Sure, the image of the space shuttle juxtaposed with the Swordfish has the potential to be delightful, but the story doesn’t go full in with the sheer levels of barminess implied by the juxtaposition of modern technology and future tech. There’s the implied theme hinted at that the old ways of doing things can help with the new, but the episode likewise doesn’t draw on that theme, opting to instead languish around in the deserts of Earth, which, as established in previous episodes, there’s nothing to do.
There is, of course, the issue of Earth. Earth has, ultimately, been left to die. Typically in works of Science Fiction, there are stories of the Human Race going out into the stars. But usually, these stories nonetheless frame the Earth as the central hub of humanity. But in Cowboy Bebop, Earth is essentially a ruin, a relic of an old era left in the dust in favor of more interesting worlds. There are many places like that in the world today. Once upon a time, Rome was the center of the world. Then England. Now look at them: ruins left to decay and die in their fester. Sure, the English ruin is currently trying to take down everyone with it, but it’s been dead for a while. Some would say the world is haunted by that ruin the way it isn’t by others. That all the political problems of the modern age can be traced back to the English Civil War between to rather nasty sides. New life was built upon its post-civil war ashes. But that old monstrosity calling itself England still lurks throughout the world.
The empire died, but its ghost still remains. At times, it feels as if science fiction writers want the return of the empire. Maybe not consciously, but there are stories of colonies in space, of barbarians that need to be pushed back for the sake of “The Federation” or whatever its being called. They have no background beyond conquest and control. And they only see to conquer the human race and show how better they are than them. They are so unlikable, they practically deserve to be exterminated. And at the center of it all… the Earth.
Which makes Cowboy Bebop’s notably uninterest in such things all the more interesting. For all that Wild Horses is a dull story, it’s a new type of dull: the dullness of mundanity. Not that mundanity is inherently dull (there is a reason why David Lynch’s The Straight Story is the best Star Trek: The Next Generation movie). But in the case of Wild Horses, it very much is. It’s largely a look at the middle moments of getting a spaceship towed juxtaposed with an attempt at capturing a bunch of jerks who justify their jerkishness with the language of social justice twisted into being about gaining more power for themselves.
Considering what I talked about before, it’s perhaps fitting that they’re a hacker group. A bunch of tech nerds who are unprepared for playing against someone who adapts to their attempts at pwning One could argue that the current predicament the world is in is because of a bunch of nerds obsessed with pwning others. Specifically, the guy behind Brexit is very much into those, some of the people who got Trump elected president like Steve Bannon got their bread and butter at riling up angry video game nerds to harass female creators and critics for being female, and also Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s not to say that people can’t have interests, but maybe don’t be a dick about those interests and argue that people who don’t share them ought to be thrown into a cell and executed via rather distasteful means that are highly gendered. Wild Horses is, of course, not interested in that. It’s more about the moment to moment action than the implications gained through watching it in 2019. But time changes all things. It gives weight and meaning to things that didn’t exist beforehand. The future, ironically enough, was not theirs to see.
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