"The next episode is Brain Scratch, the last one before everything goes to hell. We see Faye try one last desperate bounty at SCRATCH. Here again Spike does his world-famous deflective act. He reaches where Faye is and, the moment Jet informs the implications of the software used by SCRATCH, he switches off his communicator and goes in just as the other man is telling him they need to plan things out. He has seen her faint on screen earlier and knows there isn’t much time left to save her.
He finds Faye and Londes is dealt with by Ed, post which he just sits around till she wakes up. Spike’s presence being completely useless in saving Faye here is very similar to her presence being unhelpful in saving him from Mad Pierrot. But the idea is, it’s the intent and motive which counts and, in similar circumstances, they act identically toward each other. Even when they are not equipped to deal with the situation at hand, they cannot just abandon the other in the face of danger and would rather join in and try to help as opposed to doing nothing or running away.
Hard Luck Woman is an episode which begin the culmination of the series. Faye leaves trying to find her past connections and Spike is seen keeping tab of her leaving each time but seems to sort of let her figure her things out. He doesn’t know what’s going on but we see her continuing to feel the sense of not belonging on the ship. During the episode, Faye’s memory comes back and she lapses into her old personality for some time. He sees the resulting reaction and is concerned but she leaves immediately after. I have mentioned earlier too that I feel, while she definitely wants to find her past, she also feels she does not belong on the ship because she thinks Spike has no room for her in his life. The episode culminates with both Jet and Spike feeling hurt and emotionally eating double their share of boiled eggs as both the girls seem to have left the ship.
And that leads us to the finale. The moment the attack happens on Jet and Spike, he knows Faye will be targeted since Vicious knows about her. When Faye is at the airport, the scene with Alfred and his mother happens. While yes that scene is reflective of the Bebop crew as a whole, it is specifically relevant for Spike and Faye at this point.
Faye is chasing her past, trying to find a place she belongs to because she feels unwanted and in the way, just like Alfred’s mom. When she speaks to Spike later as well, she makes a point of telling him she has a place to go to, even though she does not. She feels she does not matter to him when in truth, getting her to safety is likely his top priority at the moment. Just like when Alfred comes, we get to know that he has been looking all over for his mother, Spike calls Faye breaking his norm of letting her sort her things out to ask her to come back and meet him at Tharsis. He tells her he wants her to help Jet but that is not such a big requirement. Jet is just shot in the leg and can manage-we do see him take his zipcraft to go see Bull during the next episode. Spike tells Faye to stop wandering and come back to ensure she is safe and accounted for, so she is not targeted by his enemies, but she brushes him off feeling again like she is extra on the ship and he is just calling because he needs something. She reacts initially with a flash of emotion at seeing his face on the screen but then schools herself into acting difficult.
He is right though, since she is targeted by Julia and the Syndicate ships follow her back to the Bebop. During the interim, Jet asks Spike to turn back and let go of the past and Spike responds to him by talking of a woman. Jet feels right now that Spike is going out of some bloodlust or hang-up on his past but I’ve already covered why that’s not the case. What Spike is telling Jet is that he needs to do this for a woman but what Jet does not know, and what Spike glazes over, is that the woman is Faye and he needs to do this to ensure she is safe, so that the past can be laid to rest and he can have hope to move forward to a life with her which is not hunted. The language he uses here, speaking in pronouns and adverbs, is the same as what he uses in the Jail scene with Elektra. These two scenes are perhaps the most misunderstood scenes in CB ever.
Spike tells Jet he saw a woman who was “truly alive” for the first time and she was a part of him he had lost i.e. his wish to continue living. He begins speaking in the past tense since earlier in the episode Faye has informed him she is not coming back and she has a place to go to now. So he assumes she has left them for good. He still has to do what he has to do though, even if she decides to never comes back.
