Temis the Vorta said:
Or maybe I'll just rent Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Probably more accessible?
Definitely start out with Cowboy Bebop the Movie, it's self-contained and basically like Firely, Farscape, or Blake's 7 or something.
I mean the funny thing is, Cowboy Bebop did not have character arcs. There were recurring characters, but other than the first 5 episodes introducing new characters and then the finale, it's possible to watch most of it out of order.
Seriously, the only story is this:
Extremely short version: it's a few hundred years in the future, and humans have colonized a few of the other planets in our solar system. We follow a motley crew of bounty hunters as they try to collect their next big score.
Longer version: a few hundred years in the future, humans colonize the other planets of the solar system. To speed travel with the other planets, a network of Stargates is built (haha) that hang in orbit and you fly ships through to get to one on the other side. Problem was due to cheap construction, there was a malfunction in the Lunar gate that destroyed Earth's moon (or just damaged it? maybe I'm mistaken)....anyway Earth itself after the "Lunar Gate Disaster" is now basically sitting in a cloud of asteroids and gets routinely pummeled by major meteorite impacts from the debris cloud. People still live on Earth, mostly underground, but its basically a third world country and most humans emmigrated to the colonies since then. The major human settlements are on Mars, Venus, and the 4 Jovian moons, but there's a few hardscrabble colonies further out on Saturn's moons, etc.
The international space police aren't very effective and its basically like the wild west (think Firefly's fringe worlds....though the ISS is also ineffective because they're rife with corruption) so the solution was that there's a big industry in Bounty Hunters.
Future space-slang for "Bounty Hunter" is "Cowboy", and the captain of this particular ship of bounty hunters likes jazz so he named their ship "Bebop". Hence the title "Cowboy Bebop".
The rag-tag crew includes:
Jet Black: grizzled ex-police officer from the Jovian moons and owner of the Bebop. Lost his arm in a botched police raid, requiring a cybernetic replacement (he's also got a big scar on his face from that).
Spike Spiegel: Spike doesn't talk about his past much, but it is gradually revealed in flashbacks that he used to be an enforcer/hitman for the feared Mars mafia syndicate known as Red Dragon. As a result, Spike is an incredibly dangerous fighter, skilled in not only marksmanship with his pistol but an incredibly skilled hand-to-hand combatant ( he practices Jeet Kun Do, which is "a step above Fight Club"; it's not so much "staged karate" as formlessly and quickly shifting between various punches and kicks and thinking on your feet; he frequently uses improvized weapons). Spike's best friend was fellow mob enforcer Vicious, but they had a falling out when Spike fell in love with Vicious' girlfriend, Julia. In a massive fight, Spike was left for dead (although they rarely mention it, he had to have one of his eyes replaced with a cybernetic one). Spike is now just drifting aimlessly and fell into the bounty hunting business with Jet, and in his own words, he's not sure if he's dreaming or awake anymore.
Fay Valentine: Femme fatale who joins the crew. Fay actually was in a shuttle when the lunar gate disaster happened and was nearly killed, so her body was frozen until medical science could fix her 70 years later. She awoke with amnesia and no real memory of who she is ("Faye Valentine" is a pseudonym) ; actually her revival was part of a medical scam; spend the money on reviving frozen people with critical injuries, then stick them with the astronomically high hospital bill the could never hope to pay. Bitter about how she was hurt when she was naive and alone, Faye turned to a fast life outside the law of gambling, etc. and became cynical and manipulative. Now she's a skilled shot and joins the crew as another bounty hunter (she had no where to go because her money ran out, and she sort of just planted herself into the crew)
Ed: Ed is an idiot-savant master computer hacker. Ed grew up basically as a feral child on Earth (which is a mess now) which her own homemade computer; "Ed" is actually a 10 year old girl (she made up her own name). She's a computer master though, easily slicing through corporate-level firewalls. She's very loopy because of her odd childhood; she didn't grow up alone, as from time to time she'd pop into a few orphanages and hang out, but she would just then keep wandering around on her own; utterly a free spirit. The result of her eccentric childhood is that she speaks and moves very oddly in exaggerated ways (think River Tam) and refers to herself in the third person. Very happy-go-lucky and perpetually optimistic.
Ein the data-dog: the "fifth member" of the crew, a small dog that used to be a lab test animal. He's got a computer chip implanted into his brain as part of the experiments, which increases his intelligence. The crew seems to ignore it, but it's shown that he has basically near-human intelligence; only Ed seems to realize that he's more or less as smart as a person, and she treats him as she would another child. ("Ein" is short for "Einstein")
