Cowboy Bebop Newbie Recap: “Ballad of Fallen Angels”

Catch up on the earlier Cowboy Bebop newbie recaps if you missed them!

“When angels are forced out of heaven, they become devils. You agree, don’t you Spike?”

This episode seemed to be over in the blink of an eye, beginning in unfamiliar territory and ending on a sweet and eerie note. From the gorgeous imagery (the cathedral at the end is a stunner) to its delve into Spike’s backstory, the episode is a success across the board, even if it seems to be over before we’ve gotten the chance to sink our teeth into it.

Mao of the Red Dragon Syndicate and Carlos of White Tiger are in a meeting, negotiating the future before Vicious, a member of Red Dragon, double crosses and kills them both. A fake bounty is put out for Mao’s arrest, which lures Spike in. Unbeknownst to Jet and Faye, both Vicious and Mao are tied to Spike’s past. Whether he was a good guy or bad is left untold, but they were significant enough for him to knowingly walk straight into a trap of Carlos’s making.

Spike spends the first part of the episode meeting with Annie, someone from his past, who believed him dead for the past three years. They lament, drink, and she equips him with a gun and bullets but warns him away from Vicious.

Jet and Faye take more a backseat in the episode in terms of character development, but both get neat singular moments. Faye’s curiosity into the bounty leads her to an opera house, and her descent into Vicious’s private booth is tense and exciting, playing out like a classic film as “Ave Maria” plays in the background. The danger is palpable once she arrives and finds a victim of Vicious disapproval. She’s captured and is a link to reeling Spike to the final confrontation.

Jet meanwhile spends most of the episode trying to remain the crew member who stays cool under pressure by telling Spike that he shouldn’t be out trying to chase the past. When he tries to dig a little deeper and understand why Spike is walking straight into a trap, he’s met with more unanswered questions and the question is turned on him, with Spike asking him how he got his metal arm—another no-real-answer until he later uses it as leverage to try and talk reason into Spike, telling him he got his cybernetic arm for being the exact same sort of reckless as Spike.

All of this culminates in my favorite scene the show has done thus far.

That ending! It’s a six minute sequence that seems transported from an entirely different show. Up to this point, Cowboy Bebop has resided happily in a Western film tonality, with the rogue heroes against the corrupt crooks, and “Ballad of Fallen Angels” warps all of our pre-conceived notions of the show. Spike saunters up to the cathedral with more an artillery of ammunition, from guns to grenades that he tosses casually over his shoulder like a badass.

He isn’t swayed by the henchman threatening Faye at gunpoint and instead pulls the trigger first. Faye runs free and calls Jet as the carnage begins to build, and we get a greater sense of who and what Spike used to be through the taunts tossed at him by Vicious. He believes Spike is a blood-seeking beast like him, circling his prey. Spike tells him that none of that blood is left in him as he and Vicious stare one another down in a cinematic shot, Spike on the ground with his gun to Vicious’s chest, Vicious with his sword to Spike’s shoulder.

Furious, Vicious grabs him by the face (ugh the crunching noise) and throws him bodily from the cathedral, beginning a scene epic in scale despite it being so solely focused on Spike.

The music as Spike falls from the cathedral is particularly beautiful (I’m humming it at work while I type this, which I’m sure makes me seem approachable), as we get brief glances of his life leading up to being a bounty hunter and we see glimpses of the good and the bad, of a blonde woman, him working with Vicious, a storm of bullets and bloodshed, and that particular shot of a rose in the rain. It’s gorgeously shot and inter-cut with Spike’s body falling from the sky—his fall from grace, so to speak—and by the end we still know little about our protagonist, but we’re certainly even more intrigued.

Up until this point, our characters have been thinly drawn with the world surrounding them creating the greatest amount of curiosity. Faye was playful and untrustworthy, Jet gruff and laid back, and Spike was reckless. They only just became a team last episode. “Ballad of Fallen Angels” doesn’t illuminate Spike as a character, but it gives us an idea; it gives him a mysterious background and shades of gray, and it makes his interactions with Jet and Faye all the more interesting.

He awakes later on the ship, badly beaten, awoken by Faye’s humming. Too soon to lose the show’s signature humor, he tells her she’s off key, and she hits him and storms off. It’s nice to see that the show isn’t afraid to address the fact that Spike is, in fact, fallible.

This seems like a game changer episode—one that takes the ideas of the series and makes it a tangible reality. This isn’t just a show about bounty hunters tracking down their marks but also about these crew members and their pasts, nefarious or not, and how they got to where they are today. The first four episodes were fun but on the shallow side. Now there’s some depth.

Allyson Johnson is a twenty something writer and a lover of film and all things pop culture. She’s a film and television enthusiast and critic over at TheYoungFolks.com who spends too much of her free time on Netflix. Her idols are Jo March, Illana Glazer, and Amy Poehler. Check her out at her twitter @AllysonAJ or at The Young Folks.

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