This episode’s preview is just Ed humming “Wo Qui Non Coin.”
Session #24: Hard Luck Woman
Original Airdate: April 10, 1999
Written by: Michiko Yokote
Title Card Song: “Piano Bar II” – This is another version of “Memory” one of the series’s most iconic and important tracks.
There’s a special feeling, not quite melancholy, at the end of a late night with good friends where the night started with laughter but the conversation got deeper and now it’s time to go.
“Hard Luck Woman,” named for the KISS song from Rock and Roll Over, is the last call for Bebop. There are still two episode’s after this, but this is when Bebop starts to put the chairs on the tables and pack the instruments up. It’s time to start saying good bye.
Ed finds Appledelhi, her father, whose name is meant to sound like the Turkish for “Excuse me, check please.” Faye remembers her past and learns she has nothing to go back to.
It’s tempting to just not talk about this episode beyond these few paragraphs. You’ll get so much more from watching it that rehashing it in prose just seems a bit pointless, but we haven’t come through 23 episodes to stop talking now.
I want to start with Faye’s plot line. Jet and Spike have been pretty passive in dealing with their pasts. When something comes up, they handle it, but they generally don’t go looking for those loose threads.
Faye takes the reigns. It’s implied this isn’t the first night she’s spent analyzing the video she received and trying to find some clues about her past from it. With Ed’s help, she finds the Merlion statue from the video, which is an iconic statue in Singapore. It seems that finding the statue and meeting Sally Yung, a high school classmate who is now elderly, is enough to start a trickle of memories that soon turns into a flood.
Faye rushes off to find her childhood home, and we see her memories coming back, images of her childhood. But the really painful message of this plot line is that you can’t go home again. It’s not a revolutionary message, but it’s beautifully delivered.
Meanwhile, Ed is learning from Faye’s example. It’s easy to miss behind her chaotic behavior, but Ed is an impressionable kid. She looks up to the Bebop crew, especially Faye. She see’s Faye looking for her past, and, when a link to her father falls into her lap, Ed decides to do the same. When Faye tells Ed about how important it is to find the place you belong, Ed decides to do just that.
Appledehli is a hoot, but he’s one of my least favorite characters just because his Don Quixote gimmick takes precedence over his daughter. He and his assistant are traveling around the planet trying to make a map of Earth’s surface as continued meteor showers change it on a near daily basis. Their goal is to somehow restore order from chaos with maps. Appledehli also has an interesting fighting style. Despite his eccentricity, he’s grounded and solid in battle, the earth to Spike’s water.
It’s easy to see where Ed gets her eccentricity from, but it still bugs me that she leaves the Bebop to try to hunt him down. The episode ends with Ed and Ein leaving the Bebop for good, Faye laying in the rubble that used to be her room, and Spike and Jet left with what was meant to be a feast for five.
In most contexts, two grown men emotionally eating a couple dozen eggs would be fodder for laughter, but Bebop keys this weird, emotional moment just right. It gets my eyes to water every time. Having had a few Thanksgivings where family was missing from the meal for all the worst reasons, this probably hits extra close to home for me.
When the episode closes, it seems Spike and Jet are own their own again, and we close with “SEE YOU COWGIRL, SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE!”
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