Cowboy Bebop, Session 5: "Ballad of Fallen Angels"

The first four sessions of Cowboy Bebop show you what the series looks like. "Ballad of Fallen Angels" is the first to show you what it is hiding. Until now, Spike Spiegel has been easy to read. He is lazy, sarcastic, absurdly good in a fight and happy to drift wherever the next bounty points. Jet knows his partner does not talk about his past, but the show has given us little reason to push. Then the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate starts eating itself, and the lazy bounty hunter routine stops explaining Spike at all.

Originally broadcast on WOWOW on November 20, 1998, Session 5 was written by Michiko Yokote, storyboarded by series director Shinichirō Watanabe and directed by Tetsuya Watanabe, with Toshihiro Kawamoto serving as animation director. Those credits matter because this is the first episode where Cowboy Bebop's style stops being decoration and becomes character.

A bounty that isn't about money

Mao Yenrai, an important figure from Spike's old Red Dragon life, has arranged a truce with the rival White Tiger syndicate. Vicious has no interest in peace. The White Tiger delegation is wiped out and Mao is murdered. When the bounty reaches the Bebop, Spike recognizes the name immediately, and for once the money barely matters.

Jet notices. Their argument is one of the first times the series lets us see how little these two men actually know about one another. Jet asks what Mao meant to Spike, and Spike answers by asking Jet how he lost his arm. Message received: you keep your ghosts, I'll keep mine. Neither man explains himself, and that refusal matters. Cowboy Bebop is not interested in opening Spike's file and reading his biography aloud. It begins revealing him through the things he refuses to say.

A man who already died

Spike visits Annie, an old acquaintance from his Red Dragon days, and the mood shifts the moment he walks through her door. Annie does not greet him like an old friend who has come home. To her, Spike died years ago, and Spike has to insist that he is standing right in front of her. That small exchange gives "Ballad of Fallen Angels" its real subject: is Spike Spiegel actually alive?

Physically, obviously. But the episode keeps circling the idea that the man who belonged to the Red Dragon died when Spike walked away, and that the bounty hunter living aboard the Bebop is someone who came afterward. Vicious does not accept that distinction. Neither, perhaps, does Spike.

Mao matters for the same reason. He tried to make peace, and Vicious kills him and dismisses him as a beast that has lost its fangs. That is more than gangster posturing. It is Vicious explaining how he sees the world: you do not walk away from violence, you do not become peaceful and you do not stop being what you were. Standing just outside that argument is Spike, another former Red Dragon killer who has supposedly left that life behind. The question hanging over the entire episode is whether Vicious is right.

Faye walks into the past

Faye Valentine, meanwhile, does what Faye does best at this point in the series and chases the bounty without waiting for anybody else. She expects to find Mao. Instead she finds his corpse sitting in an opera box beside Vicious. It is a fantastic introduction because Vicious needs no long speech and no elaborate biography. The body sitting beside him says enough.

Faye becomes bait. Jet tells Spike not to go, and Spike goes anyway. He calls it a debt, which is probably true, but Faye is only part of the reason. Vicious is there. For the first time since the series began, Spike stops drifting and deliberately walks toward something. Unfortunately, that something is his past.

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The cathedral

Vicious could have been another anime gangster with a long coat and a sword. What makes him frightening is what his presence does to Spike. He does not need to discover Spike's weaknesses because he already knows them. He knew Spike before the Bebop, and he knows the man Spike is trying not to be anymore.

By the time Spike reaches the cathedral, the episode barely resembles the series we were watching four sessions earlier. Faye is held hostage, Vicious waits near the altar and Spike walks straight into the trap. The two men speak like they are continuing an argument that began long before we arrived. When Vicious talks about angels cast out of heaven becoming devils, the title suddenly stops sounding decorative. Who is the fallen angel here? Spike, Vicious, or both of them? They came from the same world. Vicious insists they still share the same blood, and Spike says he has already bled it away. Neither man believes the other.

Then the shooting starts. The cathedral fight is where Cowboy Bebop first puts nearly everything it can do into a single sequence. The action is fast but readable, the enormous architecture makes everyone inside it look small, and Vicious brings a sword into a gunfight without tipping the scene into parody. Spike gets more battered with every exchange.

Through all of it, the episode keeps breaking into the present with fragments of something else: rain, blood, a wounded Spike, red roses, a woman we cannot yet place. We do not get the story. We get memory. Stopping the episode so Spike could explain what happened between himself, Vicious and Julia would have killed the mystery. Instead, the show lets us experience the past the way Spike seems to experience it: not as exposition, but as flashes he cannot shake.

