Adios Cowboy – Arc 1 – Day 31

A twelve-hour day at work means today’s production on Adios, Cowboy was reduced to a standstill. These things happen. I did, however, have a Bebop shaded thought or two while driving from one presentation to the next.

Pop culture from the late 80s up to September 10, 2001 had some interesting ideas on what would come next after the West “won” the Cold War. For all the stories that saw fit to explore the primacy of the liberal democracy as a force for planetary unification, there were just as many who feared the coming of the corporation as a force to supplant the nation state as The Next Thing. I’m trying to decide where Cowboy Bebop sits on this scale.

I don’t know that the show is painting the syndicates as power brokers befitting the likes of Shadowrun. They seem more like organized crime families with OCP’s veneer of legitimacy. Even on Callisto, a moon that screams of being a run-down company town, it is hard to tell who is in charge.

The challenge is made all the more confounding when the show insists on framing the point of view characters as “little people” within the solar system. How can one get a sense of Bebop’s politics and vision when its characters are so disenfranchised as to not care about the universe beyond their next bounty? I suppose I’ll have to figure this out by the time I get episode 11’s review squared away.