He is looking out of the window and moves from using the past tense to the present as he sees Faye’s ship appear on the horizon, continuing in the same flow to inform Jet “She’s back.” Jet gets confused and then thinks Spike is talking about two different women when in truth it is the same one. The English dub does a weird meandering dialogue here but the screenshots are how it goes in the sub. I’ve already covered what he means by ‘other half’ etc. in detail in the previous part so will not go into that again here. Spike knows by this point that he is loved in the same way that he loves because he has seen the test of her commitment and hence he refers to her as ‘his other half’ even if nothing is formalized between them.
He knows that, with everything that is happening, he has to ensure he closes the door on the Syndicate once and for all so he can move on with his life if he survives, a life he wants to live now. He also knows the people close to him will be targeted so he needs to ensure the threat is removed completely. Jet is assuming his intentions to be steeped in the past when in truth he is looking to the future.
For Faye, she has seen Julia and her feelings of inadequacy and alienation from Spike become higher, indicated by her not using his name to Jet once she is back. But she does relay the message, even though Spike seems indifferent at first and then angry at the mention of Julia’s name. There is a lot of conflicting emotion in Faye as she goes to him sitting at the workbench, hesitating if she should give the message or not.
This would not be easy for Faye since here is a man she loves but has been pretending not to and has been running away from believing he loves someone else. Then she comes face to face with that someone else and all the fear she had of being abandoned by him has become real. It’s a testament to her character though that, even at a moment like this, she chooses to do the right thing (or what seems right to her since she doesn’t have the background on Julia’s true intent). He would want to know so she is conveying the message regardless of how much it kills her. She even tries to convince him by trying to drive home the point that Julia is in danger. It’s an incredibly selfless act of love.
Spike on his part pretends to not understand the message. Julia is not relevant to him now, not a priority but rather the exact opposite. He knows she has been working against him. And he wants Faye to understand that. He gets who Faye is referring to the moment she begins speaking but continues to dismiss it till she uses Julia’s name. He looks angry then as if infuriated Julia would stoop as low as to try and use Faye to get to him.
He leaves and Faye requests Jet to let her out as well. They defend the ship together and then Spike goes off to deal with the situation. It’s interesting that she is shown taking all the damage here, leaving him unscathed enough to go off. Faye and Jet discuss Julia and Faye gives Jet her description, looking broken up about how amazing Julia seems to her. I’ve mentioned in the second part why this is because she is overthinking the situation in her head without understanding what is actually going on. Spike is trying to keep Julia within his line of sight, knowing she is working with Vicious and likely intends to lead Spike to him under the guise of running away.
He comes back to the ship post Julia’s death, knowing he needs to go end things with Vicious once and for all now. Over here, he tells Jet the story of two cats, which is generally believed to be Spike conclusively telling Jet he is going to go die and not survive in the face of extreme injury the way he had before since Julia is dead and his will to survive is gone. But in truth, the situation is quite the opposite-he has recently acquired the will to live so it can’t indicate that.
There are two stories told during these episodes, the first is Jet paraphrasing the story of ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ by Ernest Hemingway which seems intentionally distorted. What Jet narrates of it is not how the story happens and the airplane is a dying dream of the main character Harry who has been thinking back to different events in his past till that point in the narrative. He was never headed to Kilimanjaro and gets injured in a hunting expedition. But in his dream, the plane he is on begins to move toward Kilimanjaro and then Harry knows that this is where he is now headed. The second story, however, is intentionally not distorted.
Just like Jet’s story is tweaked to align with what he needs to say in the current moment, Spike’s cat story could have also been tweaked to mention the tiger-striped cat meets his mate and then chooses freedom/becomes free, or this part could have been glossed over. It would fit his situation with Julia much better since he met her during his Syndicate days, not after becoming free. But this is not done. Spike specifically talks about meeting the cat after becoming free.
With the same deception where we are led into believing Vicious is the ‘true Samurai’ who can kill Spike till we go deep and understand what it actually means to be a true Samurai, we are misguided here and need to look deeper at the actual story to understand what Spike is trying to say here. This story is a children’s fairy tale called ‘A Cat Who Lived a Million Lives’ by Yoko Sano.
