Vicious: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop’s Greatest Failure

A failure to embody the name

I am not a fan of Netflix’s live-action attempt at Cowboy Bebop. However, of the many problems I have with the show, there are two I find unforgivable. First, they made Faye into a joke. Second, and the subject of my writing today, Vicious was written as a worthless villain. In, what I can only assume was an attempt to add more depth and humanize him, they made him seem weak. It was as if they couldn’t imagine the ruthless crime lord and a complex human being as the same person.

To be clear, I have no problem with the idea of exploring Vicious as a character more. My problem rest with how Vicious loses any semblance of threat. He is the primary antagonist of the season and Spike’s personal story and yet, he never really feels like he could win. I am going to spoil a lot of the story from here on in, so this is your warning.

The first problem with Vicious is his power dynamics within the show. A villain has to seem powerful, not necessarily strong, but powerful. Vicious lacks any kind of power when dealing with other characters, he is almost always on the weaker end of the dynamic. He had no leverage with Mao, gave in to Santiago quickly, and the show persists in telling you how inferior he is to our protagonist. Spike has a perfect opportunity to kill him early in the season and simply doesn’t. Even while dying Caliban still seems to have the victory over Vicious. At best Vicious seems like a nuisance.

Second, they don’t allow his identity as a crime lord to coexist with their more “human” identity. There is little overlap between Vicious as a man with trauma and Vicious as a criminal. It makes him into a pitiable loser most of the time and then he will suddenly kill an unimportant character in an attempt to show his criminal side. An example of what they may have been trying to go for is Silco in Netflix’s Arcane. Silco is a crime lord with the only line he won’t cross being his adoptive daughter. This is carried over in every interaction he has, whenever an issue with her is brought up, he shuts the conversation down. Vicious lacks any similar link between his two sides. There is an attempt with Julia, but Julia is subjected to his abuse from her first appearance. This invalidates any kind of feelings he has for her and makes them shallow at best. It doesn’t work.

Lastly, and probably the most complex is their lack of commitment to humanizing him. Most of what drives Vicious is kept secret from us until the last three episodes. All the depth they try to give him comes from the reveals in these last three episodes and don’t properly connect to the rest of his character at all. The show attempts to tell Vicious’s story alongside Spike’s but never gives him proper build-up. Vicious talks about losing his mother yet that memory has no weight over his current character. He should have had flashbacks to her death similar to Spike’s own about Julia. It would have shown how impactful that moment was to him.

The elder Caliban being his father has no impact because the elders were faceless antagonists in his story. If they were unmasked and Caliban was the harshest one towards Vicious it would have helped. Instead, we see Vicious kill a character we have no context for and then we see a bit of their relationship. There is zero investment.

The show also tries to leverage Spike and Vicious relationship, which it does rather well… for Spike. During the flashback to Spike’s syndicate days, there is a scene where he breaks his golden rule to save Vicious. It is an excellent scene that had been set up and adds to Spike’s moral complexity. Vicious lacks any such depth building in this flashback despite being one of its three central characters.

Vicious lacks any real substance as a character. You may make the argument that he wasn’t particularly deep in the original anime. That is a fair statement but he didn’t have to be as there wasn’t so much time devoted to him. He was vicious, not simply aggressive. He was a criminal that demanded respect with his actions and not in petulant temper tantrums. He worked excellently as a foil to the carefree and often listless Spike Spiegel. Now, he is simply a nuisance that only poses a problem in the last episode using a clichéd villain tactic in kidnapping a child.

This failure to make Vicious into a real threat kills any tension that could be derived from his impending confrontation with Spike. Why should we worry about a villain whose greatest achievement is being a failure? Because he killed an old guy whose bodyguards were suspiciously lacking guns in a futuristic story where everyone has guns? No. Vicious is the show's worst failure.