3 quotes from Cowboy Bebop, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Two sessions' worth of screen time, spent largely on somebody else's memory. The show's habit in miniature: the people it kills get a taste of resolution and never the thing itself.
“I get it now. You're the one, aren't you? You're Spike. Julia was always talking about you. Your eyes are different colors. I remember her saying that. Said you get a strange feeling if you keep looking straight into his eyes.”
“Right on the corner bar stool. She'd slip in when I wasn't looking. And she'd ask me to play the same song every time she came in. Strange lilting tune, and then she would smile. Ohh, what a smile. So sad... so beautiful.”
Gren recognizes Spike through Julia's description of his eyes before answering his questions about where she used to appear. The recognition briefly reverses the usual direction of a search: Spike discovers that he has already existed in somebody else's conversation. Gren's account gives Julia an ordinary habit, returning to hear a particular piece of music, which matters beside the intrigue attached to her name. She had a place to sit and a request another person learned to expect. It also tells us something about Gren. He remembers a listener's manner and the feeling of her smile, not merely information that might be useful to the man asking. A musician's attention survives in the way he tells the story. The account cannot establish what Julia privately intended, and its tenderness should not be inflated into a complete understanding of her. Its value is smaller and more human: Gren preserves an encounter as an encounter. Even while dying, he has something to give Spike that cannot be reduced to a location.
“You said that you don't need comrades, but I am attracted to that word. To the point of tears...”
Gren is quoting Faye's speech back to her, the one from the previous session about humans being social animals and real solitude being better than loneliness in a group, and he is doing it as a man who had comrades once. Titan gave him Vicious, a friend he followed into a war and then, by his own account, into a courtroom, framed by a music box. The word he is attracted to is the one that ruined him, and he says so with a sax player's timing, letting the sentence trail. Faye's cynicism is a pose she has held for about ten sessions; his is a wound he has held for years, and the exchange is the show setting the two side by side so the audience can hear the difference. She will go back to the Bebop. He will go to Vicious, be fatally wounded, and die on a last voyage to Titan. Nobody in Jupiter Jazz gets to keep a comrade. The one who wanted it most is the one who says so.
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Julia has appeared only in flashbacks at this point in the series, and this is how she is built: at second hand, by a stranger repeating what she once said about somebody else's eyes. The technique keeps her a rumor for twenty sessions, which is why she works as a destination rather than a character, and why the show can put an entire ending on the far side of her.