Session 14: Bohemian Rhapsody
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
In Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy, biographer Frank Brady summarizes chess as “one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance.”
Similarly, Cowboy Bebop is one of the more notable series where setting takes place simultaneously with character. As each session’s narrative unfurls, new locales and ideas are colored in, building the world outwards while hinting at complex backstory that may never be explained.
Deprived as we are of seeing Spike and Jet’s origin aboard the Bebop, the opening seconds of “Bohemian Rhapsody” treat us in medias res to the closest the series ever gets to a “getting the gang together” montage. Left to their own devices, Faye, Spike, and Jet skip the pleasantries and jump straight to the finish line—collaring three bounties in 20 seconds. Remarkably, this condensed, fast-forwarded narrative doesn’t give the audience whiplash. Fourteen sessions into the series, like the crew, we’ve become comfortable shooting first and asking questions later.
So, what happens after the crew catches their bounties? This is the only episode that cares (or, at least, spends the time) to explore that. Instead of being told who the bad guys are via a one-way exposition dump from the bounty hunter–focused TV show Big Shot, we’re forced to look up. The Bebop’s original three bounties were victims of circumstance and short-sighted greed, just pawns in a larger plot.
As D’Angelo Barksdale put it in The Wire: “These bald-headed bitches get capped quick,” while “the king stay the king.” The fact that chess works as an apt metaphor for both the drug trade in 2002 Baltimore and a credit-fleecing pyramid scheme in Bebop’s 2071 solar system makes all of this session’s moving pieces easier for us to track amid its ever-expanding world.
The ability to move freely through another dimension of cyberspace, as team super-hacker Ed does, is queen. The solar system–spanning, crooked Gate Corporation plays bishop. Jet and his one-off, cutthroat rat-race rival, Jonathan, play knights. The Bohemian Junkheap, an asteroid scrapyard haven for those who fall through the cosmic cracks, sits in the corner as rook.
Even with a more filled-out board, we don’t really need to understand the episode’s full story or how all the pieces connect; we know how this game works and how it ends. In following the money, we know the real bounty is the king — hiding at the back of the board, cashing in on his con via Europa’s money launderette. After wading through layers of world-building and conspiracy, the Bebop’s eventual discovery of the big bad, the 98-year-old, senile Chessmaster Hex, doesn’t offer much in the way of accomplishment. He can barely remember when he last ate, let alone process the standoff he’s a part of. There’s no resistance, no scramble, no cognizance of his spoiled master plan. His nabbing offers nothing but a whimper of a climax.
Contrary to the Bebop’s modus operandus of living to work, Jet forgoes their usual bounty payment in exchange for the Gate Corporation to leave Hex undisturbed. Doing so keeps Ed’s chess partner online and buys her more time to feel alive — or whatever a teenage cyberpunk’s version of feeling alive is. Their enduring match, like Spike’s description of Hex’s Junkheap hideout, imposes no nationality, no government, no taxes, no cops — it’s “the perfect place to hide out.”
But perfect can’t last forever. The ideal game of chess, one that never ends, is unrealistic. Although Hex has finally found a worthy rival in Ed, as Chessmaster, it’s his game to end on his terms. A checkmate brings him closure, brings him the end of his player’s purpose, brings him, like in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death.
Ed has her whole life ahead of her, the entire universe cosmically in front of her aboard the Bebop, and at her fingertips in the visually more appealing, neon-saturated, CGI-animated, cyberspace cacophony. Yet the happiest we’ll ever see her is playing chess with Hex, in an all-too-brief game constricted to an 8×8 board.
In Cowboy Bebop, there are entire worlds out there to explore, each with their own stories and rules. But no matter how detailed they become, they’ll never be more satisfying or interesting than what’s in front of us with Ed, Spike, Jet, and Faye. Everything we need is right here.
Thanks for reading The Dot and Line, where we talk about animation of all kinds. Don’t forget to for this article and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
