Session 09: Jamming With Edward
How to Succeed in Making a Believable Dystopia Without Really Crying
The Earth is a shambles. The economy is a disaster. All the robots are lonely. So how is this episode one of the show’s funniest?
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
Cowboy Bebop exists in one of the most realistic dystopias ever to grace animation. The main characters — despite bearing the glamorous job titles of “bounty hunters” — are constantly scraping for cash, running from organized crime syndicates, and dealing with an incompetent government.
Most of the time, this aspect of the show isn’t really mentioned. The crushing weight of space capitalism serves simply as a backdrop to the film noir relationship drama, gritty action sequences, and moody, bittersweet reflections on the past set to the jazz stylings of Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. But in “Jamming with Edward,” the details of how a universe exists where humans can explore the solar system, but are still forced hunt down criminals just to afford their next meal, are fleshed out.
“Nothing good comes from the Earth anymore.” –Jet Black
What this episode lacks in the series’ usual blend of hand-to-hand combat and darkly quotable lines it makes up for with an upbeat soundtrack, a brief exploration of consciousness beyond the human experience, and beautifully rendered space laser theatrics — starting with the recreation of the Nazca Lines in the episode’s opening sequence.
“Nothing good comes from the Earth anymore,” Jet Black laments as the Bebop crew reaches the home of the human race. And it’s obvious upon arrival that he’s right: the planet is a broken mess of a place, filled with rubble and debris from long-fallen buildings. All that ever made it remarkable, from its human wonders to its vast variety of plants and wildlife, is a shell of what it once was—if it even exists at all.
The Nazca Lines, which are so dutifully recreated by satellite-borne laser in that first scene, put a fine point on that fact. That the original land carvings had been completely eradicated before the series even began speaks to the extent of destruction caused by the malfunction of the Gate Corporation’s infrastructure. This mysterious company is responsible for the technology that allows humans to travel through space quickly and effectively, but also for the Astral Gate disaster that occurred 50 years before the start of the series—a devastating failure of engineering that destroyed the moon and left the Earth uninhabitable to this day. After the catastrophe, those who could afford to escape the planet did, populating the solar system and bringing with them such human faults as war, political corruption, and income inequality.
Those who remained on Earth were left to scrape by on a planet constantly under siege by meteors that pack the atmosphere and make it difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild. While that hardscrabble existence is most apparent during Jet’s interviews with local residents of a defunct subway system, nearly every scene in this episode reveals the devastation of the planet, with piles of rubble clogging the background and even visibly surrounding the Earth when viewed from space.
Environmental strife is the most obvious issue highlighted by this particular brand of dystopia, but the economic situations feel uncomfortably familiar as well, with the characters effectively operating in their universe’s version of the dreaded “gig economy.” Yet the topics of planet-wide destruction and capitalistic decay that would normally lend a darker tone to most shows never overwhelm this Rolling Stones–inspired session, which also serves as a light-hearted introduction to the show’s comic relief character, Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV.
Known as Ed, for short, the humorous hacker’s presence almost offsets the grim ruination that greets our bounty-hunting heroes on planet Earth. (Almost.) We first meet Ed while she’s relaxing outside on a sunny day, net diving and listening to the weather report. (Chance of rock showers this afternoon: 20%.) A fan of the Bebop crew, she’s excited to find the ship is headed to her home planet on “vacation.” Unfortunately, her attempt to contact the ship is interrupted by a harsh reminder of the realities of living on Earth post-catastrophe when a meteor crashes nearby and sends her and her computer flying through the air. (Chance of rock showers today upgraded to: 90%.)
While Ed’s role in the series is largely to provide some levity to otherwise overly serious situations, she also proves to be the perfect embodiment of the issues brought to light by this particular imagining of the not-so-distant future. From her cyberpunk goggles to her wild hair and unusual clothing to her scuba-inspired navigation of the online world, Ed’s hacker aesthetic is on par with other representations of web-savvy teens in the mid-to-late ’90s. But her overly childish mannerisms, complete lack of social or familial ties, and instant connection with a self-aware but non-sentient object underscore the trauma and loneliness that has defined her life on Earth.
It’s not all bad, though. Ed gets to meet her heroes—thanks to the issuing of an 80 million Woolong bounty for the net-diver thought to be responsible for hacking the weather satellite that caused the land carvings in the show’s open. While Spike opts out of this bounty chase, Jet and Faye set out on a hacker hunt, but are unable to scrape anything together other than a confusingly contradictory set of rumors about a hacker named “Radical Edward” and a specifically packaged “nice souvenir from Earth!” in the form of the marshmallow peep–inspired Piyoko.
Upon discovering the Bebop crew’s intentions, Ed decides to help them out. She accesses the weather satellite responsible for the carvings, only to find it acted on its own accord. Not one to judge a self-aware man-made object, Ed befriends the satellite and nicknames it MPU (it’s like CPU, only “neater!”).
After the police interrupt her chat with MPU, Ed hacks Bebop’s computer to tell the crew she can help them catch their bounty — in exchange for a favor. Faye hastily agrees, and everyone sets to work to manually download MPU, while Ed reveals herself to be the “Radical Edward” everyone was talking about (“What’ve you heard?” she asks Faye, cheekily).
Before completing her plan to download and copy MPU’s data for the bounty placed on it, Ed promises the satellite “it’s not lonely here!” While that might certainly be the case for the newly downloaded AI, it proves true in a far more literal sense for Ed. After a disappointing trip to the police station, Faye urges Jet to take off quickly, despite Ed yelling about a promise, because “Some promises are meant to be broken…in fact, most of ’em are!”
Jet lifts off, leaving Ed on Earth for a rare moment of visible sadness. But she won’t be kept down for long.
Using her remote control, Ed grounds Bebop, and reveals that Faye promised she could be an official member of the crew. Cut to Big Shot (shucks howdy!), where we get the final word on the 80 million Woolong reward: “They won’t pay no bounty on no computer, no how!” A disappointing but familiar experience, for both our show’s protagonists and real-life freelancers the world over.
As the Bebop crew sets off on their next adventure to the quirky gibberish tune of “Cats on Mars,” Jet echoes his sentiment from earlier in the episode: “Nothing good ever comes from Earth.”
Except, as the Bebop crew soon learns, at least one good thing does—the hacker that will save their skins on more occasions than one.
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