Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Session 23

Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Session 23

Cowboy Bebop takes a turn for the self-reflective, raises doubts about the persistence of identity, and throws a dog into a minefield. Kind of a busy half-hour, truth be told.

Is Cowboy Bebop a science fiction show?

The answer to this question depends on your definition of science fiction.  In pragmatic, descriptivist terms, stories are sci-fi if they draw on the trappings of sci-fi, and under this rubric Cowboy Bebop obviously qualifies.  It’s got space travel, terraforming, cryonics, superhuman machine intelligence, laser guns, arbitrarily advanced levels of body modification, you name it.  There’s another popular definition, however, which holds that sci-fi is properly defined as speculative fiction:  it has to engage in a meaningful way with the consequences of a radical technological and/or sociological change to human society.  Works that don’t do this – and Star Wars is probably the quintessential offender – are sometimes accused of not being “true” scifi.

Just to continue this little digression, there’s a tendency to associate the literature-of-ideas stuff with “hard” scifi, and the “adventure stories… IN SPACE!!!” school with “soft” scifi.  But these ideas aren’t really the same.  Hard vs. soft just has to do with how plausible the fictional universe’s technology is under our current understanding of the laws of physics.  What I’m looking for here is a distinction between the literature of ideas and the literature of narrative.

The technology in Star Trek isn’t really any better worked out than the technology in Star Wars.  If anything, Trek might be worse:  at least Star Wars doesn’t allow time travel.   But Star Wars is not concerned with the rigorous working out of an idea.  Rather, it’s about telling an adventure story with mythic overtones.  The laser swords and spaceships are purely window dressing.  (Didn’t George Lucas actually use stock footage of WWI dogfights for the space battles in some of his test cuts?)  Star Trek, on the other hand, is very much an idea driven show, and therefore counts as speculative fiction:  it’s just that the ideas in question are always sociological or psychological.  You could quite easily write truly speculative fiction within the Star Wars universe without changing the franchise’s technological “hardness” at all.  For instance you could write military SF that tries to rigorously work out what kind of tactics the trade federation droids would have to apply in order to take down a Jedi.  Or you could write political SF about how Palpatine’s rivals in the galactic senate try to use arcane procedural rules to limit his power in the interval between his election to chancellorship and his dissolution of the legislature at the beginning of A New Hope. Or you could write socioeconomic SF that explains how Jabba the Hutt’s criminal enterprise fits into the broader society of Tatooine.   (“It ain’t like that.  See, the Hutt stay the Hutt.  Everthing stay who he is.  Except for the droids.  Now, if the droid make it all the way down to the other dude’s side, he get to be Twi’lek.  And like I said, the Twi’lek ain’t no bitch.”)  The point is to take some idea, any idea, as a starting place, and then work out the consequences in rigorous detail.  By the same token, it would be possible to write science fiction that is diamond-hard, but utterly unconcerned with working out the consequences of anything at all.  Like, do a version of Death of a Salesman where all the characters have robotic arms, and Biff has a big monologue in act II where he explains the technology behind their robotic arms.  Nobody HAS written Death of a Salesbot to the best of my knowledge, and there are some pretty obvious reasons why it wouldn’t tend to happen. But there’s no reason to discount the possibility.

Anyway, Cowboy Bebop.  In one of my earliest posts, I categorized this show’s approach to science as semi-hard.  In retrospect, I feel like semi-soft would be a better description.  Usually soft SF has lots and lots of technology:  replicators instead of microwaves, lasers instead of handguns, etc.  Bebop doesn’t do this, which is why I assumed what I assumed.  But as I run down the episodes in my head, there’s just too many things that are implausible, and perhaps not even meant to be plausible.  The genetically engineered virus that turns people into chimpanzees, the demonically preserved harmonica player, the incredible leftover seafood monster, the magical fortunetellers of one kind or another that pop up in various episodes…  But hardness and softness aside, it’s also pretty hard to make the case for Cowboy Bebop as a piece of speculative fiction, because hard or soft, the sci-fi elements don’t MATTER most of the time.  A virus that turns people into monkeys would actually have FASCINATING consequences – do the victims still have legal rights?  What happens to their property?  But as far as Cowboy Bebop is concerned, it might as well just be Ebola. Well, that’s not true:  the monkey thing matters because of the symbolic weight of a man transforming into a beast.  Similarly, it would be inaccurate to claim that the Red Eye drug in the first episode might as well be PCP.  It needs to give the dealer superhuman strength and speed because that makes for a good fight scene in a way that PCP never would.  But the broader consequences of a society in which all junkies have superhuman strength are never raised.  You could argue, kind of, that My Funny Valentine is about the consequences of cryonics… but as it turns out Faye’s amnesia is far more relevant than the idea that she’s been frozen and defrosted.  And certainly there’s no attempt to deal with it in a comprehensive or systematic way — she could have been in a coma for a week.  (Although this might not be entirely true — see below.)

