Laughing Bull Quotes

Bull's warning comes right after Spike has made a joke of the prophecy, and the joke, that he was already killed once by a woman, is the one the shaman refuses. The session's structure depends on the refusal. Asteroid Blues is built as a pilot with no arc, a bounty that ends in the sweet thing shooting the bounty and then being shot herself, and the only thread that leaves the episode is this exchange in a tent. Everything Bull says is fulfilled in reverse order: the red-eyed coyote appears in the Zona Norte, the woman takes twenty-five sessions. 'Too lightly' is the note. Spike, when the prophecy lands, has a way of treating Julia as fate, a story about a cat; Bull's complaint is that fate is a word men use for the women they did not take seriously enough to survive.

In the final session, Jet goes to the shaman and gets the series' one purely mystical speech, and it is the least Bebop thing in Bebop. The show's dead die stupidly and specifically: a boy with a harmonica, a woman on a rooftop, a shopkeeper shot in her own store, an old man killed right after he signed a truce. None of them were guided gently into anything. Bull's speech is delivered to Jet, not Spike, and Jet has no use for it; what he takes to the finale instead is a cat story and a shared laugh. So the quote sits on top of the ending like a caption somebody else wrote. It is quoted constantly because it is the only thing in the last session that sounds like wisdom, and the last session is built to refuse wisdom: its final words are a gunshot noise and a title card about weight. The shaman was a good device for a prophecy. As a philosopher he is decoration, and the show, to its credit, cuts away from him.