The Narration of The End: Cowboy Bebop

One big happy pseudo-family

Taking every advantage of Uberman while I’m still within its napped-grasp, I decided to make Cowboy Bebop the most recent addition to my anime playlist. Before any anime veterans reading stops believing in the me that believes in the you, let me say that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the Bebop crew before hand. I first watched the series in 2007 and again in 2008, once in English, and once in Japanese. After 2008 I decided to lock all recollection of the Bebop within the deepest bit-locked depths of my hard drive, never to be opened until I was certain it was wiped from natural memory.

Three years later, my brother nit-picking his boredom, Cowboy Bebop was the first chosen to kick-off the nostalgia-filled anime marathon. If you’ve never seen or heard of Cowboy Bebop then I cannot help but shed a tear for your incomplete existence as a human being. In layman’s terms: stop reading these unimportant words and watch Cowboy Bebop, spoilers lie ahead.

Approximately 10 hours after our start, episode 26 ended, and a clash of theories began. The origin of this clash? This line:

“You’re gonna carry that weight.”

Just what is that line? The ending of Cowboy Bebop feels like a fearless life aimlessly ended. Spike chose to face Vicious. Perhaps Spike no longer desired living a life like ‘watching a dream’. And Jet and Faye? Perhaps without Julia, life on the Bebop, life as a bounty hunter, would be meaningless. Faye, however, also had the same choice, yet made a different decision.

Victim to amnesia, Faye spends almost her entire time on the Bebop stumbling among fragments of her childhood, her friends, her family; her life. Led by the dream that someone, somewhere, is waiting for her, she searched for a life teased by her unknown past. In the end, a place she could call ‘home’ was never found. Faye realized her life from that moment onwards was about facing reality, about moving forwards, about forgetting the past. A lesson Spike himself had tried to teach her.

Considering the similarities between Spike’s and Faye’s situation before then, it was at that moment Faye had been freed from the threads that bound her to the past, the very same threads that bound Spike, up until his death.

In fact the same relationship can be made with almost all personalities on the Bebop. Jet Black, a former ISSP agent and overly proud owner of the Bebop, handles his past very much the same way as Spike. After discovering the corrupt-driven betrayal of his former partner, he dives head-first to face his past, confronting him on a floating prison under siege. Jet and Spike not only shared identical methods of confrontation, but their history also involved the same dark source; the Syndicate.

Niether Julia or Faye could tempt Spike to refuse the allure of the past. Faye knew the reasons for Spike’s departure were ultimately in vain, as she herself discovered. Just as Faye ran down that road finding herself with every step, Spike shot at his past with every bullet.

"Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is fake because I lost it in a accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye, and present in the other."

In the closing scene, Spike, heavily wounded, silently climbs down from the Syndicate’s throne. Smiling, his left eye closed, he points to the few remaining members, “Bang...” Spike faced his past, not for retribution, but for ease. By shutting the eye that sees the past, whether via injury or symbolic nod, Spike is finally free, dying with a gliding smile.

I believe the message director Shinichirō Watanabe delivers is an idea cursed throughout Cowboy Bebop. How one deals with an allure or attachment of a time long passed defines that persons future. In simple terms, can you forget your past, regardless of its depth, and move on? An answer is left as a single line that reads

A weight that Spike, could no longer carry.