Cowboy Bebop/Headscratchers

Whatever happens, happens.

—Spike

Cowboy Bebop

• "Jupiter Jazz:" Aside from all of the other Gren-related "headscratchers" and spoilers... at the end, we see a falling star. The Wise Magical Native American Guru dude says something like "it's the soul of a fallen warrior - a pitiful soul, who could not find its way to the lofty realm that awaits us all." This originally was a Tearjerking Player Punch to this Troper, who finds Gren's death painful enough without being told he is a "pitiful soul" who doesn't even deserve /heaven/, or something. But then, remember, someone else died in that episode; Spike's old friend and Vicious' henchman, whose name escapes me. So then, which "fallen warrior" did this refer to? ... Either way, it pretty much sucks, and brings us back to the insistent theory that even wise Magical Indian witch-doctors can be wrong, and Gren DID deserve to go to heaven or wherever, DAMMIT.
  • Well, for magical doctors being irkingly vague is part of their job description.
  • This troper has always interpreted the falling star definerently: Its not a representation of Gren's death, but being Gren him/herself. After Gren's ship was sent away from Jupiter's orbit, it eventually found its way to Mars where it got caught in the gravity well and burned up like regular meteor. To an observer on the ground, it would look like a falling star. True, it would take a while for this to happen. But they never specify when the scene with the mystic takes place relative to everything else, so it still can fit.
• "Bohemian Rhapsody:" So Chessmaster Hex's big plan was to exploit a glitch in the gates' computers to steal people's money and drop it in hidden accounts. He had random volunteers carry out the job of installing a computer virus on the gates... while holding evidence that leads directly to his location? I mean it's clear he was The Chessmaster, but did he really expect to be senile in 50 years?
  • This troper's perspective is that Chessmaster Hex originally planted those clues with the intent of taking credit (in some grand fashion, of course) for being right about the gates and letting it bite the corporate owners in the butt. No, he didn't expect to be senile, and that's part of the beauty of the episode: although he has laid the groundwork for this fantastic scheme, he is no longer able to appreciate it.
• In Hard Luck Woman, how did that old woman know Faye's name? In My Funny Valentine, we find out that the people who woke Faye up knew nothing about her and made up the name she has now. So there's no reason for people who knew Faye in the past to know what she's called in the present.
  • Only her last name was given to her by the doctor. Her first name was in their records.
    • Faye's Doctor claimed to have given her the name, but why should anyone believe him given all the other things he lied about? Just what the medical team did or did not know about her past was never explicitly stated in the story.
      • Isn't the mere fact that the old women did know her by "Faye" proof enough that the doctor didn't lie about that?
• The series takes place in 2071, and Faye was frozen about 50 years earlier, which would be roughly 2021. Her taped message was recorded about 10 years before her accident, i.e. around 2011. Who the heck was still recording on Betamax in 2011, for archival purposes no less?!?!
  • That is indeed pretty odd, specially considering that Beta was dead long before the show was made, so it's not even a case of tech marching on. Maybe Faye, in her past life, was like those people today who like to write things in old-fashioned typewriters because they feel it has a certain elegance computers lack.
    • Betamax lived on in Japan quite a bit longer than anywhere else (plus it lived as a studio format because of it's higher quality)
  • Personally, I figured Faye and her friends were digging through her family's old stuff, found the recorder and thought "hey, this is fun, let's record stuff!"
    • One Word: Grandparents. Two more, for the tech savvy: Analog Loophole.
• Why did they keep Ein around? As far as they knew he wasn't good for anything and was just another mouth to feed.
  • Besides, it's not like a football sized dog is expensive to keep. A 13 dollar, 20 pound bag keeps my shih zhu feed for months.
  • Ein was a Data Dog. He was genetically engineered as a biological computer. Though none of the members of the crew ever noticed him doing it (with the possible exception of Ed) Ein was able to see and point out discrepancies in computer data that Ed then brought to the attention of the crew which led to their solving their problem.
    • Okay, but Spike and Jet didn't know that, and if Edward did, she never said anything to them. So why did they keep him?
      • Why exactly are you so convinced that Ed didn't tell the others anything? The audience doesn't get to see every waking moment of the characters' lives.
        • Jet does warm to him pretty quickly. Sure he's not thrilled at first but pretty soon he's as protective as all the rest of the crew. And even Spike, his rants aside, seems to like him. They're mostly just putting on their usual tough guy acts.
  • Maybe they couldn't find anyone to take Ein and didn't want him to go to the pound and die. I think Spike 'protests to much' about what he hates and using Ein to make a bigger family. Plus doesn't Jet like the dog?
  • The crew do know that he is a data dog though, further they know that that means he is worth a lot of money, probably they kept him around at first because they thought they might find a buyer.
    • Objection! The crew never find out about the data dog connection. The only part of the episode that mentions it is the Big Shot show, and it's pointedly shown that none of them are watching it. They most likely kept Ein because Jet's a big softy.
      • They never found out about it from Big Shot, but I'm sure the police told them what the dog was. Besides, I'm sure Spike tried to sell everything associated with the case when he saw that he wasn't going to get full bounty. He would have found out about it then, and it's probably difficult to find buyers for data dogs.
      • If the Police knew they had the dog they would have confiscated it as stolen goods -- even if they were just angling for the reward themselves.
