Cowboy Bebop (1998): Cowboy Bebop: Boogie Woogie Feng Shui   Rewatch 
December 14, 2014 10:17 AM - Season 1, Episode 21 - Subscribe

Jet receives a cryptic e-mail from his old friend, Pao, who is one of the top three feng shui masters on Mars. Or was, as Jet finds Pao's gravestone, where he meets Pao's daughter, Mefia, and some hitmen. Spike and Faye speculate about Jet's relationship to Mefia, which gets to Jet, but they all work together to solve the mystery of the sun stone.

"I hated you all this time... I despised you all this time ..."

"Once again, unchanging daily life has returned, just as it was before. One thing has changed, though... I no longer read the fortunetelling pages in magazines."
posted by filthy light thief (2 comments total)
 
I just watched this one Vimeo, if you're looking for a source. I won't link to it, because it may not last, though the video was uploaded 7 months ago.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:18 AM on December 14, 2014


I feel like this one was just one additional draft away from being a pretty great episode. The combination of Jet's private-eye narration (which was pretty cool on its own), the pseudo-mystical quest plot (which seemed slightly out of place for CB), and the lack of agency with Meifa's character (perhaps it was the inertness of her English VO) just didn't quite gel into a story that fully hung together for me.

I think part of my discomfort with the episode comes from Spike and Faye's insinuations about Jet and Meifa, and the fact that the episode goes on to do very little to dissuade the viewer from seeing it that way. I get that the intention was to present Jet as a surrogate father/older brother figure for Meifa, but the way they kept hammering on the older-boyfriend joke, it started to feel like the dominant frame for the relationship. Jet's casual misogyny is a problematic aspect of the show -- and one that I feel is actually addressed fairly well in-show as an intentionally-written character flaw -- but casting Jet as a potential ephebophile (if intentional) comes across as more than slightly gross.

Also, did Jet actually snap the one gangster's neck instead of just knocking him out, or was that the sound FX guys going overboard? I realize the show has had a pretty high body count thus far, but when our main characters kill, it's typically in self-defense; Jet's a pretty by-the-book type, so it seemed really out of place.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:55 PM on December 21, 2014


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