"Rain," "Green Bird" and the fall

The music does an enormous amount of work in Session 5. The episode stays restrained for long stretches, which makes its musical sequences feel almost overwhelming when they finally arrive. "Rain" carries Spike toward the cathedral while the opera house, the religious architecture, the talk of angels and devils and Yoko Kanno's score all begin folding into one another.

Then Spike and Vicious reach the stained-glass window. Vicious throws Spike through it, Spike leaves a grenade behind, the cathedral erupts as he falls, and "Green Bird" begins.

It is one of the defining images of Cowboy Bebop, and the strange thing is how peaceful it feels. Spike has just been shot, beaten and sent through a window, yet the scene no longer plays like an action climax. For a few seconds he is somewhere else. The man who spends most of his life acting as though nothing matters is suddenly surrounded by memory, and he is literally falling through a church window while remembering a life everyone around him insists is dead. He looks less like someone escaping his past than someone surrendering to it.

Then he wakes up

Cowboy Bebop refuses to leave him there. Spike wakes aboard the Bebop days later with Faye nearby, humming, and for a moment the woman beside him seems to blur into the woman in his memories. Then Spike complains about her singing.

It is such a Cowboy Bebop way to end. The episode has just delivered gang warfare, betrayal, lost love, religious imagery, a cathedral gunfight and a fall through stained glass set to "Green Bird," and it closes with Spike on his beat-up ship insulting Faye. Life continues. That may be the cruelest part. Spike falls straight back into his old life and wakes up in his new one. The Red Dragon did not kill him, and the Bebop has not saved him. He is stuck somewhere between the two.

November 1998 and a different Cowboy Bebop

From an archival perspective, Session 5 also matters because of when it arrived. Cowboy Bebop first reached Japanese television on TV Tokyo in spring 1998, but that run aired only 12 episodes and a special, and "Ballad of Fallen Angels" was not one of them. Japanese viewers saw Session 5 for the first time on WOWOW, where the complete 26-session version began broadcasting on October 23, 1998, so anyone watching weekly reached it exactly four weeks in.

That timing is part of what gives the episode its force. This is not a late-series reveal arriving after twenty episodes of teasing. Watanabe and the staff crack Spike open almost immediately, then refuse to give us the whole answer. After Session 5, Cowboy Bebop can return to comedy, bounty hunting and self-contained adventures, but the audience cannot completely return with it. We know something now.

Western fans did not have to wait for an official release to see it. After TV Tokyo's partial run, WOWOW's complete, uncensored broadcast became the source for everything that followed, and fansubs of the full series made their way to Western viewers long before any English release. Subtitling it was its own challenge: Watanabe's dialogue leans hard on film noir rhythm and bounty hunter slang, and an episode this quiet lives or dies on how its few lines are translated.

Then the underground and the official world collided. Cowboy Bebop launched with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block in September 2001, with Bandai Entertainment's English dub, and "Ballad of Fallen Angels" aired on American television on September 24, 2001. Oddly, the complete fan releases arrived after the license: Psychlo-Anime finished the first documented full run from DVD in August 2002, and niizk's June 2008 release remains the one fans actually point to, rated 9.13 from 87 votes. The official side took longer to catch up, and Funimation's 2014 Blu-ray turned out to be an SD upscale rather than a true remaster. For a show that went legit this early, its fans kept building their own versions for years. The full story lives on the Fansub & Scanlation History page.

Why it still matters

Seen in isolation, "Ballad of Fallen Angels" is remembered for the obvious things: the cathedral, Vicious, the stained glass and "Green Bird." Those moments deserve their reputation, but they work because the episode is doing something more important underneath them. It changes the meaning of Spike Spiegel.

Before Session 5, his recklessness can look like confidence, his sarcasm like effortless cool and his refusal to talk about himself like simple mystery. After Session 5, none of those traits read so casually. The jokes get a little sadder. The recklessness starts to make sense. What looked like effortless cool begins to resemble a man who decided long ago that his life had already ended. That is why Vicious matters. He is not merely Spike's rival. He is proof that Spike's past still exists.

Across 26 sessions of Cowboy Bebop there are louder episodes, stranger episodes and episodes with more elaborate action. Session 5 does something more fundamental. It changes the person at the center of the show without fully explaining him. "Ballad of Fallen Angels" does not tell us everything that happened to Spike Spiegel. It shows us that we never understood him in the first place.

And from this point forward, the past he keeps calling dead is always somewhere behind him.

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Cowboy Bebop

1998-1999 · Sunrise

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