  • What bugs me is that Corgis are worth way more than 2 Woolongs. Unless they've been breeding a hellacious number of Corgis, they should be going for between 50,000 and 100,000 Woolongs per (if, as seems likely, a Woolong is about the same as a Japanese Yen). Around here, you sure can't get Corgis for 2 cents!
    • That's. The. Joke. It's like all the Futurama gags about presently-endangered owls becoming urban pests.
  • Not to mention, if Ein is a Welsh Corgi (a Pembroke, by the way), he's not "100% pure mongrel"--he's not a mongrel if he's a Corgi, Jet!
  • Given that Spike is the one that breaks off the chase to save Ein I suspect Jet isn't the only big softie on the Bebop
  • in the preview for the last episode, jet absentmindedly admits that, because of spike bringing ein onto the ship, he found out that he really likes dogs.
• Why did they keep Faye around? She didn't bring anything to the table to outweigh her obvious intent to screw the Bebop over and bolt at the first sign of a haul big enough to make it worth it.
  • Bewbs.
  • Yeah that one is pretty self explanatory.
  • Also she became part of the family, so she can come and go and be mean since she's family.
  • Canonically: "I don't know, and I have no opinion."
  • Also, what good is a Lupin III Shout-Out with no Fujiko? Mainly breasts, though.
    • You mean "bewbs."
  • For the same reason they keep Ein: the guys on the Bebop are really big softies underneath the tough exterior.
    • And lonely.
      • And not particularly found of conforting each other...or are they?
  • Fan Service, baby; fan service.
    • Faye was the Bebop's equivalent of Daphne Blake (early Daphne, anyway): eye candy and damsel in distress. Look at it this way: Ein is Scooby, Ed is Velma, Spike is Fred, and Jet is Shaggy.
    • I will now think of this show as Scooby Doo in space. That should be the new laconic.
    • This troper has just set that as Laconic.
      • Thank you, kind Troper.
• The series is generally realistic is its violence and the results of which upon the human body (I.E. despite being cool and Badass, Spike still gets shot and cut all the time and suffers somewhat realistic physical damage to himself because of it, requiring recuperation). How then, after getting thrown backwards and upside down out of a church window which must have been somewhere between 50-150 feet off the ground, and landing most likely head-first upon stone/concrete, on the middle of a staircase no less, does he just get wrapped up in big bandaids, lie around for a week, and then is right as rain. And this was in one of the most serious episodes in the show no less.
  • It's still a cartoon. The amount of damage Spike takes in some episodes (Pierrot le Fou in particular) isn't remotely realistic. And we don't know how long he was in those bandages. If you're really bothered, put it down to really good space-age medicine.
  • There's a lot of homage to Hong Kong action movies in this show. Heroes like Spike's idol Bruce Lee could take any kind of punishment as the plot required. The show isn't realistic, it just allows the heroes to get hurt from time to time.
  • Adult Swim explained this one: The fall was in slow motion, and so obviously didn't do that much damage to him.
    • Oh my. That's a genius explanation. I think that I just broke a rib from reading it... LOL.
    • Wait, but if we apply Viewtiful Joe Slow-Mo and FF physics theory, then the fall would've had been a bazillion times worse as the impact waves stay around for longer!
  • I always assumed Jet managed to fly in and get him (or Faye for that matter if her ship is anywhere around), since we clearly see Jet leaving to go help Spike before the fall...seems like an odd bit of Deus Ex Machina, but considering how Spike managed to catch Ein on his ship, I think Jet or Faye could catch Spike before he falls far enough to be critically injured. Or, you know, Spike couldn't die yet because he hadn't found Julia...that's what kept him alive until the end, right?
  • For what it's worth, it was once explained to me that they were on Mars. There is less gravity, allowing one to survive a longer fall than one would on earth.
    • This is the case. Your gravity on Earth in comparison to Mars is about half, which changes terminal velocity . Also take into account that Most people that survive falls from great heights have done so by not tensing up, and also add in the fact that Spike is a martial artist, where they train you to relax for falls...
      • Not to mention that Spike's particular style of martial arts relies on relaxation as the key to its techniques in general...
      • It's clear to me that he survived simply because his Jewfro cushioned the fall.
      • Considering that this is clearly a mathematical question: Falling 50ft on Mars, with a gravitational force that is 38% (3.75m/s^2) of Earth's (9.8m/s^2), would result in a 2.85 second fall, at a 24mph impact. The same fall on Earth would be a 1.75 second fall, with a 39 mph impact. Before considering anything else, crash a car at 24mph, or take a 20 foot fall of a wall (same speed of impact as a 50ft mars fall), and tell me a human body wouldn't be in pretty bad or near fatal shape, landing how he did. But then you need to consider, if Cowboy Bebop's Mars settlements don't have artificial gravity closer to Earth's, they would be bouncing around like if everyone had moonshoes. Our moon is 1/3 of Mars' gravity, and the Moon Landing video shows exactly how awkward it is to move around. Ballistics would be insane as well. But every settled planet and moon on the show, save some asteroids, had a pretty consistent feel to it. So we must assume it's an Earth-like fall. Additionally, anyone born on a planet with just 1/3 of the Earth's gravity (in this case Spike), would be physically weaker due to lower bone density and needing to exert less force to provide movement and all (ala Zone of the Enders). In either case, a Mars gravity fall, with a Mars weakened body, would fair as bad as someone taking a equal height fall at a stronger gravity with a stronger body. Math has rendered the point moot.
        • Spike was severely injured by the fall. We were shown that he was in a full-body cast afterward! Plus, it's the year 2071. Medical technology's got to be improved greatly from what we've got now.
