![]() ![]() Look out for a recurring gangster character called the Eunuch because he castrates his victims ecoterrorists deploying a chemical that transforms people into trees in a disgusting on-camera fashion and a BDSM mistress who objects to talking with Spike and Jet because “I’m already late for my midnight bukkake.” (*) This can be a very violent, gory, and sexually frank series. The bounty plots are where Bebop is at its strongest, as Julia is dull and Vicious (Hassell sports a white wig making him look like he’s trick-or-treating as the Witcher) is too often a caricatured sociopath(*), though a late-season flashback to Spike’s time as Fearless effectively recontextualizes both characters. It’s always a relief to see a streaming drama that both deploys standalone stories in its episodes and is proficient at telling them, which avoids the kind of narrative bloat that tends to infect a lot of Netflix series. Those stories are mixed and matched from the anime, and merge bounty-of-the-week plots with the more serialized Syndicate story, which plays out in the background until late in the first season. This is a lively and confident series that knows what it is and how it wants to tell its stories. Many of the costumes (most notably Spike’s blue suit with popped shirt collar) and even some of the shots are borrowed from the anime, yet the show never comes across as slavishly imitative or like a museum replica. The visual palette, meanwhile, is a blend of high and low elements, blending modern special effects with Fifties-style green screen in a way that looks simultaneously primitive and cool, so even the sequences that seem cheap pop off the screen in appealing ways. (*) The show is just self-deprecating enough to get away with its various affectations, making sure to show, for example, how bored Faye is whenever Jet begins monologuing about his favorite music. (The closest comparison may be the short-lived Joss Whedon outer-space Western Firefly.) Yet the creative team (including frequent director Alex Garcia Lopez) makes the combination all seem perfectly natural. These individual pieces should not work together as well as they do here, and it’s hard to imagine a live-action show even trying so many disparate elements without having source material that had already done so. Jazz fills the soundtrack - and a lot of the dialogue from Charlie Parker fan Jet(*) - while the technology is a mix of wildly futuristic and retro, from interplanetary holographic communication to top-loading VCRs. ![]() This results in a thick stew of ingredients: science fiction meets neo- noir meets buddy comedy meets Western meets kung fu gangster epic. And, in time, Spike’s ex-Syndicate partner Vicious (Alex Hassell) and ex-lover Julia (Elena Satine) get clues that the man they knew as “Fearless” may not be dead after all. His partner, Spike Spiegel ( John Cho), is secretly a former assassin for the intergalactic Syndicate, while the pair are frequently harassed or assisted by fellow cowboy Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), whose past is a mystery even to herself. ![]() The Bebop belongs to Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), an ex-cop with a metal arm who lost everything when he was framed for the crimes of a fellow officer. ![]() (Much of the action in the premiere, for instance, takes place on the asteroid colony of New Tijuana.) Our heroes are “cowboys,” or bounty hunters, who roam the system on their ship, the Bebop, in search of fugitive criminals. Earth is uninhabitable, so humanity has spread out to various planets and moons and other locales across the solar system, which have been terraformed to resemble our home world. The series takes place in the 22nd century. The Netflix series was developed by comic-book writer and Marvel TV/movie veteran Christopher Yost, with Andre Nemec serving as showrunner and several members of the anime creative team (notably composer Yoko Kanno) involved. ![]()
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