What Cowboy Bebop’s red-haired Ed season 1 cameo really sets up

Based on reactions from fans of the 1998 neo noir western anime OG directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, Netflix’s new live-action adaptation of Cowboy bebop can be a worthy mixed bag or a memorable deposit. But those who see the series through to the end may have questions after the flesh-and-bloody iterations of Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, as played by John Cho and Mustafa Shakir, respectively, split up due to personal rifts. Season 1 ends with Spike walking down an alley while drunk until he collapses on the sidewalk. Then we hear a voice chirping his name.

[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains major spoilers for Cowboy Bebop season 1]

When Spike opens his eyes, he finds a strange child who is giving out a bit of gibberish about the allocation of a possible bounty for Spike. Subtitles identify the person as “Ed” and viewers of the anime can identify the quirky character as the only Radical Edward.

Ed, short for Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, made his debut in the ninth episode of the original anime, “Jamming with Edward,” and is a wacky 13-year-old hacker who became the Bebop team in exchange for helping the crew get a bounty that turns out to be AI. (Technically, they load the AI’s original personality into safety elsewhere and give the bebop a copy of the AI.) Ed is famous for her childish one-liners, insane view of life, and cartoonish mannerisms (based on the series’ dance moves) . Composer Yoko Kanno).

Image: Netflix

After a noticeable absence from Netflix marketing and theories about the legendary hacker’s appearance, Ed joins Ein, the corgi abandoned by the bebop crew for his hackable brain implants, on the live-action show with their white harvest on top, black pants, green tinted glasses and red hair from the anime. The character is uncredited, but Netflix is noted in a tweet that this Ed is played by newcomer Eden Perkins who uses them / them pronouns. (Netflix couldn’t confirm Polygon if the character was using the same thing.)

When Ed should step into the picture of the live action series was a point of discussion as they weren’t part of the anime’s original lineup either. “I wanted to make sure we gave Ed’s character enough dramatic space because Ed is the big disruptor,” says showrunner André Nemec. He wanted to take a breath, to establish the world with Spike, Jet, Faye and Vicious before “dropp”[ing] the atomic bomb that Ed brings into this world to create chaos. “

In Ed’s big final scene, they tell Spike – by glee that is difficult to decipher – that the bounty is “Volaju”, known as “Butterfly Man”. And so another Cowboy bebop The season 2 plot thread is spun …

Who is Volaju aka the Butterfly Man?

Image: sunrise

In the original anime canon, Volaju is the 2001 antagonist Cowboy Bebop: Knockin ‘on Heaven’s Door, or known in the US as Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, a side story between Episodes 22 and 23 before Spike’s fateful mission to wipe out the Syndicate. Like the series characters Wen (a man trapped in a child’s body) and Mad Pierrot (the clown-like assassin), Volaju was an antagonist on a tragic level: a guinea pig for war experiments, forced through physical abuse to shape him into a super soldier.

Which brings us to the live action script referring to his previously unseen Volaju as “Butterfly Man”. In the anime film, Volaju’s brain was anesthetized with nanomachines, which entered his brain as forms of light that are reminiscent of butterflies, “the most beautiful butterflies you can imagine”. Whenever people are injected with his blood, they can also see the butterflies and become immune to the nanomachines. He ponders, “Countless butterflies cannot exist in this world, but I’ve lost the memory of the world they belong in.” The hallucinations of butterflies arise from his war and laboratory trauma and remind him that he is in a constant state Nightmare, limbo. (Spike attempting to grab an imaginary butterfly in the film’s opening credits scene illustrates his own captivity in a dream state like Volaju, surrounded and mocked by seemingly achievable beauty but unable to feel it.)

Volaju is Ed, according to live action. In the anime film, a vengeful Volaju tried to infect entire populations on Halloween with nanomachines, to which he is immune. Whether live-action Ed’s ramblings about the butterfly man is an homage or a premonition for the live-action universe is in the air. If Vincent Volaju shows up in person, he’ll likely get a character makeover or his story changed like with the other bounties in Part 1. But it would probably still include images of butterflies.

You might also ask: How did Ed even know Bebop? In “Binary Two-Step,” they seem to have been a source of bounty tips for Jet, who they never met face-to-face, for a while, fueling Spike’s suspicion. (“The hacker? [the tip] super reliable, “he replies sarcastically.)

The end text “See You Space Cowgirl, Someday, Somewhere!” (the end credits used when Ed left Team Bebop in the old anime) suggests more Edward craziness in the future as the series goes on for better or for worse with Part 2. A follow-up could clarify live-action Ed’s motives for sending Team Bebop on a mission after the AI ​​on their mishap.

Nemec says they timed Ed’s last second appearance as Spike is spiraling downwards because, “After the weight of Episode 10, it felt like a little breath of Ed’s fresh air was really the right thing to do to the audience remember: and things will go on, and probably in a way that one cannot even begin to speculate about. “

And if the live action Cowboy bebop is not your jam, good news: you can always see the original Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.