• Did I miss something in "Ballad of Fallen Angels" or did Vicious inexplicably come back seven episodes later after being four feet away from a detonating incendiary grenade? (OK the same scene had Spike surviving a three story fall, but that just doesn't look right).
  • I was somewhat confused by this as well. What's the point of that whole fight in the church anyway? It's entirely inconclusive.
  • It cemented them as rival badasses and provided some awesome action. As for the grenade... Vicious was probably in full body bandages for an episode before mysteriously emerging without a single scar in the next. As noted Spike has survived some nutty things in his time.
  • On closer inspection, we only see the grenade before it explodes, and the only parts of the explosion we see are outside the window. I suppose he just outran the fireball off-screen.
  • Come on guys, show a little imagination. Vicious is standing on a narrow walkway and has several second before the grenade goes off. He hops over the side opposite the window lands down on the main floor of the church, where he either injures his leg in the fall or gets hit by some debris blown loose by the grenade, which is why he doesn't just walk outside and finish Spike before Faye and Jet get to him. As for the point: it shows for the first time the rivalry between Spike and Vicious, the first flashes of Spike's past, that the only way one of them will die is if the other does it, and that it's going to be damn hard to kill either of them. It's a setup for further drama.
    • Realistically, though, the walkway is a lot less substantial than the outer wall of the church (which, given the massive blast, was all that protected Spike from taking some of the blast of his own grenade). It shouldn't have stopped the blast from reaching Vicious even if he did jump down. Not to mention the significant chance that the walkway would then fall on him.
      • Not to mention, the grenade was between Vicious and the edge of the walkway.
  • The real reason is obvious: Grenades are useless in Cowboy Bebop. This one didn't kill Vicious, and in Knocking on Heaven's Door Vincent survives a grenade that blew a train partially from the track while HOLDING IT IN HIS HAND. Unharmed. Of course, when Grenades are kicked it causes them to misfire, making them incredibly dangerous.
  • Vicious is a futuristic Alexander Anderson created by the Red Dragon to destroy their enemies, except Vicious eventually went mad and decided he wanted to be the big boss himself. Spike was secretely altered when he jointed the Red Dragon to act as a foil to Vicious if he ever decided to destroy them, which is why both Spike and Vicious can recover from injuries quickly. Spike, being the nice guy he is, decided that even though he had a secret mission to destroy Vicious if he ever went mad, he was going to try and be buddies with Vicious to avert that from happening. Spike (Alucard) found Julia (Integra) and decided he wanted to be with her instead of remaining with the Syndicate. Vicious (Anderson) wanted to keep Spike to himself and so tried to intimidate Julia into killing Spike (which he knew wouldn't work, since he knew that Julia probably wouldn't be able to bring herself to shoot him fatally and Spike could easily survive any other wound), so that Spike would abandon or kill her and return to the only thing he had left, which was the Syndicate and Vicious. Things didn't play out according to plan; Spike ran off, and feeling abandoned, Vicious began to hate him. Over the course of the series, Spike is revealed to be a Death Seeker (shown in the conversation between him and Vicious in what I believe was "The Real Folk Blues Pt. 2", which went something like Spike saying that his life was a dream he couldn't wake up from, and Vicious, knowing that only they could kill one another, replied with something like "I can wake you up") and Vicious is set on outliving Spike and proving himself superior. After hanging around the crew of the Bebop, Spike becomes more humanized and decides he wants to find Julia again; when he finds her again, Vicious has her killed so that he can have Spike to himself. Without having Julia to protect and with nothing left to stop him from destroying Vicious (as his original mission had detailed in this exact situation, as Vicious had killed the Elders not too long before Julia was shot), Spike has no reason to run from Vicious anymore and the two of them eventually destroy one another, just like the Syndicate had predicted in the first place.
  • Kinda sucks that the Elders failed to hear the guy who mentioned they would most probably die in the proccess too, poor Steve.
• What happened to that AI that hacked the laser in "Jammin' With Edward" (Ed called it EMPU). Ed was making a copy of it so they could turn the other one in for the bounty (they didn't get), and Ed suddenly got fried. Did it not let her copy it? Does she just have it and never speak of it again? Did they fuse brains or something?
  • This troper read the situation thusly: Ed did make the copy, which is what they turned in (and didn't get paid for). The original version of MPU actually stayed up on the satellite, albeit without his creative-art outlet. This troper could be wrong.
    • I got the idea that Ed did save the AI, but onto her computer where he could get loose in the network.
• "Toys in the Attic". Just... what the hell? Everyone is hurt with a poison that they have no cure for except for Ed who ate the thing that poisoned them, it'll be several days until they reach Mars. How did they survive that?
  • Either the episode's a non-canon what-if, or the poison wasn't as bad as we thought? Funnily enough though, the preview for the next episode was narrated by Ed, and went something like "And then they all died. Every one of them. Next series: Cowgirl Ed!" with Spike and the gang in the background shouting things like 'We're not dead! The series isn't over!'
  • Pulled from an archived page of the "Real Folk Blues" fansite: "When Spike tried to identify it he found a close match, but the computer listed it as a mirror image causing a mismatch. He identifies it as bifidobacterium which is actually a healthy substance." Theoretically, the "poison" from the thing that attacked them was actually a mutant strain of an otherwise harmless bacteria, that rendered them unconscious. Likely, they woke up later and thought it was all a bad dream.