Actually, REAL sci-fi has glowing pyramids.

Brain Scratch might not seem at first blush to be more spec-ficcish (spec-ficcan? spec-fickle?) than any other episode of the show.  A cult that advocates straight-up suicide would have worked almost as well as a cult that advocated “migrating to electronics,” right?  Except that it would lose its symbolic resonance with real-world humans that “live in electronics” by watching old TV shows and blogging about them on the internet all the time.  The current version also just happens to touch on one of my favorite classic science fiction devices, the idea of the “brain upload,” where we can achieve immortality by transferring our consciousness to some kind of electronic device.

Accounts of this technology tend to fall into two camps.  Either brain uploading obviously does work, and is awesome, or it obviously doesn’t work, and is horrifying.  William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive fall squarely into the latter camp.  Notable science fiction stories where brain uploading “works” are fewer and further between, although Ghost in the Shell might fit here — if so, it’s a lot less gung-ho about it than most.  Interestingly, though, there are some real-world futurists who think that brain uploading is the wave of the future.  Cowboy Bebop falls into the pessimistic camp, if only by implication.  No one ever spends any time speculating as to whether the Scratch cultists who seem to have committed suicide have actually achieved immortality, and even Londes turns out to be tragically bound to his physical form.  (Well, unless you interpret that speech at the end as evidence that he did manage to leave his body fully behind after all, which is kind of stretching it if you ask me.)  Now, how you feel about brain uploading depends on how you feel about a philosophical problem called the Persistence Question.  This is typically phrased something like as “How can we tell if a person existing at one time is numerically identical to a person existing at another time?” (Numerically identical, meaning “there is only one of it,” is different from qualitatively identical, meaning “it is exactly the same.”  We generally assume that people can change over time without becoming more than one person.)  Eric Olsen, writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy prefers “Under what possible circumstances is a person who exists at one time identical with something that exists at another time (whether or not it is a person then)?” arguing that the classic formulation begs the question of whether a person was ever a gamete, or ever will be a corpse.  There are a couple of classic answers.  For instance, you could claim that if person A and person B have the same body, they are the same person.  But this is a little hard to accept:  if you cut my arm off, or transplant my brain into a cadaver, do I stop being me?  You can also claim that identity is no more than a social consensus:  if other people recognize person B as person A, then they’re the same person.  But this fails the a whole bunch of common sense tests:  what if I lock myself in a closet where no one else can see me – do I stop being myself?  The most popular and intuitive answer is to appeal to psychological identity.  If a person at time A has a certain set of memories, and a person at future time B has all of those memories, then they’re the same person.  And this is how brain uploading seems notionally to be meant to work:  if you scan my brain and then toss it into a blender, and then load the data from that scan onto a toaster, the toaster will have all my memories, personality, etc.  For brain uploading to work as a method of achieving immortality, that toaster would then need to actually be me. And the psychological answer to the Persistence Question would seem to suggest that it would.

Ceci n'est pas un bunch of fish.

It might be obvious from the way that I phrased it that I have little sympathy for this point of view.  After all, what if we repeat that thought experiment WITHOUT the blender?  Scan my brain, load it onto a toaster, and let us both go on our merry ways?  I have no problem with the idea that both of us would be “people,” who should probably have nearly identical legal and moral rights.  But I’d like to think that I would still be me, and the toaster would still be a toaster.