The story of the two cats begins only after the tiger-striped cat becomes free. The tiger-striped cat is loved very much by all its previous owners but they all end up killing him by mistake. They mourn him deeply when he dies but, at the end of the day, are all bad for him. On his part, he hates them all.
So he keeps coming back to life again and again, moving from one incompetent and incompatible owner to the next. One day he becomes free, and is his own cat, free to do as he pleases. He meets a lot of girl cats who want to be his wives and they throw themselves at him (not a fan of this element in the story but I didn’t write it) but there is one cat, a white female cat, who ignores him completely. He notices and goes to brag to her that he has lived a million lives, shows her his abilities but she remains unimpressed, simply commenting “Is that so?” Finally he stops this and just asks her if he can be with her and she says yes. They then spend their days happily together and have many kittens who grow up into fine stray cats. Eventually, the white cat gets old and dies. The tiger-striped cat cries a million times and then finally he stops crying. He lays down silent beside the white cat and dies too. He never comes back to life again since he does not need to. He has lived a fulfilled life with his beloved and joins her in death.
This story is very reminiscent of Spike’s own. He starts off not caring what happens to him, goes through near-death experiences again and again. He falls in love with someone but it is not enough to make him begin valuing his own life and he continues to be indifferent to danger and death, just like the cat in the story. And then he becomes free and meets someone who makes him want to live. The cat, earlier so impressed by his own feat at defeating death, finds joy in the mundane when it finally meets a mate who does not want anything from him, who complements him and helps him find stability and the will to live. This is not a story of a destructive romance with lives cut too short but of a beautiful equation between two people who are slow to find love and togetherness but when they do, it’s the real thing.
Spike meets Faye after he becomes free and she shows no interest in him. She has feelings for him but doesn’t display them just like he doesn’t really express to her what he may be feeling. They go through a whole subtle journey together, understanding each other and showing each other that they care, but it is all very muted. By the end of the story, he has realised his feelings for her, knows she cares deeply for him as well, and her presence in his life makes him want to live.
I always get the sense he starts this particular story out of the blue since he becomes aware she is listening to his conversation with Jet, standing outside in the passage. Him telling the story at this point perhaps comes closest to a confession of his feelings directly to her as we get on screen. He does confess them to both Elektra and Jet, though again so disguised that it is very easy to confuse them for his feelings for Julia.
There is also the line which he says to Jet while he is leaving. “I can’t do anything for a dead woman.” This is translated a bit differently in the dub but this is the translation in the subs. At this point, Jet has asked him why he is doing what he is doing and this explanation prima-facie does not answer Jet’s query at all unless we think deeper. Spike knows Jet is thinking of Julia and he says “I can’t do anything for a dead woman.” but leaves unsaid that he can do something to protect a live one, and is about to. Of course, he is doing it for Jet too but by now he knows his feelings for Faye.
During both the parting sequences with Faye and Jet and pretty much during the entire finale, Spike is intentionally ambiguous. His dialogue is designed to allow the viewer to draw the current interpretations we are drawing but is confusing enough prima facie to make them feel like there is no point in trying to stop him or save him so that they do not try to accompany him. Spike is going now to end things with Vicious once and for all and to protect his companions. Having them accompany him at this point would defeat the very purpose of what he is trying to do. That’s why he doesn’t give a straight answer to either Faye or Jet during the entire finale.
In the sequence which follows, as Faye confronts him, we don’t see him ignore her or act cold toward her like he did toward Julia or Vicious. When he looks at her as she points the gun at him, he seems sad. There is a lot of unspoken emotion there. She tells him he is hung up on the past, again assuming his intentions are to avenge Julia or to go fight Vicious out of a personal grudge. However, he proceeds to explain his eyes to her which seems a rather odd thing to do at a time like this.
The scene right here is often cited as a classic instance of the “almost kiss” trope in anime, also used in the “cigarette kiss scene” between Rock and Revy from Black Lagoon below. If you trace the movements, Spike is drawn to actually lean in to be pretty much like 5 milimeters away from her face, which is a very weird way to show someone your eye.
