Cowboy Bebop: "Toys in the Attic" and "Bohemian Rhapsody"

(This is the sixth 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.)

• “Toys in the Attic” (originally aired May 15, 1998 [TV Tokyo], January 9, 1999 [Wowow] and October 8, 2001 [Adult Swim])
• “Bohemian Rhapsody” (originally aired June 5, 1998 [TV Tokyo], January 30, 1999 [Wowow] and October 15, 2001 [Adult Swim])

(Reminder: We're skipping over the "Jupiter Jazz" two-parter until next time.)

‎Here's a fairly consistent method I could use to judge TV shows: How often do they make me feel the opposite of what I would expect?

I love a tonal mishmash. I love comedies that are deeply sad, and I love tragedies with big laughs. I saw the famously all-over-the-place 1984 "rock and roll fable" Streets of Fire tonight, and I adored it. I'm not sure it makes a lick of sense, but it doesn't have to. I just want to watch things that feel like they're trying to be absolutely everything all at the same time.

That intro is a long-winded way of saying: Cowboy Bebop is really funny, and that's an under-appreciated reason for why it's so good. Neither "Toys in the Attic" nor "Bohemian Rhapsody" is among my favorite episodes of the show so far (though "Toys" comes really, really close), but both made me grin and even guffaw at multiple points throughout their running time.

As with most episodes of the show, "Toys" and "Rhapsody" are beholden to their influences, but in a cheeky fashion. "Toys" frequently lifts plot points and elements from Alien in bald-faced fashion, but it's never pretending to do anything but imitate as the sincerest form of flattery. "Rhapsody" is less heavily indebted to prior stories, but I did really feel like Chessmaster Hex looked like the cover guy from the Chessmaster games, so I'm just taking that to be a direct homage.

There have been plenty of sci-fi shows that have ripped off Alien or 2001: A Space Odyssey over the years and annoyed me. That Bebop doesn't annoy me is tribute, I think, to how much fun it's having with its references. When Spike is stalking around the Bebop with a radar detector and a flamethrower, the show is using the trappings of Alien to tell its own story, which is a very odd blend of comedic and horrific elements. Because Bebop makes its homage so pointed, that makes the moments when, say, Ed eats the last remnants of the mysterious creature all the funnier.

Bebop manages to create stories where the stakes are appropriately serious — you really do buy that the Bebop crew could die from fridge monster poisoning — but also deeply fun. The show takes itself just seriously enough, and it realizes that its level of drama fluctuates from episode to episode. But even when it's embarking upon a much more grave episode (like "Ballad of Fallen Angels"), the show leavens that gravity with humor, action, and character interactions.

It is not a particularly new observation that even the darkest and most dour of shows needs spikes of humor here and there, but it's one that plenty of TV shows set in rundown, dystopian futures forget. (Yes, I would argue this show takes place in a dystopian future.) Human beings are never just one thing, and shows like Cowboy Bebop understand that fact. Even in a world where the Earth is in ruins, the moon no longer exists, and capitalism has become even more unbound from the needs of people than it already was, people will still be making each other laugh and producing extremely strange sketch comedy news programs about bounty hunters.

‎"Bohemian Rhapsody" is my less favorite of this week's two episodes, but its approach to storytelling is a great example of the show's commitment to making everything it does just a little bit more entertaining and fun than it has to be. Just on an objective level, Chessmaster Hex's ultimate scheme requires you to suspend so much disbelief that, for me, it all became just a little too much to bear. Elaborate criminal schemes that unfold across decades are a lot of fun, but they feel just a bit beyond the world of Bebop, which tends to have more immediate dramatic stakes. It's a weird world, but a world where everything kind of happens right in your face.

And yet the way the scheme unfolds, with the many different chess pieces and Ed figuring out how to play Chessmaster Hex and Hex feeling such delight at having a new opponent, is just so dang fun that I feel churlish complaining about what are fairly substantial issues with the episode's premise. Even the climactic assault on the Chessmaster's compound is visually arresting and full of great action beats. Also: Chessmaster Hex has a parrot, and everybody needs a parrot!

I guess what I'm saying is that Bebop is the rare show that can get the big stuff (the premise of an episode) wrong because it so consistently knocks the small stuff out of the park. The show's cool, jazzy style and its willingness to bend and twist its stories in unexpected directions buys it so much latitude from me, so when an episode doesn't get 100 percent buy-in from me, it almost doesn't matter. I'm perfectly happy to hang with the Bebop crew and see what nonsense they get up to.

In fact, I'd wager that's why I enjoyed "Toys in the Attic" so much. Again, it feels cobbled together from bits and pieces of other sci-fi stories, especially Alien and (ultimately) 2001, but it zeroes in on key dynamics among the five beings on board the Bebop in a way that feels very satisfying. As Jet, Faye, and Ein fall prey to the poisonous creature and Spike goes off in search of it, with Ed's fate unknown, the episode finds a way to show us who these characters are between missions, even though the episode technically takes the shape of a mission, just one that immediately affects our characters rather than some guest stars they've bumped into.

Plus, the episode manages to keep the tension going, even when it becomes clear that the ultimate culprit is... uh... food that's gone bad in the refrigerator. (Honestly, this is hilarious.) When Spike has to jettison the fridge out into space, then gets bit by the creature and very nearly slides out the airlock doors, it's somehow extremely funny and extremely suspenseful all at once, a mix that is much harder to pull off than it seems to be.

I watched Evil Dead II with some friends over the weekend, shortly after I watched these episodes, and I was surprised at how similar the two properties' storytelling philosophies seem to be. Cowboy Bebop isn't maniacally mashing up horror movie tropes with Looney Tunes and Three Stooges energy, but it's trying similarly wild and fascinating things. "Toys in the Attic" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" both have the feel of a show that is just starting to figure out everything it can do throwing absolutely every idea it has at the wall. And along the way, it wants to make sure we're having the best fucking time in every possible way.

And I am having the best fucking time, even when the episodes don't really work. This is a gloriously fun show, and that's a key reason why it's such a good show, too.

‎Other thoughts I thought:

• One thing I didn't think quite worked in "Toys in the Attic" was the "life lessons" framing device, although it was maybe all worth it for concluding on Spike's admonition that it's important to clean out the fridge.
• My favorite episode of Firefly was always "Out of Gas," and "Toys in the Attic" seems like a much snarkier, sillier version of that episode, in a way that I find very appealing.
• The "next week on" preview at the end of "Toys" is hilarious. Hearing Ed say that everybody else is dead, and now the show is about her, is precisely the kind of energy I want from my TV shows.
• The cat floating around in zero gravity in "Bohemian Rhapsody" reminded me that cats really hate being in zero gravity.
• I would absolutely watch a remake of The Queen's Gambit with Ed working her way through the interstellar chessmasters.
• One nice thing about the show's episodic nature is that I never once felt like I was missing any important information for having skipped over "Jupiter Jazz." I'm sure that if I had watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" immediately following the two-parter, some subtleties would have been more clear to me, but I didn't feel lost in the story or anything.
• Sam Raimi should have made the American remake of Cowboy Bebop if there needed to be a remake. (There didn't need to be one.) This is my truth.

Next time: Guess what! We're gonna make time for some "JUPITER JAZZ"!! Coming to your email on April 18!