- Title: Cowboy Bebop – The Complete Series (2021)
- IMDb: link
Adapted from the popular anime of the same name, the Netflix live-action version of Cowboy Bebop only lasted a single season before coming to an abrupt end on a cliffhanger introducing the last of the animated series’ major characters. This version of Cowboy Bebop gets off to a strong start with the introduction of our space bounty hunters Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), chasing down bounties across the universe and often getting in over their heads, and the introduction of rival bounty hunter Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) who will eventually become part of the team.
Although the show earned mixed reactions from both fans and critics, the three leads make the most of the opportunity. The style of the show is also impressive, although I can see how the mix of high quality CGI and sometimes much cheaper effects (which I found charming) could at times be jarring to the viewer. The show took some liberties with the timeline of the show, cherry picking episodes and lengthening the stories from their shorter original runtimes. As someone coming in without much experience with the original series, I enjoyed myself through the majority of the episodes, even if I felt some of the quality dropped when it became a bit too lost in the rabbit hole of our characters’ backstories.
The episodes featured the unresolved history of Spike’s past as a hitman for the Syndicate which introduced friend-turned-enemy Vicious (Alex Hassell) and the woman (Elena Satine) who came between them, the bounty of Asimov and his girlfriend (Jan Uddin and Lydia Peckham), the introduction of a dog named Ein, all three bounty hunters working together to stop a family of eco-terrorists (Adrienne Barbeau, Miranda Daughtry, Zane Fleming, and Tim Carlsen), Spike getting stuck in VR, Faye’s reunion with the con artist (Christine Dunford) who stole her life, and Jet discovering the true identity of the person responsible for destroying his life.
