Most Cowboy Bebop episodes give Spike Spiegel a bounty, a complication, and enough time to crack a couple of jokes while puffing on a bent cigarette. He’s always getting himself into trouble, fighting for his life in shootouts where he’s vastly outnumbered, dodging explosions left and right. Even when he does take a beating, Spike effortlessly remains the coolest guy in the room.
He’s an uncanny marksman and master martial artist with no actual superpowers, but you never really worry that he’s in any real danger, primarily because he’s one of the luckiest anime characters to ever exist. That’s what makes “Pierrot le Fou” so frightening. The episode takes the familiar thrill of watching Spike get into trouble and turns it into something closer to a horror movie: for once, he’s completely outclassed in every possible way by a grotesque, portly bulletproof madman with a clenched grin.
Mad Pierrot, whose real name is Tongpu, is the result of dangerous experimentation aimed at manufacturing a supersoldier. Those experiments gave him superhuman strength and speed, the ability to fly, and an innate psychic barrier that stops most projectiles. Nobody who’s ever seen his face has lived to tell the tale — until Spike.
The scariest thing isn’t the way Mad Pierrot grits his teeth so hard that he drools out of the corner of his mouth. The scariest thing is that Spike might actually lose to this freak. After-school airings of Gundam and Dragon Ball Z on Toonami had made me hungry for more anime.
Cowboy Bebop was fun and cool and often rather sexy. I didn’t really understand at the time that the series relies on a kind of rhythm that makes it feel safe to watch Spike take risks. And I sure as hell was not ready for this episode to scare the living daylights out of me.
Cowboy Bebop itself is a lot like jazz. Every episode remixes familiar story beats: a bounty, a lead, a chase, a fight that goes wrong somehow. Those elements get rearranged into something fresh that suits the story.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
