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As the other All Stars did not rewatch and write about Cowboy Bebop, I asked them what they thought about the show. Before speaking to them, I understood their opinions were either broadly negative or, at best, apathetic. I wanted to know what made Cowboy Bebop unsavory to them. I spoke to RJ, Ari and Brandon. Ari’s and Brandon’s perspectives were somewhat clouded by the passage of time; they had both last seen the show five or six years ago. RJ hadn’t said when he last watched the show. After discussing Bebop with the three of them, I came to understand that their perspectives weren’t totally negative, but they each had similar problems with the show that, when compared to other anime they’ve watched, made Cowboy Bebop feel formulaic, boring and dated.

RJ thought the show was good, but said it had some flaws. The series’ episodic structure feels outdated in the face of current anime, which usually have a serial structure with discrete story arcs. Each bounty hunter aboard the Bebop has an arc, and Spike’s is the closest thing to a main plot, but those arcs should have been longer. RJ said, Jet’s side plot should have been more than just a one-off episode. Each episode was an adventure of the week, according to RJ.

Ari said he agreed with RJ’s perspective. He thought the show was boring, and that Spike’s story just wasn’t that great. When asked further about Spike’s story, Ari said, They wanted to jump into a 2 or 3 part story but there was no build up. Spike’s rivalry with Vicious was one of the few things he could recall about the plot. The time between watching the show and answering my questions made it hard for Ari to give me specifics. He took issue with character development and Bebop’s pacing. The show couldn’t keep his attention, and he said he would never recommend Bebop as a first time anime to anyone. Out of ten, he ranked it at six, signaling he finished it but didn’t enjoy it. For context, seventh-ranked shows were titles he enjoyed more often than not, which included Naruto, One Punch Man, and Sword Art Online.

Brandon told me he would recommend [Cowboy Bebop] to some people but not most, citing its age and competition with current anime that offer longer, more involved serial stories. Episodic narratives work better with comedy anime. Cowboy Bebop’s 24-minute episode length didn’t give me enough time to care about what’s happening before it’s over, he said. The relationship between Spike and Vicious was less impactful as a result. He appreciated at the time the lack of tropes, but if he were to rewatch the show now that wouldn’t matter to him as much as it did six years ago. He thought that Great Pretender or Samurai Champloo would be better starting anime for someone interested in capers or neo-noir stories (Samurai Champloo was also directed by Shinichiro Watanabe). On his scoring scale, Brandon ranks Cowboy Bebop at seven alongside Angel Beats! and Dragon Ball Z. His scoring criteria are similar to Ari’s.

In general, the three people I interviewed thought that Bebop’s weakest element was its episodic story. At a 22-minute runtime, each episode moves too fast to grab the viewer’s attention and invest them in a self-contained narrative. If the episode carries no narrative continuity with the rest of the show, then why should I watch anything but Spike’s arc? Even then, Spike’s arc comes out of nowhere, and it makes up too little of the whole show to be convincing as a throughline for the overall story. Episodic shows like One Punch Man and Sword Art Online, or long serials notorious for filler arcs like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, are on par with or better than Cowboy Bebop. I must disagree with this assessment.

The show won’t grab your attention if you aren’t paying attention to it. The dialog is quick and clever, and the English dub is full of emotion. The script avoids long stretches of exposition, and when it needs exposition the visuals break up the auditory monotony. The animation is clean, and the backgrounds are full of details. Kimitoshi Yamane’s mechanical design style creates space vessels with distinct, functional silhouettes that are a treat to see in motion. Cowboy Bebop is boring only if you don’t want to watch it in the first place. Each episode is paced well, and the episodic style ensures you can watch a whole episode and get a satisfying 3-act narrative out of it. There are no cliffhangers or mid-arc padding interludes. The weakest episode is “Toys in the Attic,” which is structured like 1979’s Alien, but with a less satisfying resolution: Spike struggles to get the horror fridge off the Bebop, and he doesn’t even kill the slime monster--that honor goes to Ed, who eats it and then resuscitates the rest of the crew, I guess.

The show, broadly, is about Spike’s life after leaving The Syndicate and his search for Julia. While his search is rarely the focus, it’s clear that it’s always in his mind, as Spike bolts every time he gets a lead on her. There is some verisimilitude to the down time between leads on Julia--Spike hasn’t seen her in three years, and she doesn’t want to be found, so it makes sense that his search advances rarely and in bursts. Those frenetic hunts make up an overarching plot insomuch as Spike is the third-person point of view for most episodes; had the camera been over Faye’s shoulder, the dominant plot would be Faye’s struggles with her past and her debt. The episodic, slow progress of the story presents a realistic life for a bounty hunter of the future. Every episode without Vicious is another day of Spike fighting for his life in a solar system that respects only power and wealth.

Faye’s story is just as good as Spike’s. Faye is on the hook for over 300 million woolongs after she woke from cryogenic stasis with retrograde amnesia. Her immense debt (exasperated by Whitney Haggis’s con) and lack of connection to a world that had moved forward without her led her to a life of bounty hunting. Her background informs her aloof personality, although the audience doesn’t get to see that background until “My Funny Valentine” and, later, “Speak Like a Child.” But when those moments arrive, they drive home one of the big themes of Cowboy Bebop and most New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction: life in space is a neoliberal nightmare. Where Spike’s story carries the weight of the show’s plot, Faye’s story undergirds the setting by emphasizing the theme of rampant capitalism pushing the world’s vulnerable to desperate actions. It’s hard to miss this theme and Faye’s contribution if you’re actively paying attention to the show.

I’m impressed by what Watanabe did. He made a 26-episode show that garnered huge praise and attention from Western audiences, when the biggest anime in the US were either serial shonen like Dragon Ball Z or high-concept shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion. Bebop succeeded without a toy line; it succeeded with an episodic format that was uncommon at the time; it succeeded with a fraction of the episodes of most shonen; it succeeded as hard science fiction while the Real Robot genre was waning; it succeeded as a postmodern work about material struggle when many contemporary postmodern anime were concerned with ontology. Bebop succeeded on the merits of its writing. Watanabe produced a final, cathartic ending to ensure he didn’t have to make a sequel. What aired was a masterwork of screenwriting. The show started, it hit three acts 26 times, and it ended forever. Bebop fitting as much action as it did into nine and a half hours of footage astounds me, because shows like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z had less action over a longer total run time, and Sword Art Online, another episodic show, never gave me a reason to care about the action in its first season. My fellow All Stars consider those shows as on par with or better than Cowboy Bebop because they weren’t paying attention.