Our story opens with a robbery at a casino. While the robbers threaten patrons, Spike Speigel (John Cho) wanders obliviously into the casino wearing headphones. Seemingly startled to find the crowd of armed men, he surprises them with his martial arts. Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), Spike's partner, crashes into the fray while complaining that Spike was supposed to wait for him. The epic fight sees a hole punched in the casino wall, at which point it is clear that this is a space station; everything starts getting sucked into space.
Spike and Jett are bounty hunters, colloquially called 'cowboys' in the future. They travel the solar system on the Bebop, Jett's spaceship, and live a hand-to-mouth existence with their meager earnings. In the first episode of the series, they find themselves working against another cowboy, Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda). She soon becomes an ally, more out of necessity than desire. Each character has a tragic backstory that led them to the Bebop. Spike was a syndicate assassin who had an affair with a colleague's girl. Believed to be dead by the syndicate, he avoids talk of his past. Jett had been a cop who was wrongly sent to prison. He has a strained relationship with his ex-wife and barely sees his 8-year-old daughter. Awoken from cryosleep with no memories, Faye was scammed by a woman claiming to be her mother. Abandoned by her 'mother,' she seeks some way of finding out who she was and how she happened to be in cryosleep.
All 10 episodes of the series are mash-up storylines from the original anime series. Many changes have been made, very few of them that were an improvement. Ein the Corgi seems to have become a cyborg dog. Ein was a genius dog but could not project holograms from his eyes in the original. Faye has become a lesbian and has a faux mother, neither of which happened in the anime. Her risqué outfit and gambling addiction are gone. Jett had never been married and had no children. Also, despite the name, he was not a black. Radical Edward, who only appears in the series finale, comes across as a Pee Wee Herman wannabe in a crazy outfit. Spike and his backstory are closest to the source material, though many of the background characters in his past have changed. Vicious (Alex Hassell), Spike's former partner but now adversary, has married Julia (Elena Satine), Spike's love interest. Julia's role has greatly expanded in the Netflix version and has a dramatic shift in the finale.
The series is entertaining. The chemistry between Cho and Shakir is terrific. However, fans of the original found many of the changes to be vandalism. Some particularly egregious scenes were when Jett talked of using a restaurant bidet, Faye's afternoon lesbian fling with the mechanic, and Spike's potshot at Vicious which demonstrated Spike was an idiot. Disappointing. Though not terrible, it doesn't live up to the anime.
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