Cowboy Bebop is the recent live-action Netflix remake of the eternally popular anime series of the same name. As such, it has a lot to live up to. Whether or not it accomplished this massive goal is not for me to say in this article; I am merely here to explain the somewhat complex ending of the first season of the show for those who may be a bit confused by all the strands woven together in the finale. Each member of the futuristic bounty-hunting Bebop team, Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), have their own agendas and demons to face down by the end credits, so things get a little messy. Add to that the characters’ tattered pasts, love interests, and enemies, and you’ve got a finale that has a lot of loose ends to tie up. But hey, that’s what we’re here for. Let’s dive in and descramble this caravan of Cowboy occurrences together.
Fearless, Vicious, and Julia: A Love Triangle
The backstory between Spike (who was named Fearless when he worked for the evil Syndicate), Vicious (Alex Hassell), and Julia (Elena Satine) is really the backbone of the proceedings leading up to the season finale. Spike is partners in crime with Vicious, and the two did terrible, violent things for the Syndicate during their time together. But Fearless had an eye for Julia, Vicious’s beautiful, blonde, singer girlfriend. When the two screw up dealings with the Venusian cartel, and Vicious finds one of them on the street and begins to torture him, he asks Fearless to take Julia home. He doesn’t ask him to sleep with her, but Fearless takes the initiative anyway. Of course, after a couple of hours in the sack together, Fearless and Julia are head over heels for each other.
Vicious’s dad (John Noble) wants his son dead because of the war he may have started with Venus, but Fearless takes it upon himself to wipe out the entire cartel rather than kill his best friend. But this isn’t enough to make up for Fearless’s indiscretion with Julia, so Vicious brings a team to take out his buddy. Fearless winds up shot and swimming with the fishes for his sins, although he does not die, obviously. Instead, he takes on the identity of Spike Spiegel and winds up a cowboy alongside Jet Black.
The Family Jilting of Jet Black
Jet’s past is not so much his fault, but that doesn't mean it isn't as tragic as Spike’s. He was a cop and a family man with a wife and daughter. Trying to bust a dirty colleague, he winds up getting shot by him instead. Worse, he is framed and sent to prison for a number of years. This obviously causes a rift in his family, which leaves room for the very cop he thought was the original culprit to move in on his wife and become stepfather to his daughter. While Jet, as the cowboy he becomes, eventually does find the real villain, it isn’t the man who took his place in his homestead. So things remain quite strained within the family unit. They only go from bad to worse when Jet’s daughter, Kimmie (Tamara Tunie), gets kidnapped by Vicious and his thugs, due to his association with Spike. This, of course, leads to the revelation of Spike’s past as a Syndicate hitman, which drives a potentially unbreakable wedge between the two friends and partners.
The Forgotten Past of Faye
Faye Valentine’s past is a mystery, and there is good reason for that. It seems she was stuck in cryo sleep for too long, causing permanent amnesia. When she was eventually woken up by a con artist named Whitney claiming to be her mother (Christine Dunford), Faye had no memory of her own to go against the claim and wound up being swindled out of everything she had by her. When she meets up with Whitney again, she is already a cowboy and member of the Bebop, and wise to Whitney’s ways.
Faye means to turn in the villain for her sizeable bounty but instead winds up helping her to get off-world in exchange for her “identikit”, which could supposedly restore all her lost memories. Instead, it turns out to be nothing but a VHS recording of herself as a child, talking to her future self about what she’s like and what she hopes to become. There is one useable clue on the tape though: Greenvale Avenue, the name of the street where she grew up.
A Cowboy Bebop Breakup
With all of this in play, the climax occurs at an exchange where Spike is to be traded by Jet for Kimmie. But when the dealing goes down, Jet signals Spike, who is sealed in the trunk of a car, at a pivotal moment. He fires through the car, killing some of Vicious’s men. Sadly, Vicious himself cannot be taken out, as it turns out both he and Kimmie are nothing but holograms that blink out of existence before her father’s eyes. He and Spike are then overpowered in the confusion and wake up tied to posts in Vicious’s family crypt along with Kimmie.
Further complicating the matter is Julia, who has been sent with a couple of Vicious’s thugs to be killed. But she manages to manipulate the hit-person who strangles the driver, causing a massive car crash that only Julia walks away from, of course. Meanwhile, Vicious is just about to execute Jet and his daughter in front of Spike, but is stopped by a hail of gunfire coming from Faye’s ship outside. She takes out some of Vicious’s men and even shoots the ropes off the three hostages. They make their way out of the fracas and Jet and Kimmie board the ship while Spike goes to confront Vicious and end things once and for all.
It's a high-octane fight between the two men who once called each other “brother”, with Vicious wielding a sword against Spike’s heater. But Vicious manages to get the upper hand. Before he can deal the death blow, Julia shows up and fires upon him, sidelining him. As it turns out, she’s not quite the delicate snowflake she’s been made out to be all season. She wants Spike to finish off Vicious and then take control of the Syndicate alongside her. Spike declines. This infuriates Julia, who says, “You were clearly nothing more than a dream I needed to wake up from,” implying that their love was a lie, after which she puts a bullet in him. Spike falls through a stained-glass window, and she leaves him for dead – the same mistake Vicious made so many years ago.
This is the beginning of the end for the Bebop crew. Faye tells Jet she has a chance to find out who she really is and takes off to investigate her Greenvale Avenue lead. When Spike resurfaces, Jet tells him the only reason he’s still alive is because he helped save Kimmie. His years of deceit and his past with the Syndicate are too much for Jet to forgive. His last words to his old partner are, “If I ever see you again, I will kill you”. Meanwhile, Julia has Vicious chained up in what looks like a boiler room. She explains to him that, as the Elders (the leaders of the Syndicate) had been eradicated earlier (by Vicious, no less), he will now become one of them. However, they always wear masks, so she’ll be speaking for him. She then plays a little Russian Roulette, loading a single round into a revolver, spinning it, and firing at him once. When no bullet emerges, she tells him they’ll try again tomorrow.
The final scene of the final episode of Cowboy Bebop finally introduces fan-favorite character, “Radical Ed” (Eden Perkins) to the proceedings, even though it’s only to yell at a passed-out Spike who just stumbled out of a bar. In the anime, Ed was a young girl, abandoned by her father, who becomes a talented hacker and eventually, a member of the Bebop. Here, she yells in Spike’s face that she wants to hire him to find “The Butterfly Man”, Voluja. We also see that Ein, the team’s semi-beloved dog is staring at Spike as well. For those who don’t know who Voluja is, he was the main antagonist of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, a former soldier driven insane by experimental testing of a pathogen. His nickname is born of the fact that he constantly hallucinates glowing butterflies.
And that’s how Cowboy Bebop’s first live-action season ends. The team is disbanded. Jet is even more alienated from his daughter due to her kidnapping and completely isolated from Spike. Faye is on her way to try to dig up her past, Julia is running the Syndicate with Vicious as her hostage, and Spike is a complete mess, although apparently not so bad that Ed won’t hire him to take out this Butterfly Man.
Will we get to see how all of these strings eventually unravel? Well, that ball remains in Netflix’s court, as they have yet to greenlight a second season of the show. Keep your fingers crossed, cowboys.