This episode’s preview is narrated by Ed with comments from Spike and Faye.
Session #9: Jamming With Edward
Original Airdate: December 19, 1998
Written by: Dai Satō
Title Card Song: There is no title card track this episode. Instead, we get traditional Japanese summer sounds playing in the background. The cicadas and other chirping creatures should be familiar to just about any anime fan.
This episode takes its name from a Rolling Stones album. It seems odd, now that I’m going through each episode like this, that we’re about a third of the way through the series and just now introducing Ed.
Ed is clearly inspired by Pippi Longstocking, but she also apparently was inspired by Yoko Kanno. The character was going to be a boy but was changed to a girl later on to even out the quartet.
Once the episode gets underway we meet our lonely satellite re-carving the Nazca lines then we jump to Ed, sprawled out in the sun using her goggles to net dive.
When Ed accesses the Earth Gate registry, most of the ship names are references to makers of pool cues, excluding Bebop and possibly a few others.
Yuuri Kellerman is a clear reference to Uri Geller and is voiced by Michael McConnohie as a Peter Lorre impression.
When Ed hacks the computer on board the Bebop, they reuse the screens for Giraffe and Zebra from “Sympathy for the Devil.” There’s also a screen that seems to be a list of bounties from the police, and that reuses part of the list of pool cue manufacturers from the gate registry.
The Piyoko candy is real, although the real version is called Hiyoko. I’m not clear on if that’s a brand name or what, but if you’re thinking they’re like Peeps, you’re in the right neighborhood.
We get a really good feel of life on Earth in this episode. It’s as diverse as ever, but the people still living there seem to be poor, eccentric or some combination of the two. This is also the episode where we learn that after the astral gate incident, people had to move underground, and they launched powerful super computers into space to supplement their communications technology. MPU, who is a clear visual reference to HAL 9000, is a spy satellite disguised as a weather satellite.
I suspect the list of satellites Ed access via the Outernet is also full of references, but those names are less unique so my research hit a dead end.
Big Shot makes its first appearance since “Honky Tonk Women” to deliver the news that the government has ruled that computers aren’t valid bounty heads, leaving our heroes empty-handed once again.
It’s not clear what becomes of MPU at the end, but I like to assume he became part of Ed’s computer, Tomato.
SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY.
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