(Shin is probably the weirdest part of the episode. ![]() But in this case they only manage to escape thanks to a surprise assist from Shin, an old syndicate buddy of Spike’s. Really, Spike would probably have handled it without Jet’s help. This isn’t exactly a callback to the cigarette-lighting scene from “Toys in the Attic,” but it’s sort of ringing the changes on the same joke, right?Įarlier on in the series, Spike and Jet would have fought their own way out of this. Oh, it’s a very special episode this time, folks. Just before things threaten to get too real, mafia goons come crashing through the door guns-a-blazing, and Jet catches a round to the leg just to make it clear that our heroes are no longer bulletproof. So Jet puts on a big show of being happy that Faye is gone, and Spike grimly sucks down his hooch in silence. (You will remember of course that the last episode ended with Faye, Ed, and Ein all leaving the BeBop, and Spike and Jet grimly choking down a basket full of hard boiled eggs.) Neither of them are talking about their emotions of course - they are, after all, Men. And since his ex-friend Gren has already run up the flag and joined the sax quartet invisible, this basically just means Spike… and the mysterious Julia.Īfter this little preamble, we catch up with Spike and Jet in a dive bar, engaged in the traditional dive bar activity of drinking away their loneliness. The syndicate, operating on the principal of guilt by association, sends a raft of goons to kill anyone who ever had any close ties to Vicious. Because really, there’s no percentage in it.)Īnyway, Vicious’s failure has catastrophic consequences for our heroes. I’m tempted to use it to start an Evil Henchmen’s List modeled after the Overlord List, except that every entry in the list after “#1 – I will not empty my full clip at any character who has dialogue,” would just be “I Will Not Hench” written over and over again. What are you gaining by emptying your entire clip? (This last may be the stupidest action taken by any character in the entire run of the series, which is saying a lot. They’re decrepit geezers, so withered and dried out that they can hardly stand. If Vicious’ men weren’t going to look before they started shooting, or while they were shooting, couldn’t they at least have looked around the room after they finished shooting? And remember, the elders aren’t cape buffalo. Why be in the room when that $#!& goes down? Why not be across town? Why not be in the next room over? If you really need to see the expression on his face, why not be twenty feet above the kill zone AND behind a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass? Let’s accept for the moment that they couldn’t seize Vicious and his men before the coup attempt got off the ground. Vicious’ creepy bosses had anticipated his coup attempt, and saved themselves by the fiendish and Machiavellian stratagem of… sitting up on a balcony about twenty feet above their old seats. ![]() We see his thugs burst into a richly appointed room and empty their machine gun clips into what turns out to be empty space. (It’s also effective because the characters we really care about are similarly out of the loop.)Īnyway, Vicious’s plot seems to fail at first. Was that the start of his power play? In his second appearance, he seemed to be a loyal(ish) enforcer for the three unnamed old coots then running the syndicate… was he working on their orders when he killed Mao? Or did he manage to keep his killing of Mao a secret? We never get to know, and although that’s a curious storytelling choice, it’s quite in line with the way that Cowboy Bebop usually handles character motivations. In his first appearance, Vicious assassinated the Red Dragon capo, Mao Yenrai. One gets the impression that this has been a long time coming. The instigating event that kicks off the action is that Vicious - we all remember Vicious, right? - stages a coup to take over the Red Dragon crime syndicate. Not an awful lot actually happens, and the things that do happen are sometimes hard to fit together. ![]() ![]() Sessions 25) and 26), The Real Folk Blues. Part of the reason that I was so late with this post is that whenever I sat down to write about these final episodes I’d begin by trying to summarize the plot, and that turns out to be difficult to do in any elegant way. The entire original run of Cowboy Bebop only took two years-probably the whole production cycle was less than four. So I will understand if you need to take a minute to remind yourself about who these characters are and what I think about them. The most recent was in January, 2011, nearly 4 years ago. The first post in this series came out in November, 2009.
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