Cowboy Bebop is interesting because in many ways it encapsulates both the best and worst things about episodic series within its runtime.
The premise is simple enough and works perfectly for the kind of story Cowboy Bebop is - one about these drifting mercenaries simply doing odd jobs across the universe, with no overarching goal beyond living paycheck to paycheck. The cast are a colorful bunch and have a fair amount of fun interactions with each other, and the episodic stories vary wildly in terms of what they're about. Good enough, so what then is the issue?
The episodic stories are incredibly inconsistent in terms of quality, some being excellent, others being mediocre if not outright bad.
The more comedy-focused episodic stories are fine, but act as a kind of mood whiplash with the darker parts of the series - but then there's ones that are outright pretty damn bad, standouts including the infamous Feng Shui episode or the episode Edward's introduced in. This lack of consistency (to say nothing of most episodes following a certain format, more on that later) make Cowboy Bebop an incredibly difficult show to sit down and get engrossed in.
That's to say nothing of how the central narrative is structured - this show is episodic in the true sense of the term and from what I can gather not even told in chronological order, which while makes sense to an extent (the entire point is that these characters are static and numb to what's happening around them) means that the central narrative and random episodic stories have a clear, thick dividing line between them, with the narrative essentially coming out of nowhere at random. There's an argument to be made about how this fits the idea of Spike trying to run away from his past, with his past finding a way to chase after him anyway - this is a weak argument that isn't helped by a certain issue in how the story is presented.
You don't get to see virtually any of the side cast outside the scope of the episodic parts they're introduced in, and this includes characters who are relevant to the central narrative outside of a few quick flashbacks. This was a deliberate design choice and I heavily disagree with it because it leaves the viewer thoroughly disengaged from everything happening in the story, meaning when the main narrative does return and kick back in full force, I have no reason to care about it beyond being an observer to Spike's mistakes. Why should I care about his emotional investment to Julia, or rivalry with Vicious, when his dynamic with Jet and Faye are what I see much more of anyway? And while there can be an argument that much like them being observers to all the tragedies that happen and growing numb to it, we're placed in a position where we too are growing numb to their issues, it also makes it impossible to relate to these characters despite the themes about overcoming the past being general and easy to relate to - the distance the story uses to invoke this message is paradoxically both its strongest asset and worst enemy.
The central cast are a largely static bunch in a sense - they do progress slightly over the course of whatever there is for a narrative, Jet has several episodic arcs dedicated to that in particular - but their dynamic stays as that of a pack of strangers keeping their distance from one another while awkwardly trying to get closer only to drift further. This isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, but the way the series presents this is through the cast (and by cast I really just mean Spike and Faye) rushing headlong like headless chickens over and over again into making mistakes as other cast members (which happens to be consistently Jet) tries to stop either of them from doing so. This very quickly gets old and I refuse to digest the idea that this is repetition for the sake of emphasis because it happens so many times that the viewer is likely to get really sick of it really quickly - Faye going off gambling is one of the most unfunny gags in the history of anime and she's such an annoying character with such a thoroughly uninteresting backstory that it baffles me to the moon that people can point at her and claim she's one of the greatest female characters in anime history. That backstory is relevant to the themes of the story, but it's so emotionally uninteresting and overdone that it's shocking that it isn't shat on harder by fans and detractors of this alike.
This isn't to say that there's no positives to Cowboy Bebop - hell, I'd dare say there's more positives than negatives. Spike does manage to be an engaging character from start to finish, even if there's issues I already went over in how his arc is presented. Jet's actually a character I didn't have much of an issue with - his tolerance for Faye's bullshit notwithstanding, his comradery with Spike was authentic and genuine, and several of the best moments in the series were with him and Spike bickering over how horrid the food is. Ed's actually somewhat entertaining after her debut episode - the cringe factor still occasionally comes back, but it's nowhere near as bad as some people would have you believe. And Ein, well, being a dog aside, is pretty fun.
The visuals are absolutely stunning and have aged magnificently - the backgrounds are beautiful, the animation's gorgeous and the way the series does worldbuilding is actually something I find pretty underrated - there's no massive infodump on the world, just scattered pieces of exposition as the cast explore random parts of the setting, with said setting having extremely varied locations and cultures that always if nothing else showed a nice, new thing for the viewer to look at. The soundtrack is spectacular and great, there's a fuckton of neat references to Western pop culture, the action is usually absolutely gorgeous and varies from gun fights to spaceship battles to hand-to-hand combat, all of which is done insanely well. The central narrative despite all my issues with it is still decently engaging, and the ending is memorable as hell and among the most iconic in anime history for a reason.
If this review comes off as harsh, it's because Cowboy Bebop is put on such a high pedestal insofar as episodic anime goes that it comes off as baffling - not even by the fanbase, but even by the series itself, which claims in random transition slides that it will be a new work that will invent a genre of its own (which by any standard is a shockingly narcisstic thing to put in there, influential and classic this show may be it certainly did not do that). There's better episodic anime out there (Natsume and Mushishi) and better cautionary tales out there (Fate/Zero and Gundam IBO) than this series, and they're not nearly as infuriating to watch at points as this is, nor do they have a strange theme about the maturity of accepting the status quo as is - which while makes sense in the context of what the series is trying to preach about humans being cogs in a machine, interesting that everyone from the environmental activists, revolutionaries and terrorists is just portrayed as though their fight is pointless and nothing can or will ever change. The political implications of such an attitude is obvious, and while the series doesn't portray such an attitude positively, it also provides no real counter to it.
In a way, that's the highest I can say about a show like Cowboy Bebop - for all its talk about being revolutionary, the show is in many ways more of the same if you've seen a sizeable number of episodic shows or cautionary tales. And that's just about the biggest slight I can make against a show like Cowboy Bebop - it's decent, but nothing outstanding.
Thank you for reading my review, any and all feedback would be appreciated.