  • Come on. It's pretty obvious this was a joke episode. No one minds that a piece of dead, fridged meat comes to life and attacks everyone on the ship but we're arguing over why they survive being bitten by it?
    • Think about it--spoiled food from the fridge comes to life and starts attacking people with a poisonous bite? Granted, some types of food poisoning are potentially lethal, but lots of others just make you feel like crap for a day.
  • I never had the problem with this episode that it seems others do (especially since it's my favourite). I just assumed that either a) Edward looked after them until they reached Mars (or wherever) where they were cured or, b) the disease was actually non-fatal and just made them really sleepy for a few days. Also, I always assumed that the blob was actually some sort of fungus / bacterial thing that was growing in the rock lobster, not the lobster itself (which is perfectly okay in a series where there's a biotoxin that turns people into monkeys and scientists can engineer "data dogs").
  • It was all a dream. No, seriously. It was. The very first shot of Spike in the next episode shows him waking up from a nightmare. The implication is pretty clear.
  • I always assumed it was a non-canon episode, like the Zombies! episode of Samurai Champloo (from the same director).
  • I figured that the bite wasn't actually fatal (Spike never figures out what it actually was), and with the ship on autopilot to Mars, they were either rescued, or recovered.
  • Basic snake bite first aid: poison harms the blood stream and is fine in the digestive tract.
  • Ugh, just remembering the scene where he opens up the moldy fridge is making my skin crawl. That stuff creeps me out.
• It's obvious that there's a wide variety of languages spoken across the solar system, so why aren't there any language barriers? I gather that the Japanese dialogue is probably just Translation Convention, but it seems odd that this problem never comes up when there are space stations with "No Smoking" signs in twelve different languages.
  • The crew speaks English, so they go where English is spoken. In the movie, it's implied that Spike would have had more problems than he did when he was looking for that doctor if he hadn't stumbled across an Arab dude willing to help him clearly the doctor himself.
    • Actually, it's heavily implied that the crew's common language is Chinese: Jet is reading e-mails in Chinese or pointing on the Chinese 'No Smoking' sign for warning Spike, Faye's from Singapore, Spike used to work for the Triads and so on. Also, the crew seems to like to anchor the Bebop at a port of a Martian chinatown.
    • In the movie also, Rashid (the aforementioned Arab dude) stops several times to have conversations in what this troper presumes to be Arabic while Spike stands there with a confused look on his face. It is clear a language barrier exists.
  • Perhaps a universal language has been established. In the least, there could be a language that is "The language of spacers" that is spoken by most people with whom the crew speaks.
    • It's probably English-as said above, the Bebop crew is implied to speak Chinese, but English is the lingua franca of the Solar System, much as it is now on Earth. This makes sense in the continuity of the series-after the Gate accident, the Earth was chaotically evacuated and people ended up in a thoroughly mixed amalgamation of nationalities in cities all across the Solar System. English is the most commonly learned second language in the world today, so that status would be strengthened in that sort of situation. But one in six people on Earth today is Chinese, so they would be the most common nationality in these new communities. Japanese would actually be rather rare-only one in fifty-four on the planet today speaks it as a first language. The real question in Cowboy Bebop is why Hindu isn't equally as prevalent as Chinese...unless India happened to be facing the Moon...
      • English is actually the official second language of India, so it's very likely Hindi is quite prevalent, but English takes a role as a "trade" language. That is the same as today, where many people speak, or are at least familiar, with languages other than their own to facilitate communication.
  • Note that in "Speak Like a Child", Spike and Jet are only able to read the Japanese sign in the old museum (in Japan itself) because of the English printed below it.
• How is spike able to shoot his gun out in the vacuum of space? Doesn't oxygen need to be present in order for the charge in a cartridge to detonate?
  • No, most guns should be able to fire in space - gunpowder contains an oxidizer.
  • This is why guns can be fired underwater, after all. However, I'm not sure what effect, if any the lack of external pressure would have on how the firing mechanism worked. Somebody call Mythbusters.
  • Not only does modern gunpowder contain its own oxidizer, modern cartridges are actually pretty much airtight, to prevent them from being ruined by moisture in the air. This, in fact, just bugs me about Firefly, where Jayne claims his rifle needs air to fire. As for what effect firing a gun in a vacuum might have---well, the chief problem I can see is that with no ambient pressure, you run a risk of the chamber bursting. Presumably, Spike rolled the dice on that and got lucky.
    • Well, Jayne really isn't the brightest firefly in the jar...
    • Given that the pressures are generally on the order of tens of tons per square inch, the presence or absence of a measly 14 PSI or thereabouts on the exterior would have little effect. On the other hand, the lack of atmosphere means no convection, and that means it's going to get very hot very quickly because it can only cool by radiation. Also, if NASA's experience in the 60s and 70s is anything to go by, the vacuum is likely to do very... ahem... interesting things to all the lubricants very quickly.
      • Yes, but Spike was only in Vaccuum for seconds before he fired the gun, and the same lack of convection would work in his favor by preventing the lubricants from cooling rapidly enough to congeal during that time. As for the original question, most handguns (and Spike's in particular) are recoil operated and yes, the laws of physics do work in space.
      • Dry film lubricants. Vacuum safe and easy to find even today. Considering it's not only guns which would need lubrication in the future, it's likely that dry film lubes are common in the Bebopiverse.
  • You're worrying about his handgun when his fighter has four cartridge-firing machine guns and Faye's has two miniguns?
