Spike Spiegel Quotes

Faye has just recovered her memory and found nowhere to return to except the Bebop. Spike's departure therefore costs more than his own safety: it removes someone from the home she has finally chosen. His defense deserves a hearing. Having described his life as a dream divided between past and present, he sees the confrontation as a way to stop merely enduring that division. Staying could leave him physically safe and still unable to participate in their life together. But Faye's objection is stronger than his answer admits. She offers an existing attachment against his demand for a final revelation, and he never explains why the attachment cannot count as evidence that he is alive. The consequence is abandonment even if the motive is sincere. His distinction between seeking death and seeking certainty matters to him; it does not reduce what leaving takes from her.

Twenty-five sessions of studied indifference had to be built before this could be said out loud, and the series pays for it with structure rather than dialogue. Spike is given no interiority to speak of, only habits: the eating, the smoking, the shrug. So when the explanation finally arrives it lands as a confession of something the audience had assembled without help, which is the most economical way a show can make a backstory feel earned.

Old Man Bull has just told him the Swimming Bird will meet a woman and be hunted by her to his death, and Spike's answer, that it already happened, is the series planting its ending in its first session. The structure is a prophecy paid off twenty-five episodes later on a staircase, and the show needs a way to state it without the audience filing it as foreshadowing. The trick is tone. Spike says it as a joke, a bounty hunter humoring a shaman for a lead on Asimov, and the episode moves on to red-eye and Tijuana without a pause. Only in Ballad of Fallen Angels, when Annie tells him he died three years ago and that is how things work here, does the throwaway turn out to have been literal. The line is the series' spine dressed as a quip. Watanabe tells the audience how it ends in session one and trusts them not to listen.

A ravenous beast with the same blood as his own is what Vicious has just called him, and Spike's denial is the thing the rest of the series tests. Steelman Vicious first, because the show does. Spike in session five is a man who walked into a syndicate ambush against Jet's advice, for a debt, and came out of a church window; in Jupiter Jazz he abandons his crew on a rumor of Julia's name; in the finale he leaves Faye crying. The beast is not a slander. Every time the past calls, Spike answers, and the answer is violence. And yet the line holds, because the series makes a distinction Vicious cannot. Vicious wants the syndicate; Spike wants out of it, and has for three years. Bleeding the blood away did not mean becoming harmless. It meant losing the appetite for the throne, which is the one thing his old friend never understands about him and the reason he asks, a second later, why Spike is still alive.

Spike's complaint comes in Jamming with Edward, the session that completes the Bebop's roster, and nobody aboard treats the ship as a family at all. Faye is there because she owes money, Ed because she wanted to be. The show's whole final act depends on the difference: this crew comes apart one person at a time, Ed and Ein walking off in Hard Luck Woman without a farewell scene, because it was never held together by anything but proximity. So the shouted inventory is not warmth hiding as irritation. It is an accurate description, and the punchline is that he stays.

Bandaged after losing to Mad Pierrot once already, he says it to Faye, and her answer is a single word, 'lunkhead', after a pause the script marks. The exchange sets up the last three sessions almost too neatly. In The Real Folk Blues, the one he does not come back from, the same two people have the same conversation in earnest: she asks where he is going, he says he is going to find out whether he is alive, and she does not rescue him, because he did not ask. So the joke in Pierrot le Fou commits both of them. Spike has now said the true thing once as a gag, which is the only register he has for it, and Faye has answered with the only register she has, an insult in place of a yes. When the real version arrives neither can change key. The show is precise about this: the rehearsal of a farewell is the reason the farewell goes wrong.

The tiger-striped cat story is what Spike tells Jet over their meal in the final session, and this is the punchline he puts on it. The cat lived a million lives and died a million deaths, cared for none of them, then loved one white cat, lost her, and stayed dead. Jet calls it a good story. Spike says he hates it, and then this. Structurally the session needs the two of them to say goodbye without either admitting it, and the mechanism is a fable neither will interpret aloud: the story is Spike's own, told in the third person, and the cat joke is how the room avoids the obvious. Then they laugh, the script says hysterically, which is the tell. Neither man is laughing at the cat. The show has spent twenty-five sessions on a partnership conducted entirely in food complaints and bonsai, and it gives the partnership one of its last scenes in the same code, so that the one sincere thing Spike says to Jet is disguised as not liking an animal.

The ending is usually called ambiguous: Spike smiles, says the word, falls, and the screen tells the audience they are going to carry that weight, and whether he lives is left open. It is not open. The finger-gun is the same gesture he made at Wen's harmonica in session six, standing over a boy who had finally been allowed to die and saying he understood, as if. There, the word closed a life that had wanted closing. Here he makes the gesture at nobody, at the syndicate's foot soldiers on the stairs, and the smile is the one from the first session, where he told Jet he'd had a sweet dream. Watanabe has said he prefers the question left open, and the show has earned the right to hedge; but the images vote. A man who has spent twenty-six sessions describing his life as a dream he cannot wake from wakes up. The open ending is a kindness the audience extends, not one the episode offers.