Okay, one might argue, what if we do it slowly?  Look, if I reach into your brain with an electrode and burn out one neuron, you’re still you, right?  By the same token, if I supplement your existing brain with a single electronic neuron, you’re still you.  Same if we make it two neurons.  So what if we replace your whole brain, one neuron at a time, until finally it’s entirely mechanical?  You probably wouldn’t even notice it happening.  Then you’ll have a completely mechanical brain, which can leave your body and flit around the internet at ease, and still is obviously “you.”  This of course is similar to the famous Ship of Theseus and Sorites paradoxen.  How many parts of a ship can you replace before it becomes a different ship?  How many grains of sand can you take out of a heap before it stops being a heap?  My answer is that it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you do it.  When we argue about the ship and the heap, we’re really arguing about what something is called. Assuming that I am more than merely that-which-I-am-called, the slow transformation is really no different from the fast one. You’d wind up with something that thinks its me, and that people who know me would recognize as me. Nevertheless, I would be dead, and what was left would be a toaster only dreaming it’s a Jordan.  The hypothetical counterargument to my counterargument is a doozie, though, because this same process of killing and replacing cells is apparently happening in our cerebral cortex all the damn time, except that the new cells are biological rather than electronic.  Either the reasoning I gave above is flawed – and I don’t see how – or else my impression that I am the same person I was when I was ten, or even the same person that I was when I went to sleep last night, or even the same person that I was when I started typing this sentence, is not really correct.    The answer to the Persistence Question, in that case, is quite simply that we never can and never should consider two people at different times to be numerically identical:  that all that persists are memories and the illusion of identity, not identity itself.

And once we’ve followed the chain of reasoning around that far, we realize with a shock that this is something Cowboy Bebop has been about all — the damn — time!  In what sense can we claim that Faye Valentine is the same person that was cryogenically preserved after her unspecified accident all those years ago?  She DOESN’T have the same memories that she used to.  She doesn’t really have the same physical body anymore, or much of the same personality — that betamax tape proved that.  And at this point in the series, there are no other minds that recognize her as the same person (although that changes in the next episode, Hard Luck Woman).   By the same token, is the Gren who fought alongside Vicious on Titan the same person as the Gren who shows up playing sax in Jupiter Jazz?  They don’t have the same body, exactly.  Their goals and opinions are pretty radically different.  Does Radical Edward, who seems to spend most of her time in a permanent schizophrenic break, have any kind of moment-to-moment continuity of selfhood?  Is Spike the same guy that he was before his unspecified traumatic event?  Is Jet the same guy that he was before he lost his arm?  It might seem like all of these questions are confusing numerical identity (is there only one of it?) with qualitative identity (is it exactly the same?), but I would argue that one of the lessons of applying the Ship of Theseus to consciousness is that a sufficiently radical qualitative change constitutes a numerical change as well.  Looking at Wen, the harmonica player from Sympathy for the Devil, we could argue that here we have an  example of an identity which truly does persist.  Since he doesn’t age, we can assume (or argue, at least) that he’s immortal right down to the cellular level:  nothing of him that doth fade, period.  And as a result of this, he’s twisted and evil.  What are we to take from that?

That brings up another point about brain uploading.  It’s pretty common, in any kind of speculative fiction that deals with ANY kind of immortality, to suggest that seeking immortality corrupts, and achieving immortality corrupts absolutely.  (TV Tropes — damn the siren call of their cleverly alliterative titles! — calls this “Immortality Immorality.”)  Very often the corrupt and twisted half life offered by, for instance, something like brain uploading, is contrasted with the sane and healthy attitude of accepting and embracing death.  Cowboy Bebop does this too – check out this earlier post for the series’ take on the ars moriendi.  But if we’re willing to go down the persistence-of-identity rabbit hole for a minute, the ideology of the show as a whole suddenly gets a lot more coherent and broadly applicable.  Cowboy Bebop is about a whole bunch of things, but one of the themes it comes back to over and over again is how important it is to let go.  This is true for the way one approaches death:  it’s important to let go of life.  But it’s also true of how one approaches living.  One must let go of pride.  One must let go of money.  And perhaps one must be willing to let go of one’s own self image, because that previous self is no longer present in any meaningful way.  More on this next time, when we get to Hard Luck Woman, far and away my favorite Cowboy Bebop episode ever.  As for me, I’m going to let go of any pretense that I’ll deal with more than one episode per post, or that I’ll get through the end of the series by the end of the month.  I WILL keep the posts coming, though, and as quickly as I possibly can.  A huge thank you to everyone who has been prodding me to keep continue the series, by the way — I’m more touched than I can say that y’all care enough to complain.

18 Comments on “Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Session 23”

  1. Sillyweasel #

    I am SO glad you have finally decided to stop trying to make each of these articles smaller and allow one post for one episode at a time.
    I love this series (of posts as well as the show itself) and seeing it had been updated from my twitter feed earlier gave me at least a good 30 minute escape from my current insomnia and depression. Keep up the excellent work and I look forward AS HELL to the last few posts.
    Question: Will you be wrapping up with the final episode itself? Or will there be another post going over the entire series itself, separate from the post for the finale?