In the sequence, she asks him a series of questions and he takes a beat before leaning in this way. It seems more like he tries to just explain everything through a kiss but when she moves away he feels this is perhaps not the best time and launches into a poetic roundabout explanation instead.
Faye is overriding her earlier misgivings of staying away from (what she believes to be) an emotionally unavailable man by confronting him this way and she gets agitated by his sharing new information with her now of all times. In truth, she knows quite a lot about him but thinking that he never thought her worthy of telling anything himself bothers her. It’s her fighting back against the sudden intimacy of the moment which seems overwhelming considering that, in her mind, he is going off to die.
He continues to talk about seeing the past from one eye and the present from the other making him feel like he was watching a dream, one which was now over.
He is smiling in this sequence, a very fond smile. This scene is not him making light of death. It’s him looking at someone he loves and smiling, telling her how she has snapped him out of his self-destructive mental state.
These lines are usually taken to mean that he is speaking of life being a dream which is now over, which does not really apply with the rest of the dialogue and explanation he is giving so let’s look at the whole dialogue sequence again. Firstly, he has spoken about his eyes. Whatever made him loose the eye was likely a trauma which also left him dissociated with reality, part of him stuck in the past trauma and the rest living in the present, causing him to doubt his own grasp of reality. This was already his state before he got together with Julia since during his flashback in Jupiter Jazz both of them are shown saying the same thing-feeling like they’re watching a dream.
In ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ when he is shown awakening from a dream of the surgery he had to replace his eye, he is visibly shaken. He seems unconscious during the shots of the surgery so whatever causes him to wake up sweating was likely also what caused him to be in that condition in the first place. The trauma likely caused him to develop a dissociation from reality in the form of Depersonalisation, a condition which causes someone to feel their own life is a dream which they are watching as a passive audience.
Watanabe has mentioned in an interview that what happens to Vincent in terms of loosing his grasp on reality is because of the traumatic events he suffers in the battlefield on Titan so not all of the references of dissociated states refer to philosophical aspects. The philosophical aspects of an illusory world and dreams as metaphors for life itself run as a theme also but what happens to the characters has a clinical side to it too.
Spike’s dissociation leaves him feeling like he was watching a dream which he could not wake up from, leading to his reckless behaviour and indifference toward his own life. He’s saying here that he’s snapped out of that state, tying back in directly with his dialogue to Elektra in the jail cell where he speaks of feeling fear of death for the first time, of meeting a woman who made him want to live. His life was not very real to him before that but this is the transformation which has happened in him.
He is saying here that what he came to feel for Faye, the healing which has happened because of her, caused him to snap out of his dissociation and the dream state got over before he knew it. This is again similar to him telling Jet earlier during the dialogue about the part of him he had lost that his death wish is gone since he has found a person who restored to him the part of him he had lost Since he is no longer dissociated, he is not living in the past and not looking to throw his life away.
He gives her that explanation and begins to leave, believing it’s the max he can do in this moment, but she’s not quite ready to let go yet. She tells him about recalling her memory, acknowledging for the first time something only he knows about her. This is again more acknowledgement of their deflection-they have been pretending they are casual acquaintances or virtual strangers when in truth they know each other very closely.
When you watch the scenes again from this perspective, the emotions on Spike’s face as Faye speaks to him become much more meaningful. This is the first time he learns from her that her memory has come back and can understand how traumatic and confusing it all must be for her.
He knows she needs reassurance at the moment, needs him to stay back with her but it’s impossible. He is not going with an intention to die but he also does not have any insurance that he will come back alive. There is also a very focused shot of her white boots as she speaks and it begs a wonder if this is supposed to be a nod to the “white cat” in his story earlier.
The shots in this sequence are drawn to show a lot of pain, guilt, and regret within Spike at her situation, one he cannot be there for her in right then. In the same way that he never told her much about himself, she never did either. They found out what they did about each other accidentally but now here she is telling him what is happening with her and how much she needs him there but he has no option to stay back.