  • This troper read somewhere that NASA gives Astronauts pistols, they can be used for propulsion in emergencies in low gravity.
    • Nope, sorry, wrong. This is a myth perpetuated by Nasa "survival tests" from the 1970's. NASA never actually gave anyone pistols because the risk of catestrophic accident was just too high.
• Six episodes in to finally watching this show, I realized that they haven't ONCE actually caught somebody and turned them in for a bounty. Not even in the movie! They're terrible bounty hunters.
  • Keep watching. They catch some bounties at the start of the eight episode. They also catch a bounty in episode twenty or so, and maybe a few others. I think the writers thought the show would be more interesting if the characters had bad luck with catching bounties (even though Spike is a total badass and both Jet and Faye can be pretty badass when they want to be).
  • It's also worth noting that their success rate is actually higher than it seems on the surface - a lot of the time they do catch their bounty, but can't get paid for it either because the bounty gets killed in the process ("Gateway Shuffle," "Heavy Metal Queen") or because some technicality causes the bounty to be rescinded ("Jamming With Edward") - or they do collect but the amount was much less than expected ("My Funny Valentine," "Hard Luck Woman").
    • Also, the first episode establishes that Spike has a bad tendency to cause enough collateral damage going after some bounties to tie up most of the reward in paying repair bills and legal fees.
    • I got the impression that viewers only see the parts that the writers decide to show, which wouldn't be the cut and dried bagging of bounties. That would get boring. In "Waltz for Venus" the team brings in three terrorists without a hitch in about two minutes. While fun to watch, if that was what the series was mostly about, it would get old.
    • All three of them also seem to be very selective about which bounties they do go after. Spike doesn't like Small Fries, or TJ ("Asteroid Blues"), and is a thrill hound. Faye want's big scores because of her massive debts, and prefers to let spike and jet do the work. Jet wants to avoid some overly dangerous ones that Spike wants.
• It's 2071 and we've already built fully functional, fully populated cities on Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa and half a dozen asteroids? How can we already have a Used Future a mere six decades into the future? Building a TUNNEL in Boston took the US Government 15 years! And the US is relatively advanced!
  • The series has an alternate history going back to before when the show was made where there was a Space Age but no Civil War.
  • According to many people who have thought about The Singularity, the rate of progress increases with time. The series was made in 1998, they were probably a lot more hopeful about the future than us. Come on, the shows is clearly set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, but we usually have to wait the whole time before crying out I Want My Jetpack.
  • I'm with the original troper; this one really Just Bugs Me. We've terraformed moons and planets * and* they've had a chance to grow huge cities with skyscrapers * and* have had time to get old and decrepit looking? C'mon.
  • I figure it has to do with the rush job they had to do to evacuate Earth after the gate disaster. Many of the ships were probably jury rigged to get people and supplies off the planet. As for the large colonies, they moved billions of people off earth, they had to put them somewhere.
    • They didn't, actually; most of the Earth's population died. The total population of the Bebop-Solar System is approximately 1 billion. So it's a rush job while dealing with the species-wide trauma of losing at least 86% of family, friends, and co-workers...assuming that 1 billion were left after the Gate explosion, and they haven't been building up to it in the 50 years since.
• Am I the only one who's bothered by the totally inconsistent gravity in the ships? It seems like there's often artificial gravity that works on humans, but not other things -- for instance, in "Gateway Shuffle," Faye is seen lounging comfortably in her pilot's seat with no apparent restraints while empty food packaging floats around her.
  • Or even worse, in "Jupiter Jazz - Part 1" Jet is sitting around with all sorts of junk floating around him and smoking -- and the smoke is streaming upwards (which won't happen in null-G because convection currents won't form). This detail could just be a case of not doing the research, but then Spike walks in and is standing around as though there is gravity.
  • Two words: magnetic boots. And Faye's ass is definitely magnetic, can't keep my eyes off it...
  • Forget the spaceships, why is everyone walking around on each and every planet, moon, and asteroid as if they all have exactly 1g? Spike was born on Mars and Jet was born on Ganymede-they would both have a hard time walking around on Earth OR Venus, musculature or no since the heart is also affected by low gravity and would require at least 1 1/2 hours of cardio exercise every day to be strong enough to function on Earth-in .3g, meaning Ganymedeans would have to exercise even more! This might be why Jet is so bulky, but nobody else seems to have a problem. On the other hand, Faye and Ed should be much stronger when not on Earth or Venus, having been raised in Earth's stronger gravity well.
    • Advanced space-age medicine!
    • Spike seems to do a lot of exercise. Ed is a kid who barely leaves her computer; she is probably weaker than normal for a human being raised on Earth, and even if she isn't she doesn't get into any kind of action that might make the difference relevant. Faye was in hibernation for a long time; her muscles probably weakened and she had to undergo extensive therapy wherever she woke up. As for the other people, many of the people on the show tend to be people with bounties; criminals who are likely to put an emphasis in beefing up. Yes, I realize this is all hand waving and the show really didn't give a damn about any of this, but hey, what can one do.
    • As part of their terraforming, planets have artificial gravity. Yes, planet-wide.
• Did Spike say "Bang" at the beginning of the first episode?
  • At what point? Because the opening with "Memory" playing doesn't seem to show anyone saying anything, and as far as I remember, the episode per say starts with Spike doing katas followed by Jet telling him that lunch is served.
  • There is an episode early on (I think it was either 1 or 2) where Spike throws something in the air, makes a gun with his hand, and says "Bang" just before the credits.