    Reply

  2. Adrian #

    Finally!

    Reply

  3. fenzel #

    Man, these posts by Stokes are great.

    I love them almost as much as the earlier Cowboy Bebop posts by the other Stokes.

    I hope when we bring on new Stokes to write the next article, it’s just as good!

    Reply

    • stokes OTI Staff #

      Doubtful. I have it on good authority that that guy’s kind of a hack.

      Reply

  4. Qwil man #

    All these paradoxes and differing answers seem to be completely ignoring the most selfish and relevant reason to ask the question in the first place: I’m alive and I want to remain alive. You talk about copying the data in a brain and destroying it as though the act of destroying the (assumed) brain won’t end its stream os consiousness. I’m sure there are people who will disagree on a personal level, but I care far far less about the information contained within my brain than I do about staying alive, and an overwhelming amount of evidence says I need THIS brain to continue to get blood, oxygen and electricity to continue to experience the sensation of existing.

    If you copy my brain into a robot that will behave exactly like me I’d love to hang out with it, but I won’t see though his eyes or think his thoughts because I’m busy with my own. THAT is the reason a copy of me isn’t me, because I’m being me right now. Not even because I remember my life, but because I’m experiencing my sense of self.

    Reply

    • stokes OTI Staff #

      Oh, I agree completely! The question though is whether there actually is a stream of consciousness, or just a bunch of discrete little consciousness-chunks that we interpret as a stream because the alternative is too horrifying by half.

      I wouldn’t tend to take the “identity does not persist” argument TOO seriously, though. Even if it were true, would it get us anywhere? We’d all just keep experiencing our identities as persistent anyway, so it’s hard to see how it would even matter.

      Reply

    • fenzel #

      One of the other issues with this is _demonstrating_ it. As much as we can currently tell, individual, subjective consciousness is nonfalsifiable, which means, in a scientific heuristic, it doesn’t exist — or rather, the burden of proof is on the person asserting it exists, and there isn’t any proof.

      Of course, we intuit that individual, subjective consciousness exists. We experience it. But quantum physics and relatively, among other things, have taught us that intuition, experience and casual personal observation are well-nigh useless in determining the nature of reality. The universe just plain doesn’t work the way human beings experience it to work. Our perception and experience are too limited.

      The way I see it, this presents a choice – you can either take the scientific approach and develop your working theories for how existence works based on what you can falsify, declining to assert nonfalsifiable things (such as the existence of the conscious self), or you can come to terms with the limitations of the scientific heuristic (which, of course, gets you in trouble on the Internet sometimes).

      There are other philosophical tools for exploring this, but contemporary philosophical exploration, as I understand it, is heavily tied up in scientific methods and heuristics, and professionals seem to be leaning toward them. For example, there has been a lot of publicity for experiments over the last few year that show that the brain makes a decision before a person can report consciously making it. I see this as pretty baldfaced question-begging (because there is a preceding mechanism, we can rule out a root cause without accounting for the preceding mechanism), but a lot of people (most notably some New York Times writers last year, I believe) see this as proof against free will.

      So I’m skeptical that we will see progress in our lifetimes on the question of subjective consciousness, but I do see a lot of risk that people will rely too much on the scientific heuristic, come to the conclusion that subjective consciousness must not exist, and commit suicide by robot brain replacement and stuff like that.

      This summer I read Brian Greene’s _Fabric of the Cosmos_, and in it he talks about quantum teleportation, which isn’t teleportation at all, but exact copying. He argues that, if something is an exact copy down to the fundamental qualities of its quantum particles, it is the same thing – that there can be no quality of individuality or identity other than this. I suspect this is because he has had to dedicate his brain so thoroughly to the scientific heuristic in order to proceed as a quantum physicist – that he must disbelieve nonfalsifiable things.

      But my suspicions about the limitations of the heuristic means I would never step into one of those teleporters.

      Reply

      • fenzel #

        Sorry, “relativity,” not “relatively.”

        I also apologize for all other typos.

        Reply

      • fenzel #

        On the flipside, for this argument to hold any water, then the limitations of the scientific heuristic have to be “around” something — that is, if they only extend so far, then we need to acknowledge the places where they do extend, and not mistake a limitation for a repudiation. It’s not all or nothing.

        The way I see it, if you actually want to make a definitive claim about something that happens in the world, if you want something useful, thinking scientifically about it is often the best way to go, limited only by the human mind’s persnickety and ill-advised tendencies to listen more to other types of arguments, whether they are valid or not.

