#Cowboy bebop spike age series#

It might seem strange that Spike feels hypercompetent despite so rarely actually catching a bounty, but the dude takes such a relaxed attitude to life that it’s hard not to get caught up in his indifference to failure and his joy in what he is good at (also here is where the episodic structure helps – the implied long stretches of time between episodes also implies bounties they did catch, and that we’re seeing the most interesting ones).

#Cowboy bebop spike age series#

The series has a strong sense of play underlying it, as if we and Spike are just throwing things together to see how it turns out.

Spike is a bounty hunter, and the majority of episodes are about either him or another member of the crew chasing a bounty head, and what changes every episode is who they’re chasing and where they’re chasing them from the badass drug dealer Asimov Solensan on the streets of Tijuana in the first episode to elderly ecoterrorist Twinkle Marie Murdoch in a cafe in the fourth to kindhearted tragic lowly gang member Rocco Bannero on the streets of Venus in the ninth. Some shows achieve unity of action by showing all the consequences of a single action Bebop, being episodic, achieves it with a recurring premise. Twenty-seven is old enough to get good at something, but young enough to still have so much to learn (and old enough to realise how much there is to learn – in Rumsfeld terms, fewer unknown unknowns and more known unknowns). I always thought Spike was cool, I always semi-secretly wanted to become him in a twisted way, that’s happened, because Cowboy Bebop was always about being twenty-seven. It’s always been escapist fun for me, and I’ve always been able to perceive a greater depth beneath that, but I understand it fully for the first time. This watch, I’m now the same age as the protagonist, Spike Spiegel – never stated in the show, but word from the creators is that he’s twenty-seven at the end of the series. I’ve been watching Cowboy Bebop once a year for almost every year since I first saw it at sixteen years old.