• Hyperspace in general behaves somewhat inconsistently anyway, but nothing excuses the long lines of hula hoops stretching throughout the Solar System-keeping them together would be an absolute nightmare since each individual ring would have a slightly different orbital velocity-the ones closer to the sun or a planet would be orbiting faster then the ones orbiting further away. How do they all stay together?
  • I always assumed that the rings constantly monitored the position/velocity/acceleration/jerk of the whole system of rings and made minor corrections to keep the whole thing together. Perhaps this was Chessmaster Hex's contribution? Of course, it'll never come out in the series itself since none of the charachters are engineers.
  • I always thought that the rings were only present at the start and end of the journey (maybe they contribute to acceleration and deceleration?). It's insane to think there's rings along every space lane... it'd take far too much time and resources to build them.
• So Ein was originally supposed to be a super-smart dog, making him worth tons of money to his pursuers, but at no point in the series does he ever behave more intelligently than a normal dog. Show, Don't Tell.
  • In Brain Scratch, they put the Brain Dream on him while they hack SCRATCH's website. Ed's hacking programs begin to work, despite Ed not having done anything. Ein is shown moving his head in time with the hacking process-it's him hacking the website!
  • He also plays Shogi (I think that's Shogi, anyway) in one episode. Granted, it was only one move, but it was good. He drives a car in the episode they find him in, dodges a net cannon in the same, and is smart enough to jump to Spike's ship as well. Ein has little moments you really have to look for. Blink and they pass right by.
  • In any episode where Ed plays a big role, Ein is her Straight Man.
  • Also, Ein can talk to cows. Can you talk to cows? Didn't think so.
  • Discounting all those instances... Ein clearly shows more intelligence than the average dog in more or less every scene he's in. Just not necessarily more than the average FICTIONAL dog.
• Why did Gren keep his breasts? I mean, really, do they not have mastectomies in the future? He's already psychologically scarred like a motherfucker from his imprisonment/Vicious's betrayal, so it's not like he needs a pair of great stonking tits to physically remind him why he's looking for revenge. Not to mention how much easier it would make catching him once he became a bounty. "Okay, amigos, you're looking for a man who loves jazz and has breasts the size of a baby's head!" How many people could possibly fit that description? Then there's the implication that Grencia's gay, meaning the cliché male reason for having and keeping breasts would be non-applicable.
  • Well, Gren was convicted of treason, and he's now living on one of the crappier planets in the system. He might be poor too, but I wouldn't know about that. I think one of those reasons would cover it.
    • Also possible that he couldn't just bring himself to do it, perhaps he grew attached to them (wink, wink) or maybe, while not exactly super poor, he couldn't get himself to spend "so much" at a single thing that wasn't that important to him. Alternatively, he could be a closet travestite (considering his situation, that would be a glass closet).
  • Plus, even with advanced medical science, masectomy is not a walk in the park, especially bilateral masectomy. It's easier and less complicated (not to mention cheaper) to just keep the boobs.
• Despite my love for the show, what's always bugged me is that if you think too hard about them, most of the episodes don't make a whole lotta sense. Why does VT get so pissed and go after the bounty head? Why doesn't Rocco just hand over the gray ash plant and sell the seeds? How could the bounty heads get all those guns onto the Venus shuttle in their friggin' carry-ons, for crying out loud? (I can't even bring a bottle of stinkin' water!) How did the Bebop not burn up on re-entry or crash and leave a gaping hole in the ground when they were * out of fuel* in "Mushroom Samba"? You get the picture. Personally, I gave up trying to figure it all out and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
  • VT was a bounty hunter in the past, perhaps she saw the chance to revive the old days for some time. About the guns in the Shuttle, truth be told, with a little money in the right place you could too bring your stinkin' water. Not burning up....it's a spaceship and it's supposed to not do that (dunno, really) about not crashing perhaps "out of fuel" means "out of fuel significant enough to travel, but still enough to make an emergency landing so everyone aboard the ship actually survives". Still, yeah, it's fiction, enjoy the ride.
    • "Enjoy the ride" has a much deeper meaning for this show than as an excuse. Bebop is very stylistic. The sci-fi elements are the way they are because the worldbuilding is designed to give the solar system a very old west, frontier, "we're new here, we're trying not to mess it up" feel. This takes precedence over realism, hence the Bebop being able to make safe landings despite being out of fuel. It's like how in Fallout, the bombs fell in 2077 but everything looks like it came from the '50s. Part of the charm is that 2077 was what people in the 50s thought 2077 would look like instead of a realistic guess. Part of the charm of Bebop is that things work the way they do, and characters react to them accordingly, even if its a poor guess about how the future will work.
• Why did Vicious leave Spike alive at the end of Jupiter Jazz Part One? Spike was lying unconscious before him, and he just walked away from a man he's been trying to kill for years like it was nothing. Sure, they might have just been trying to keep Spike out of their business for the moment, but that doesn't mean Spike still isn't a threat to the Syndicate.
  • Ling shot him with a disguised tranquilizer round instead of a real bullet and Vicious just assumed Spike was dead.
• We never found out the connection between Faye and Julia. In Ballad of Fallen Angels, Faye sings the same song that Julia did in the past. Plus, there's the way she reacted when Vicious told her who he was. The biggest hint of their connection was in The Real Folk Blues when Julia clearly knows who Faye is even if Faye doesn't seem to directly know her . . . or at least remember knowing her.