        So, if you want to know where life comes from, ask a scientist. Even if they don’t have a perfect answer now (and they have a pretty good one), by applying a scientific heuristic, they will have a useful answer that will get better over time, and they have good mechanisms in place for eventually separating useful assertions from total bullshit.

        But if you want to know why something exists, science isn’t going to be all that helpful, because normative assertions and intentions are nonfalsifiable – you can’t find experiments that would disprove most of them were they to turn out a certain way, and as long as there is no possible way to disprove something, it becomes much more difficult to separate meaningful, useful assertions from total bullshit with that kind of authority.

        This doesn’t leave the human mind without tools for approaching such matters, but it has a lot of important implications.

        Reply

        • stokes OTI Staff #

          “If you want to know why something exists, science isn’t going to be all that helpful…”

          Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. This is where people get confused about evolution a lot of the time, I think. You’ll come across statements like “Giraffes evolved long necks so that they could eat leaves on high branches.” This is not correct — at least not what scienctifically. Rather, science tells us that giraffes evolved longer necks for no damn reason, and as a result were able to eat the leaves on taller branches.

          Reply

  5. Qwil man #

    I got too wrapped up in my gripping fear of death to mention that I’m really really glad to have this series back. Keep it up!

    Reply

  6. MrsSpooky #

    So glad to see your Bebop postings again! I was beginning to think you’d given up on it. :)

    I loved this, especially where you said “…all that persists are memories and the illusion of identity, not identity itself.
    And once we’ve followed the chain of reasoning around that far, we realize with a shock that this is something Cowboy Bebop has been about all — the damn — time! ”

    I wasn’t wild about this session when I first saw it. Watching it again, I was struck by what Spike said in that scene where he faced off against Londes on that pyramid of screens. Spike says “I’m sick of this act. What’s wrong? Come on out. An illusion isn’t enough for me.”

    Then:
    Spike: Just like a little kid.
    Londes: What?
    Spike: YOU are the one who can’t tell… fantasy from reality, Londes. If you want to dream. Dream alone.

    I thought it was significant that Spike “I’m just watching a dream” Spiegel would say something like that. And I love the profile shot of him when he said it.

    For some reason, I can’t shake the thought that the whole session was written as the means to have Spike say those things.

    Reply

    • stokes OTI Staff #

      Huuuuuuuuuuuh. That’s an interesting idea. A question to ask, then, would be whether Spike is self-aware enough to apply that knowledge to his own situation?

      Shades of Sympathy for the Devil, right? In that case Spike obviously doesn’t recognize the similarities between himself and the baddie of the week (or at least explicitly claims not to — one could argue that he’s not to be trusted). Is he just as oblivious and/or self-deceiving this time around? Or has he matured a little, meaning that he’s talking as much to himself as to Londes in that sequence?

      Reply

  7. vee #

    great article!

    I really liked how you connected this episode to the central traumas at the center of the three adult characters’ backstories and how they’ve “died” through simultaneous personal betrayal/extensive physical harm, lost their identities, and returned to bum around space aimlessly, something like the cultists who leave behind their personal possessions/bodies to inhabit cyberspace forever.

    But to follow this parallel, this episode implies that such a compromised existence (which–the life of being a badass bounty hunter–gets presented visually as fun, free, and “cool”) is a mistake/delusion and that those who have entered it SHOULD wake up, the way Faye does at the end through the intervention of her family unit/crew.

    The differences between the crew and the cultists of course are 1. the remnants of memories from their former lives which come back in the form of key phrases, talismanic belongings (Julia’s name, music box, fake eye, Jet’s watch, Faye’s videotape) which the show suggests should be faced and then left behind and 2. they’ve forged a few grudging connections in the afterlife, ie, when Faye wakes up from THIS coma, there is at least someone around, not the romantic figure who will sweep her off her feet and buy her pretty princess dresses (subverted thoroughly the first time around) but part of a crew that will begrudgingly rescue each other when it matters. I guess that’s the show’s best case scenario after you’ve had the misfortune to symbolically die–grudging, ambiguous, and subverbal connections with the people around you. If you try for anything else–to return to the past, to fix mistakes, etc, it will blow up in your face. I like how the show still forces you to enjoy yourself, not by diluting this underlying bleak thesis, but instead overloading it on the other end with sensory awesomeness, eg. gun versus sword fights, hot ladies, zero-G battles, cool music, superpowered corgis, etc. Of course this uncompromising combination of “bitter” and “sweet” helps make the show so compelling.

