Cowboy Bebop (1998): Cowboy Bebop: Black Dog Serenade Rewatch
November 9, 2014 6:30 AM - Season 1, Episode 16 - Subscribe
An ISSP prison ship has undergone a mechanical malfunction, and has been taken over by the prisoners it was transporting, led by Udai Taxim, the Syndicate assassin who took Jet's arm. Jet's former partner, Fad, enlists him for the retrieval operation, but Fad's motivations might not be as noble as they seem.
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Another Jet-centric session; By now, it's been set up that the villains and guest characters in any given CB ep are almost always reflections of our main characters -- generally whichever lead is the focus of the ep. Here we've got Jet coming up against two such characters in Fad and Udai. Fad is basically what would have happened to Jet if he'd played the ISSP/Syndicate backscratching game, and Udai is the mirror of Jet's legendary "Black Dog" tenacity from his pre-bounty hunting days.
Jet's exchange with Faye about his bionic arm is also telling. To Jet, it's not a tragic mark of something that happened to him in the past, but something that he fully owns as a consequence of his own actions. "This arm is my arm! I don't need instructions." The show's matter-of-factness in dealing with Jet's arm always struck me as interesting -- it's something the animators threw in as an extra visual component (which basically makes Jet slightly more challenging to animate), but it never really serves as a sci-fi plot device, i.e. it never goes on the fritz at the wrong time or does anything beyond what a normal human arm can do. For all intents and purposes, Jet's arm is just an arm, except for what it tells us about his character.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:54 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]