![]() They’re the kind of relaxed character moments that bond us to our heroes while avoiding the constant, obvious exposition the rest of the show obsesses over. Of everything that Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop tries to do, what works best are the moments where Jet, Faye, and Spike just hang out, talking about everything from jazz to bathing habits to sexual preferences. The tension between Vicious (left, Alex Hassell) and Spike (right, John Cho) is the main thrust of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop. This storyline builds to an explosive, unimaginative final confrontation, the motivations of which are comically unimaginative, and which needlessly re-creates an iconic scene from the original series in a completely new context. Vicious is never gone long enough for us to fear what he’s planning, and Julia is never gone long enough for us to miss her as Spike does, diminishing the impact of the two characters with whom Spike is meant to have his most fraught and complex relationships. Julia goes through the same repetitive character beats, all while dressed like someone from a soap opera, and at the end of the season she makes a brutal turn that feels both obvious and ineffective. Vicious assumes the role of a by-the-numbers Big Bad, who explains his evil plans out loud at regular meetings with members of the Syndicate-he even gets a backstory this time around, complete with a cliched, villainy-justifying relationship with an abusive father. ![]() Now Vicious and Julia -and their volatile relationship -are a driving force of the overall plot, appearing in every single episode and leaving nothing to the imagination. ![]() Julia, similarly, appears almost entirely in Spike’s dreams as a ghost of his former life that he refuses to let go. In the anime, we rarely see Vicious, who’s made menacing largely because his motivations are unclear, his cruelty often senseless as he plots to overtake the Red Dragon Syndicate, an organization whose activities are also ambiguous but involve drug trafficking and assassinations. The new, deadly serious Red Dragon Syndicate plotline is largely responsible for the show’s suffocating pace, taking up a massive amount of the season’s runtime. It’s a mess of fan service and attempted reinvention that only adds up to an overstuffed final product each hourlong episode is packed full of as much stuff as the runtime will allow -unrelenting quips, endless exposition-without ever giving the viewer a moment to breathe. The premiere, for example, follows most of the beats of the anime’s first episode, establishes the Vicious plotline, and, for good measure, tacks on a redux of the opening of the well-received (but difficult-to-find) 2002 film Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. ![]() Most episodes of Netflix’s take on Cowboy Bebop follow the same formula: Take the plot from an episode from the anime in its entirety, add some original scenes or a subplot to fill the runtime, and fold in the new storyline for now-expanded characters Vicious (Alex Hassell), a member of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate, from which Spike defected, and Julia (Elena Satine), Spike’s mysterious former lover. While Spike, Jet, and Faye remain at the Netflix take’s core, and the story is mostly similar, showrunner Andre Nemec also looks for ways to make this Bebop his own-to his detriment and our disappointment. The pair are joined by Faye Valentine (a wannabe femme fatale drowning in mountains of debt), Radical Edward (an eccentric 13-year-old hacker), and a genius corgi, Ein. Set in the year 2071, the original series tells the story of former crime syndicate member Spike Spiegel and ex–Inter Solar System Police officer Jet Black, both of whom make a living as bounty hunters while traveling across the galaxy on their ship, the Bebop. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
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