1x24 Hard Luck Woman

[7.7/10] What must it be like to understand deep within your soul, that everything you once knew is gone? I love science fiction because it allows us to get at these ideas sideways. If you live long enough, you see things change, people change, and probably mourn a little for what’s lost. Faye’s story puts that notion into relief through someone having been cryogenically frozen and returning to what used to be their home, only to find it a vacant shell of the vibrant ecosystem they once knew.

There is supreme melancholy in that. It’s the most I’eve ever liked a Faye story. He’s trying to hunt down the images and locations from the video of her childhood found a few episodes back,a nd it leads her to earth, to an old classmate, and to the empty husk of her town, one presumably devastated in the gate accident.

There’s no exposition about this. Faye never even talks about how she feels. We just get the rush of images, the truth about the spaceship accident that resulted in her freezing, the expressions of someone remembering something terrible and not being able to go home. I never sat with too much baited breath waiting to find out what really happened to Faye. The details about her freezing were enough. But this adds a sorrowful edge to the whole thing, of someone who had an idyllic life they never got to live, thrust into this more hardscrabble life, and literally and figuratively unable to return home. The way it’s presented and styled is beautiful, and the thematic balance between Faye constantly running away while also being secretly desperate to find a place of belonging is piercing.

I am, not surprisingly, a bit colder on the Ed storyline. I've made no secret of not really caring for Ed, and I don’t know that I ever really needed to know Ed’s backstory. She’s a weirdo hacker who hooked up with the Bebop crew. Good enough for me. But it’s interesting to learn a little more detail there -- that Ed’s kind of an orphan, or was at least raised in an orphanage for several years before she found our heroes.

I don’t know what to make of Ed’s father. He’s a deadbeat, someone who bails on his daughter at a moment’s notice and apparently can’t even remember her gender. But he’s also excited to see her and came looking for her? I guess the implication is that he’s just as scatterbrained a savant as Ed is, which might mean he’s not a great parent, but doesn’t detract from his affections for his daughter? The whole thing is weird.

But it's also kind of sad. Ed never really wants much beyond basic desires like sustenance and entertainment, so to see her internalize Faye’s advice, and search for a sense of belonging via her father, is a softly heartrending development. It’s all the same happy go lucky freewhiling vibe that Ed usually has. But again, the music and beautiful sunset imagery give this a more epic feel, and it’s quite wholesome to see Ein go off with her. (I guess we’re neve going to get any payoff to him being a special genetically engineered code dog?)

So we’re back where we started. Spike and Jet are eating Faye and Ed’s portions of their egg dinner. We’ve already seen Faye in the preview for the next episode, so it can’t be that permanent. But there is a sense of Cowboy Bebop tidying up as it heads into its last two episodes, sending both of its female characters off to find what they’ve been looking for. That too comes with a certain melancholy, as the farewell vibe of this whole half our lodges in your brain and refuses to let up.