1x20 Pierrot Le Fou

[8.4/10] Holy cow, I loved this! I mean this in the best way. “Pierrot Le Fou” felt like an episode of Batman: The Animated Series. Pierrot himself scans a cross between The Penguin and The Joker, with his bulbous body, walking stick weapon, maniacal laugh, and penchant for the theatrical. He is creepy and captivating in all the right ways.

Just the way he moves is kind of incredible. He floats on air. He balances like ballet and unleashes a hail of bullets. His rictus grin startles you. He moves with an impossible gravity and swims and swirls in time with Spike. This may be the high water mark for Cowboy Bebop’s animation, which is saying something.

His backstory is just as startling. At first, he just seems like a standard issue madman, albeit one who is the perfect assassin. But watching him experimented on by the same folks who seems to have experimented on Spike gives him a sense of tragedy and pathos. This was an innocent person turned into a monster, who’s reverted to a childlike mental state, but still has the inclination for revenge on his abusers and, poetically, thanks to them, the skills to pull it off. Making him a tragic figure, despite the awe-inspiring threat he imposes, is a canny choice.

The final confrontation in a theme park only adds to the momentousness and crepe factor of the whole thing. Again, I’ reminder of The Killing oke and other momentous Joker stories tht pay in similar terms. The degraded audio of the circus music, the creepy animatronic figures, and the neon flights illuminating this final battle between two deadly but unusual warriors is so engrossing that you cannot look away. The fact that Pieree is felled not by some daring bit of contortion and strike from SPike, but rather from a simple wound that reverts him to a crying chid once more, adds to the poetry and sadness of this man’s incredible but snakebitten existence.

Overall, another high water mark for the series, with its most memorable one-off character to date, and a surfeit of brilliant animation for fans of the medium.