Spike starts this preview by complaining about doing the promos the same way every week, and he asks if someone else can do them. Ein barks and whimpers for the better part of 30 seconds before choking out “Wild Horses.” It’s a weird one.
Session #19: Wild Horses
Original Airdate: March 6, 1999
Written by: Akihiro Inari w/Kimitoshi Yamane
Title Card Song: “Forever Broke” – This song was originally released on Cowboy Bebop No Disc.
This episode is named for a Rolling Stones song from their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. This episode is a love letter to some of Bebop’s key inspirations; science fiction, aviation and Americana. Before we dive in, I just want to pool the references in this episode in one place.
The bounty heads this episode are named George, Herman and Ruth after George Herman “Babe” Ruth. Doohan is named for James Doohan who played Scotty in the original Star Trek, and Miles is modeled on LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Sound effects from the MOTHER’s boot-up sequence in Alien are used. Doohan’s scrapyard includes a B-25 Mitchell, a Mil Mi-24, an F-22 Raptor, an F-16 Fighting Falcon, an an M4 Sherman tank. The ship that Doohan flies is the Columbia.
The real Columbia was destroyed on re-entry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members. After this, the episode was temporarily taken out of re-plays, and one collection renamed the shuttle Challenger.
When Spike marks on the glass of the Swordfish to help him keep the ship at the right angle to avoid burning up in the atmosphere, this is based off of a real event. Pilot Gordon Cooper had to manually land his capsule when automation failed in the last flight of the Mercury program and used similar marks.
This episode has some incredible narrative efficiency. We learn that Spike is on Earth because we see the ruined moon behind Faye while she and Jet are trying to bait the pirates. Miles’s love for baseball sets us up for Jet using the baseball radio frequency that makes the second half of the episode work. Doohan’s bulletin board full of photos teases that Doohan himself was an ace pilot at one point. We also hear plenty of discussion of MONO computers and ship parts that help make sense of the virus plot. Even the tool or ship part that pricks Spike’s finger becomes important when Spike has to manually navigate the ship.
Doohan is an interesting character to me. As much as I love Bebop, I often want the long-form shonen action version of the show where characters like Doohan get a few hours of screen time instead of a few minutes. Doohan built Swordfish, and it’s implied that he was its original pilot and that Spike was his assistant at some point in the past. It’s also implied, as I said above, that Doohan was an ace pilot at one point. The way he’s drawn tends to invoke a haggard, old man version of Spike, at least to me, and I think we’re supposed to see what Spike could have become if he hadn’t joined the Syndicate.
This is a fun episode, but it is also one of the episodes that seems to move the quickest. We end back on the standard “SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY.”
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