This is also when Faye actually acknowledges in spoken words that he is important to her, not saying it directly but expressing how futile returning seems now if he is going away. She’s always pretended he’s just some idiot she has to put up with but her saying this now is as much a roundabout expression of endearment as his story about his eyes and snapping out from the dream.
She desperately asks him if he is going to throw his life away and he responds saying that he is not going there to die.
Spike never has any intention to get himself killed when he leaves to confront Vicious. Of course, he may just die but he’s told in the story of the cats that it will not be because the desire to live is gone in him. In the same way that Faye is alive because she has survived against all odds, he needs to go see if he can face and survive this. If he is alive on his own merit because he had the strength in him to kill Vicious all along or if his life is at Vicious’ mercy. It’s the only way for him to be free and live his own life.
He walks away from Faye without looking back at her because what he is doing is incredibly hard already. What she shares about her memory coming back does make him take pause and the sheer pain of it is depicted clearly on his face. However, if he keeps turning back and engaging with her again and again he may lose the resolve to continue with what he has to do. This entire scene can only be understood through its unspoken nuances and poignance.
She empties her gun behind him and then breaks down crying, giving in to the feelings she has clearly kept tightly bottled away, finally. He hears the shots but keeps walking away. It’s a very sad moment because we know she feels abandoned, like she mattered nothing to Spike, when in truth she is extremely important to him. On his end, it’s a moment of helplessness and, repressed as he is, he is unable to handle it any differently, unable to figure out how to reassure her. Both are very damaged individuals and this stunted communication is the best they can do in the middle of a very desperate moment, but neither is indifferent to the other.
You can believe what makes sense to you personally about whether Spike lives or dies but something the series has established again and again is that he does not die that easily. The injuries sustained by him at the Syndicate do not come close to many he has sustained in the past and lived. The question of whether he lived or died always rested in whether he had the will to live on or not, which he does. He has a reason to come back since someone he loves is depending on him.
In the song ‘See you space cowboy’ there are quite a few lines which are references to Faye.
Crossing over inside your heart, a voice speaks, “You can erase even unchangeable things”
Praying before the truth in the morning, Love will once again return to this place
I always take this line to mean that perhaps something in Faye speaks up that she can change this hopeless situation and she leaves to try and save him in the end if she can-I really don’t see her giving up and not even trying, now of all times. This is also foreshadowed in Pierrot Le Fou where he asks her if she will come save him since this might be the one he does not come back from. What he is facing now is equally dire and there is really no reason why she would not make one last try. In the last sequences Spike is seen in the early hours of the morning descending the stairs post killing Vicious. If she does manage to salvage him, love can return for both of them.
Although mortal life will someday end, this love can’t be erased, it is something that will live forever, escaping from the darkness
When you pass phantoms frozen in time, love is waiting over the rainbow, a thousand rays of light are waiting, you got a rainbow, Rainbow in your hands…
Frozen in time is again something related to Faye..."
This is a part of my “Alternate Take” on Bebop, basically a relook at the same series but from a different perspective. You can click here f
PLUS MY EDITING THOUGHTS: I would say that lyric 'escaping from the darkness' is clearly about the past. The flashbacks we got from Spike, of Syndicate and Julia are literally all dark, black and white, sepia, gray blue.. they lack color except for the rose. At the time, Spike's love for Julia (red rose) is the only striking color we fully see, but overall this imagery is translation for the overall lack of life, tragedy and darkness of his past. The scenery is also always rainy and sad and we see the same rose being thrown on the street filled with rain.
But then, after all rain and darkness, there comes rainbow in the end. And what makes the rainbow??? The sun, the light. That's Faye in Spike's life. She's the reason to feel alive, she's that woman he talked about to Jet. Rays of light are waiting aka. Faye is waiting for him to come back and tell her he found the reason to be alive: her. Rainbow is the product of their love and happiness.