to Bebop's very '90s depiction of gender, because Ed, reportedly, was made a woman just to balance out the main crew, so Faye would have another girl on her side. But as with so many characters where this sort of gender flip happened, Ed feels like her gender is utterly immaterial to who she is as a person. That's fine! A lot of people are like that! It does strike me that if the team were making this show in 2022, they might decide to make Ed non-binary or agender or something else between the twin poles of "man" and "woman." Instead, Faye realizes she's a girl at the end, then says, "Oh, you're a girl? Weird," more or less, and that's that.

I want to be clear that I don't hold this against the show. There is simply no real way that in the late 1990s it was going to be able to get a story about the complexity of the gender spectrum onto television, at least not one that would be preachy and didactic. But it is something that strikes me every week as I watch the series. In the world of Cowboy Bebop, a couple of characters are highly gendered in their presentation (Faye, obviously, but also Jet, I would argue), but almost everybody else is somewhere in the middle of a vast, vaguely androgynous spectrum, even Spike. That's one of the things that feels most future-y about the show, because the rigors of gender would probably continue to break down as humanity races toward the future. But because it's rooted in a very '90s gender binary, it paradoxically ends up feeling outdated. It's like the show couldn't even really imagine some sort of weird sci-fi twist on a less rigorous gender binary to make more sense of its presentation of the characters and world. And that's too bad. Again: The show works, and I'm having a blast, and I'm amazed a character as gender-agnostic as Ed was on a TV show in 1998. But it's the one thing about the show that feels of its time in a way where I'm constantly saying, "Well, yeah, but at least they tried."

Anyway, my wife walked in as I was watching the final scene of "Ganymede Elegy" (when Jet confronts his ex, then throws the watch-thing into the sea), and I said, "This show is so fucking good." And even though I am so super sick, you guys, I wanted to get this recap out there because I enjoy this show so very much. I'm really looking forward to where the story is going to go, now that we've started to dig into its meat.

‎Other thoughts I thought:

• I tried to double check everything I said in this article against the invaluable Cowboy Bebop wiki, because, again, my brain is way too sick today. I apologize for any errors I made in my delirium.
• The look of these episodes is really something else. I especially love the fishing village feel of Ganymede and the "just taking a stroll through cyberspace" visuals of Ed's hacks.
• "Faye ends up having to wander out into a highly dangerous situation as, basically, the bait" is a story beat that shouldn't work as well as it does, but I'm into it every time. That final sequence in "Jamming," with the lasers flying all around our heroes, was pretty fantastic.
• I also liked that the satellite's rationale for everything it did was that it missed looking at the Nazca lines. Sure!
• "Earth is a shitty hellhole, with disaster imminent at every moment" is an old sci-fi trope, but I like how this show ups the ante by throwing some moon chunks in there. Why not!
• I swear there are a billion A-Team episodes that involve a member of the team reconnecting with an ex, only to realize... her new boyfriend is the guy they've been sent to track down!!!! Whatever. It works.
• I like how many of these episodes open in the aftermath of other adventures we don't get to see. It lends a credibility to the world that goes a long way.

Next time: We're going to try to keep the "Jupiter Jazz" two-parter (which is episodes 12 and 13) as one thing, so we'll tackle episode 11 ("Toys in the Attic") and episode 14 ("Bohemian Rhapsody"). Twitter assures me I won't get too lost.