1x26 The Real Folk Blues (2)

[7.0/10] I don’t know what to make of this finale. I don’t think I fully understand it. It plays like the sort of thing I’d need to watch multiple times, probably in the context of a rewatch of the whole series, to fully appreciate. It is more meditative than narrative, more about mood than about explanation. I can admire that, even if I struggle to connect with it.

In truth, I’m still just not that invested in Spike. Maybe it’s simply that, in the long years since 1998, we’ve had a raft of dry cool antiheroes, to where he’s not so novel anymore. The freewheeling guy with a dark and mysterious past is an old trope now. So the revival that Julia didn’t betray him but rather spared him when she could have killed him to save her own skin is cool, sure, but doesn’t do much to move me either.

And yet, I’m drawn to what I would consider the bigger idea at play here. Regardless of what it is, Spike has been “carrying that weight” of Julia’s disappearance. Whoever and whatever he is, he loved her. Whatever the lackadaisical life he's been living, drifting through the stars with Jet and Faye and Ed and Ein he’s been quietly searching for the person who gave his life meaning, who pulled him out of that stupor. I can relate to that, even if I’m not invested in a relationship we’ve only seen wisps of.

When she dies, shot at the hands of this senseless coup, there is beauty in the moment. I can’t pretend to care much about Julia. She is more of an object of obsession than a character considering what a phantom she’s been. But the imagery of her falling forward in slow motion, with the birds flying in behind her, has a symbolic resonance I can’t quite put my finger on.

The same goes for Spike’s fable about the striped cat. The easy conclusion is that he’s talking about himself. He is seemingly incapable of death, an irony considering at some moment he seemed to yearn for it. But for better or worse, something about Julia pierced him, made him vulnerable, to where like the cat in his story, once she dies, he can die too.

To have him and Vicious square off and take each other out is poetic. The scene has the major action in the piece: a duel of sword versus handgun that comes with more ballet and elegance than it has any right to. The fight feels like a fait accompli, two men doing a dance knowing how it must end. They are warring with one another, but there’s the sense that for each, to kill the other is to grant absolution, to receive death a relief. It’s hard to say. This finale is so vague and opaque that you could ascribe any number of meanings to it, but it’s the one that stood out to me.

In truth, some of that comes down to the dialogue. It’s weird, because while there’s lyrical sections of Cowboy Bebop, there’s a semi-casual vibe to much of it, with matter of fact responses to fantastical events. It’s a bit odd, then, when the whole cast (sans Ed, of course) seems to be talking in riddles and fables and purple prose. The characters cease to seem ike real people and start to seem like machines built to dispense flowery words with philosophical and spiritual import to one another. It’s a choice, one plenty of shows make, but one which puts me at a distance from Spike and the rest of the Bebop crew, rather than closer to them.

There is something to Jet making Spike a meal one last time before he goes. There is also something to Faye asking him to stay in her own slanted way, a recognition that as shaggy as their path as bid, they’ve all found a place to belong here. But the stars have spoken and SPike’s time is now, to let his light fade out and end something dreadful before it starts, to let his work be done and have him eclipse this world of dross at long last.

For a minute, I thought this was an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge situation. With all the “It was all a dream” talk, I’m still not convinced the show’s intention wasn’t at least to kick that sort of dust into the air. (Again, you can see the influence on everything from The Matrix to Kingdom Hearts.) But whether it’s literal or figurative, there’s something to the idea that all of Spike’s adventures from after his assassination attempt, from after he lost Julia, were a reverie, and it took him finally “waking up” to find an end he can be satisfied with.

I still don’t really get Cowboy Bebop. I chose it because it’s so revered, but in hindsight, maybe it was a bad call to pick something so lionized as my first real anime to watch. There’s a grammar and a shorthand to storytelling on television that’s naturally going to vary from culture to culture. I can’t help but feel like there’s been signifiers and understandings that have slipped past me along the way. Often his show feels random, aimless, even slight to me in how it delivers its tales.

But I do appreciate the artistry of it, particularly on the visual side. And I do appreciate that, whatever its flaws, it’s a very spiritual show, one concerned about the mood it’s evoking with its characters, even if the characters themselves often feel miscalibrated or more surface-level than layered. For all my struggles to warm to it, I can’t pretend that every fourth episode or so didn’t do something poignant to keep me coming back. Hell, despite my misgivings about this finale, I can’t pretend that Yoko Kamma’s “Blue” playing over the finale, as we pan to the heavens for a star extinguished, didn’t get to me.

What can I say? See you, space cowboy.