    Reply

    • stokes #

      The “talismanic belongings” thing is a really interesting idea that had not occurred to me. It’s almost a gesture towards Cartesian dualism: you need to discard material objects in order to arrive at some kind of spiritual connection. There’s a sense in which totems like the music box, the video, Jet’s watch, and so on are actively preventing the protagonists from making real connections.

      This actually makes me think back to the end of Inception. [Spoilers] When Cobb walks away from the top to go play with his kids, that could also be seen as a rejection of the material fetish-object in favor of a spiritual connection, right?

      Reply

      • pureblood-3 #

        Just to point out it’s probably Jet’s arm/scar which is his talismanic belonging, rather than the watch which he managed to throw away at the end of Ganymede Elegy. Not sure what that says about him, though.

        Reply

        • Benji #

          Overthinking about the “talismanic belongings” concept, I believe that they aren’t only objects (Which difficult any approach or relation with the world). Instead, I see them as little deaths, losses or grieves that allow transformation of identity as Theseus boat, and in that way, functionality in the reality they are, and giving a new essence (or if you want rejecting the idea of non-changing inmutable essence).
          As the new wood would let Theseus boat float:

          -Jet’s robotic arm saved his life from getting a head shot;

          -Faye’s erased memory facilitated her innocence Lossing, a feature of her that we see in videotape and that is clearly incompatible with the society in 2071. If her debts where true, which we never fully known, her “new” identity is the best fit for facing hem. Imagine waking up in the past where it was common for people to kill animals in order to eat/survive, if you were self conscious about you not being capable of killing anything cause in your time that’s not common you would perish in some days. But knowing nothing about yourself let you act like “well I don’t know, maybe I was an assassin, I could kill a chicken”

          I explained a lot of this point cause it’s the same situation with,

          -Ed’s family origin, not knowing where she came from allows her to be a informatic genius in the trash-place that is the Earth on the show, like a flower in the mud. She don’t know who are her parents so she could be anything, and believing it allows her so. Remember when ask about Radical Ed and someone even says it’s an alien. And forcing things, not being imposed with a gender/identity characterization blows the stigma of terrestrial woman, being poor, marginalized and (duh) woman (it seems to be harder in the future too, for example the Gren session and Faye being the only girl as a dangerous thing)

          -Ein’s suffering experimentation make a corgi valued in 2 woolongs (even less than a dead lobster in Ganimedes) into the universe’s best hacker so far.

          And also being Ed and EIN the ones who suffered the most traumatic transformation allows them to be the ones who get off the bebop and search new adventures embracing the new and , as Ed said, following the stranger (a.k.a following the white rabbit? Idk)

          And we reach the end with

          -SPIKE, who is the only main character who don’t embrace his loss but also hides it. He never talks about having a robotic eye with no one except when he is going to die. He is never depicted using his eye as an advantage in piloting the swordfish, or firing a gun, or doing a badass kick. Actually, he defeat Pierrot because of his eye, but he never realizes this, and really doesn’t care. (Not as Jet being conscious of blocking with his arm). In the first chapter we are shown this: Asimov has the advantage of (YES) “red eye” and Spike tells him: “You trust too much your eyes” like if that wasn’t the way of fighting or even living. The final chapter, where we are confirmed of his condition, and his also red eye, we could think: “he’s gonna kick Vicious ass” but we don’t do it. Because he doesn’t use it as he didn’t use his “ability” to save Julia neither. I thinks THAT moment Julia is about to being shot is the first moment the camera shows us Spike’s perspective, we see through his eyes the shot but not a special maneuver or detection of the enemy. I don’t know but I suppose that having a robotic eye in 2071 should have some vision improvements. The perspective we see is of a normal eye but in a moment only makes a blink like something weird happened. Idk if Julia’s death make that or if he never was conscious about his ability, but I firmly believe he thought about his condition as a disability. And being focused in the past is what makes him the character confined to death cause is what the show wants to show. Move on! You are what you do from this moment! What you have been or what you could have been, is not. Choose, act and Be.

          Spike says all the time: “What ever may be should be” but he gets the pessimistic view of this phrase and he never realizes that his bebop family and his new eye and everything are what it should be and that he should be joyful about it.

          There are others characters who could be analyzed in this way (Doohan, Ed’s Dad, Rhint and Alisa, Pao and daughter, and maybe if you look close everyone) but I wanted to focus on the “main” characters.

          Thanks for blogs like this and forgive my English as it isn’t my native language.

          Reply

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