After last episode’s Alien parody, Ed narrates the preview. She says the rest of the cast is dead, Cowboy Bebop is over, and she’ll be starring in a new show, Cowgirl Ed. The rest of the cast jumps in at this point to correct her. The narration is a little at odds with the somber tone of the animation and music for the preview.
Session #12: Jupiter Jazz (Part 1)
Original Airdate: January 9, 1999
Written by: Keiko Nobumoto
Title Card Song: “Space Time” – This is an unreleased track. It’s very subtle, and it really only became clear to me that there was a track playing when the title card hits.
We know we’re in for another Spike episode when Laughing Bull and his son start the episode. Laughing Bull calls a shooting star the tear of a warrior who died on the planet and could not reach the Great Spirit so right from the get go, we know somebody is going to die.
We jump to Vicious meeting with the Van, the elderly leaders of the Red Dragon Syndicate. Vicious lies about the death of Mao Yenrai, and it becomes clear that the Van and Vicious are trying to outmaneuver one another.
After the title card, Spike awakes as if from a nightmare. Faye stole their money and their anti-freeze, and the ship is hot and humid. It’s a nice touch that Faye steals the anti-freeze before heading down onto Callisto, a cold, snowy world.
After the humming scene back in “Ballad of Fallen Angels,” Faye and Julia become intertwined characters again when Ed is searching for Faye but finds someone using the codename Julia instead. As Spike is rushing off to find this Julia, Ed has an easy to miss line saying there are no women at the Blue Crow, the source of this Julia’s broadcast.
The Blue Crow could possibly be inspired by the mythical giant bird of Brazilian folklore, but it seems more likely this was just a random, suitably thematic name. There’s a bit of a translation hiccup here. Blue Crow is the name of the town on Callisto, not the bar that features in this episode. The bar is called Rester House.
When Jet tries to get Spike to stop going after whoever is using the codename Julia, Beau Billingslea’s voice work and the animation both do a great job illustrating Jet’s initial mock outrage. Jet is playing at being mad to get Spike to stop, but when Spike calls his bluff, Jet starts getting really mad. This conversation also makes it concrete that Julia is Spike’s old flame, and it tells us that Jet and Spike have been working together for three years.
Callisto has a great atmosphere. The buildings look haphazard and splintered, and there’s a nice, moody bank of clouds hovering over the street level. We see cars crashed and left in the snow. The city seems to be primarily Russian based on the street signs and clothing. Some residents wear gas masks.
Faye and Gren’s first interaction is a reference to a boatload of superstitions about sneezing, and Faye’s name, of course, comes from words for fairy. The song Gren plays and that features for most of the episode is “Goodnight Julia.”
Spike’s outrage when he’s mistaken for Vicious, is probably the angriest we see him in the series.
When Jet enters the bar, the three old men are in the background. The bartender misunderstands his drink order, thinking he’s looking for a bounty hunter, though of course he’s not wrong about that either.
Gren seems to see right through Faye when she talks about not needing comrades.
There’s a lot to get into right at the end of this episode. Lin, who the Van assigned to work with Vicious on this drug deal, turns out to have worked under Spike before Spike left the Syndicate.
Throughout the episode, we’ve gotten bits and pieces about Gren. He fought with Vicious on Titan, and he wants to work out a deal with him now. He escaped prison, but he saved Faye from the gang that Spike fought earlier so he doesn’t appear to be a bad guy. But Gren immediately calls into question assumptions about his character, implying that Faye (and by proxy the audience) can’t really know his intent. When Faye walks in on him in the shower and it’s revealed he has breasts like a woman, it’s clear we don’t really know who we’re dealing with or what’s going on.
Making Gren have both male and female anatomy is probably not a choice you would have seen in Western media 20 years ago. However, Japanese storytelling has always been more comfortable blurring notions of sex and gender to make a point.
The episode ends with Spike shot, laying on his back in the snow, and a “TO BE CONTINUED” title card.
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