1x11 My Funny Valentine

[7.2/10] I am downright torn on this episode. On the one hand, I love the flashback we get to Faye’s past. It helps fill in the character, make her more than a scantily-clad irritant for the characters whom the show takes more seriously.. Instead it turns her into a sympathetic and tragic figure. But the moments in the present are way too convenient and ridiculous to work as payoff for the good work the episode does in establishing where Faye came from before she met the Bebop crew.

I find her past fascinating, though. Cowboy Bebop often has film noir vibes to it when it’s not going for a Western flair. There’s something about a woman who has no idea what her past is, struggling to relearn the world and make her way under a system that seems stacked against her, that aligns with that general vibe. The idea that she has a history, one she’s ignorant of, that leaves her as a fish out of water in the modern world of 2068, gives her pathos in a way the show hasn't done much of so far.

(As an aside, is stress the first time the series has given us a firm date for the series’s setting? 2068 isn’t that far in the future from our humble present, but would feel a long way from 1998.)

At the same time though, I like the fact that she's instantly saddled with debt from the moment she’s unfrozen. She is a genuine victim here, having been, so far as we know, both frozen and unfrozen without her consent. Despite that, she’s made to pay regardless of the fact that she never agreed to any of this. The sense of an impossible debt burden hanging over her, at the same time she’s struggling just to get back on her feet after a trauma and the bewildering passage of time, has a sad resonance twenty-five years after the episode aired. Real life people labor under medical debts when they’re forced to choose between their health and their pocketbooks.

Along the way, the idea that she becomes involved with a lawyer helping her navigate the insurance implications, who himself is killed when trying to evade debt collectors, adds another layer of tragedy to the whole thing. The one handler who seemed to treat her like a real person, who ostensibly genuinely fell in love with his “sleeping beauty” as he helped guide her into the new era, is another victim of the same crime. The fact that he leaves her an “inheritance” of more debt is the grim, bitterly ironic coda to the whole thing.

And if Cowboy Bebop left it at that, I think I’d be pretty happy with this one. It tells a tidy story about love and loss under unfathomable conditions, adding a depth to Faye and her experiences that's been all too scant in the series to date.

But then we jump to the present and what do you know? Right after Faye tels this story to Ein, Whitney, the insurance lawyer she had her dalliance with, pops up on the Bebop as Jet’s latest bounty. And if that weren’t enough, the doctor and nurse who revived and scammed her are on the lookout for him too.

What the hell? I didn't mind a little convenience or contrivance along the way toward willing suspension of disbelief. But unless you want to claim “Will of the Force” or something, this development strains credulity.

Nevermind the ridiculous directions this one takes. Whitney apparently got a “faa implant” for reasons that elude me. The doctor and the nurse continue to be exaggerated, ridiculous, unfunny characters who are hard to take seriously within this morality play. And we barely have time to explore the character implications of Faye’s lost love returning from the “dead’ and having lied to her because we have to have a pretty standard dogfight in space and deal with a pack of cops hunting the same folks down as our heroes.

There’s something to be said for Faye finding out at least a little more about her own past. The detail that she was cryogenically frozen after the infamous gate explosion that left that would-be young child stuck that way is tantalizing. We’ve gotten plenty of these little tidbits that gestures toward something bigger going on with the gates. I’m interested to see what it is. And I'm interested to see Faye acknowledge this big blank space where her personal history should be.

But the second half of this one is just shoot-em-ups and shouting,without the more lived-in personal storytelling that elevated the first half of “My Funny Valentine” and the character who gives the episode its name.

Overall, this is an essential part of Cowboy Bebop, if only for how it fleshes out Faye through the personal history she's kept hidden, much of which remains shrouded in darkness. But the episode fumbles the ball as it races toward the end zone.