Session 04: Gateway Shuffle
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
It really kicks off with the fattest tuba line of all time and once it does, it doesn’t really stop until the final, crushing defeat of the bad guys at the hands of Spike, but admittedly, “Gateway Shuffle,” Cowboy Bebop’s fourth episode, takes a while to get going—so much so that I genuinely thought there were space seals* in this session of the show instead of sea rats. For the record, they’re definitely sea rats, not space seals. But the fact that I mixed these details up isn’t that surprising. For one reason or another, the Bebop crew’s tussle with “Twinkle” Maria Murdock and her gang just never struck me as all that fun or engaging. (I mean, I love this show, but they’re basically just fighting PETA—snooze.)
That said, the episode’s finale of the episode is fucking amazing. You should just watch the last third of the half hour, really. I’ll catch you up: Murdock—having been captured by the Bebop crew early in the episode—successfully conned her way to freedom and is now using that freedom to fire a missile through hyperspace gate at the space settlement on Ganymede. The missile contains a virus that turns people into monkeys, and Spike, Jet, and Faye have to stop it or lose the bounty.
The ensuing hyperspace chase scene between Spike’s ship the Swordfish II and Faye’s Red Tail is as tense a battle for time as any the show produced. Eventually the race to beat the missile goes south and, pivoting hard, Spike and Faye need to instead beat the clock on the closing hyperspace gate unless they wanted to risk getting trapped in another dimension forever. While they’re flying their super-fast spacecrafts, the song “Too Good Too Bad” from the very first volume of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack is playing, the sniveling bureaucrats who were the target of Murdock’s gang are freaking out, and for a moment we don’t know if our heroes are gonna make it! Also—again—the big, blasting, BWA-BWA-BWA-ing bari sax and tuba in this here tune are not to be understated…
The episode, of course, ends with our heroes not dying. I won’t mention how it all shakes out, just in case you’ve been compelled to go revisit it yourself on Hulu or YouTube, but suffice it to say that you probably don’t need its first two-thirds if you’re still with me. Just watch that hyperspace race. And don’t miss the kicker afterward, where it’s revealed Spike totally smoked the bad guys well ahead of time without laying a finger on them.
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