  • It can be assumed that the song is not exclusive to, or created by Julia, and is an existing song, that Faye just happened to have sung when Spike thought of Julia singing it --- which might have been caused by Faye singing it. Otherwise, Spike likely would've reacted strongly to Faye singing a song only Julia knew. It's also possible that Julia knew Spike was part of the Bebop crew, and that Faye herself was part of it too.
• Why did the writers have to include the gateway system with Hyperspace in the Bebopverse? The entire series is set within the solar system. Sure, getting from planet to planet in days or weeks seems unrealistically fast, but at least it's way more realistic than traveling in hyperspace. It's not even necessary for the moon to blow up as this could have been caused by some other excuse. As for the tollbooth crimes, the toll could have been replaced by harbor dues of some kind. The whole gateway thing seems like gratuitous Applied Phlebotinum to me.
  • Not gratuitous at all if you ask me (1) It establishes a non-ftl method of travel that explains how interplanetary travel is so quick (2) They use the gate in subplots. Phlebotinum is suppose to aid the story and as far as I i can tell it does just that.
    • Not just subplots, either; the entire plot of "Bohemian Rhapsody" depends on the gate system.
  • There's another important reason for Gate communication to be present, as well. It's about means of travel and how it relates to what ship one owns. Difficult travel by very realistic means, in addition to making travel times very long, would mean few would be able to ever do that. People would be planet-bound for the most part. Think about how few people own a private jet in the present day. A spaceship with slow space travel technology would be a much bigger deal. On the other hand, *too* advanced, too fast ships would not be good either - they would remove the sense of isolation, of colonies being really separate entities that sets much of the tone of the series. Since space is big, much of actual interaction (hunting for criminals, police blockades, space trucks, dogfights, prison ship mutinies) would be meaningless. In semi-realistic space, two ships are very unlikely to ever meet. The presence of the Gates creates the sense of vast distances while making the actually travel-able space (gates and their surroundings, basically) sufficiently claustrophobic for actual interaction/short-distance travel to occur. In a nutshell - without gates, either travel between colonies other than big government projects would be unlikely, OR it would be so easy as to render most of the plot and the very concepts of the series (including the idea of bounty hunters that don't operate on a strictly planetary scale) impossible to defend.
• I was gonna ask why they had ftl but never use it to leave the solar system. Its the only scifi franchise I've heard of that's like that.
  • There is no FTL in Bebop; not even in Hyperspace. It was once stated that a trip to Venus in three days was incredibly fast.
  • Even if it were, it wouldn't work because hyperspace only goes from one gate to another. There hasn't been enough time between the invention of spaceflight and 2071 for people to go anywhere meaningful at sublight speed. (a possible solution, however, would be to send somebody in a ship out at sublight speed for some time (say, 1 year) with the supplies to build a gate. They get there, build a gate, and can then fly back, while a different, refueled ship with a different crew flies out to the gate and continues the journey. It'd still take an insanely long time to get anywhere, but at the very least it wouldn't have to be 1 ship and crew the whole time).
    • It's taken the Voyager 1 Probe 33 years to get to the border of what is considered interstellar medium. A ship with supplies and construction material for the gate would have to expend alot of energy to get to any reasonable amount of distance outside of the solar system. Then there are complications with interstellar radiation, if space travel is even possible, distance reachable with realistic timeframes. It would take centuries to reach the closest star to us (Proxima Centauri). Travel from the Earth to the Moon with conventional rockets would take up to a year, without careful consideration of optimal planetary positions. You would be getting nowhere, real slow, with sublight speeds across solar systems. Then concerns about repairs and malfunctions come about.
    • None of the above are deal breakers and at 240 times faster the gates ARE functionally an FTL drive at anything over at about 0.4 percent C. Bebop has massive space based infrastructure and extremely powerful torch drives (even ignoring gates the way they casually make and break orbit and jet around planetary systems shows this). A large multi-staged torch ship that can reach C fractional speeds is within their capabilities. Even a doable say 5% of C would effectively be a 12c starship Alpha Centauri in about three months. If you can push that up to say 50% (much harder, but maybe doable with effort) you've got tens of thousands of stars within a years flight once the gate is up. Setting up the network would be SLOW, but the speed is high enough to make a small interstellar state possible once in place. Still we're talking a long game here centuries to get the gates to even nearby stars then probably set up a workshop there to send out the next wave while you colonize. We'd be looking at time spans of millennial and it would likely only be seriously considered to even start once the solar system itself was saturated.
  • Hyperspace allows travel at 240 times normal speeds, but you need to use the gates to enter and exit, and those are only active in regular space. You can't move outside of the hyperspace corridor either. What is the real head scratcher is the Virus Cluster Bombs that get trapped in hyperspace are viewable, at what seems a regular speed in normal space, yet they are supposed to be traveling at 240 times the regular speed.
    • Possibly crossing the boundary of a closed gate brings them to normal speed without taking them out of hyperspace. I mean, it's obvious there's some bad effect to doing that, otherwise the terrorists wouldn't be freaking out and firing the braking thrusters for all they're worth when they notice the gate closing.
• One thing I've never understood is why the roof explodes in episode 26 as Spike goes into his final fight.
  • Possibly he chucked his last grenade? He was using explosives at key moments to make his run to the top floor. Whether a grenade or one of his IEDs would've actually been powerful enough to blow the skylight is another matter...
