Cowboy Bebop Review

The structure is an anthology and the achievement is that it never feels like one. Each session picks a genre and commits to it completely, a body-horror piece one week and a slapstick chase after a fridge the next, yet the crew's damage accumulates underneath whatever the week's plot is doing. Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed are written as people avoiding their own pasts rather than as a team with a mission, and the show only lets those pasts surface once the format has earned it.

Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts wrote what is still the best score the medium has produced, and the direction cuts to the music rather than the other way round, so a gunfight is timed to a bassline. Sunrise put real money into the choreography and the ship work, and the compositing has aged better than almost anything else from 1998. What holds the story a notch below the rest of it is the arc itself, since Vicious is a thin antagonist propping up a mythology the series would rather not explain. Everything around him is flawless, and the ending is one of the few that knows exactly when to stop.