• In the "The Real Folk Blues part 1" there are three instances of Improbable Aiming Skills in a series that usually averts it. First is when Faye mangages hit the tire of a moving car, second time is when Faye shoots out the tire of another moving car only this time she is in a moving car, the final time isn't fired by Faye(as far as I know anyway) but some random guy who manages to shoot both of Vicious' binds on his hands through a cloud of smoke.
  • Agreed, especially with the Mook. He should have missed terribly, as all good mooks should.
• Faye's been conscious for only 3 years. How did she get that good at flying her ship that fast?
  • Maybe one of her hobbies before her hibernation was flying. She did come from a wealthy family that could have paid for her training. On the other hand, she's only be conscious for 3 years, but she had to survive on her own-she probably had to stay light on her toes and learn quickly.
• If Ed's father's name is Appledelhi Siniz Hesap Lutfen, how is her (is it official?) real name Francoise Appledelhi and not Francoise Lutfen? (or Appledelhi Francoise for that matter)
  • This is a man who forgot his daughter at a day care, then was reunited with her for three minutes before forgetting her again, and has never learned the name of his assistant. He probably just picked one of his names randomly when he filled out the birth certificate.
  • Er, you could make the argument that since it's a Japanese name, then the first name is actually the last, but that's only if you're grabbing for straws, because it doesn't apply to any of the other characters.
    • Fun fact! Her dad's name means "excuse me, check please" in Turkish.
• It's probably a case of Rule of Funny / Rule of Drama, but in a majority of the episodes our heroes can barely afford to eat. Yet while tracking down bounties they burn what must be a not-insignificant amount of fuel, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Consider: A Cup O' Noodles costs $.30. A single round of pistol ammunition IRL goes for about $.25. If Spike's Swordfish has rifle-caliber machineguns, each one of those rounds going downrange costs about $.50, and there are hundreds expended. If those are actually autocannon (20mm+), the price must be an order of magnitude larger. And let's not get into Faye's guided rockets...
  • In the future, due to inflation, food costs slightly more than bullets. And rockets. And fuel. And bandages.
  • Maybe they're taking all those things into account when they consider their food budget.
  • Refer to the WMG that claims that Jet actually has a crapload of money from the bounties which he uses to repair the ship and buy supplies, but purposely doesn't share with the crew because they'd just piss it away. Faye would steal the money and gamble it away and there's no point in buying more food because Spike would just eat all up anyway.
  • None of the three would be above keeping some bounty's guns, ammo, food, money, or property. Also, bulk purchases. Or Black market goods.
• Is Julia named after the song by The Beatles? "Space Cowboy" is clearly a reference to "The Joker" ("Some people call me the Space Cowboy, some call me the gangster of love"). I wouldn't be surprised if they referenced music beyond episode titles.
  • "You're Gonna Carry That Weight" is the last line of Cowboy Bebop. It's also a reference to a Beatles song, "Carry that Weight." It's a song thought to be about the band breaking up, and that nothing that the group did as individuals would ever shed the weight of their past, and that none of the achievements they accomplished as individuals would be as meaningful as what they had in the group.
• Why is the manga so different? I love the anime, but compared to it, the manga's so...strange.
  • Unlike many anime shows, the manga for Cowboy Bebop came after the show was already finished (I think) and the production staff was different for both. It's like a tie-in comic for a movie.
• The crew's heavy smoking bothers me sometimes:
  • Why do people still smoke that heavily in the future, having known for over an entire century how unhealthy it is? Do they rely on future advances in medicine to stay healthy, or do they just not care because they're societal outcasts and Smoking Is Cool?
    • It's entirely in character for Spike to not really care. Aside from that, plenty of people today smoke heavily.
  • Jet says "no smoking" in the lounge when they have Meifa on board the ship. Okay, that's great, she's a kid and shouldn't be exposed to smoke. But why does he allow it in the first place? Their main computers are in there. All that smoke would be terrible for computers!
    • In that case, tell Ritsuko Akagi to stop smoking so much, too.
  • Future-age cigarettes that don't give you cancer and make you smell of roses?
• In "Sympathy for the Devil", they explained why Wen's body stop aging. However how does this explain the gunshot between the eyes and being caught in a explosion when his car crashed into a gas station. He can't age but that doesn't not mean that he is invincible.He should of still died when spike shot him.(as we saw when spike first shot him that he can bleed)
  • Wen has been lacking an element the rest have had for a while: Time. That's why the stone was such an important thing, it was "returning time to him", basically restoring his own personal time-flow to what it always should have been. If time is doing such strange things to him as to keep him eternally young, there's no way to really tell what else it's done to him without studying him. It could be that most damage won't touch him because his time-flow is out of sync with what's attempting to damage him. As for the explosion, he could always have gotten just clear enough of it that it did no real damage (i.e., jumping out of the car at the last second and we just don't see it thanks to the explosion.)
• In the finale, why does Spike do his one-man army routine through the Syndicate headquarters, instead of just strafing the place with the Swordfish II's plasma cannon? He was able to fly up and land in front of the door unopposed, so they don't seem to have anti-aircraft systems in place.
  • Spike wasn't doing run of the mill business. He wanted personal revenge on Vicious and to him that meant destroying everything he owned and killing him personally. If he were to just fire on the building with the Swordfish, I doubt he'd feel like he won anything. Plus, he seemed as if he was prepared to die in this conflict so he didn't need to be completely strategic.
  • Plus maybe the Syndicate has anti-air defenses and he wouldn't get off more than a few shots before getting blasted out of the sky.