When Faye wakes up on the Bebop, her ship is gone, but sheвЂ™s miraculously alive. And in the face of forces that are infinitely bigger and more horrible than any person could possibly dismantle, what greater power can you harness than asserting yourself as the individual you choose to be?

As she careens toward the planet in her busted ship, she asserts her own identity - not the string of numbers and letters assigned to her in cryo-sleep, but the name Faye Valentine, which feels truer to who she is than any of the other names she tried on at the beginning of the episode. Instead, she saves the ~6 million people of Callisto and heads toward what surely looks like her own death by smashing her own ship into the missile, preventing the tree grenades from going off. Which leads us back to Faye, who double-crosses Spike and Jet (and even dognaps Ein!) but eventually abandons her own goal. They may be working for themselves, but their goals are personal, not universal - and when push comes to shove, they generally do the right thing. Is there a middle ground between the evil environmentalists and the evil robber barons who turned the grandeur of outer space into yet another capitalist dystopia? If so, itвЂ™s located somewhere within the crew of the Bebop. The real plot of the ecoterrorists, who call themselves the Callisto Liberation Front, is to detonate a missile containing their grenades over a crowd, turning ~6 million people into trees (and, if they donвЂ™t mind that these trees clearly used to be people, also turning this moon of Jupiter into a dendrophileвЂ™s playground). (In her favor, of course.)ДЄs it turns out, the opera house was just the beginning. But after the terrorists get away by stealing her spaceship, she slides into a diner booth next to Spike and Jet - with blood still streaming out of her shoulder - and suggests they team up to take the terrorists down, taking the bounty as a 60-40 split. But just when Mark gets Whitney on the hook, the opera house is interrupted by ecoterrorists with a truly gnarly weapon: a gas grenade - and I truly cannot emphasize this enough - that turns people into trees.ДЇayeвЂ™s plan is derailed by this sudden turn of events, though she does manage to chase after the terrorists when they take Mark hostage. вЂњA girl with no memoryвЂ™s got nothing to lose,вЂќ she warns Mark, and her recklessness throughout the episode makes it clear that she means it. Mark was one-half of the grifters, and she wants him to set up a meeting with the other: Whitney Haggis Matsumoto, who conned Faye into believing she was FayeвЂ™s mother. Faye, we learn, was pulled out of cryo-sleep and subjected to a scam that left her without memories or money. (And at the end of a year in which a few obnoxious billionaires spent obscene amounts of money to blast themselves into space, itвЂ™s a cynicism about the future of the galaxy that, frankly, feels warranted.) For a show as colorful and fun as Cowboy Bebop, thatвЂ™s a pretty bleak philosophy to build upon - kind of an antiвЂ“ Star Trek - but four episodes in, itвЂ™s clear that this series is best when the melancholy always feels like itвЂ™s nipping at the heels of the fast-moving plot.ДЄnd while weвЂ™re on the subject, hey, Faye Valentine is back! As вЂњCallisto SoulвЂќ begins, everyoneвЂ™s favorite purple-haired, acid-tongued bounty hunter is slipping into an opera house to point a gun at the dick of a man named Mark Manley.

Or, to put it another way: The time and place might change, but people are always going to be as bad as theyвЂ™ve always been. Dogs are so rare and unaffordable that they can be categorized next to dragons and unicorns. Police are corrupt, organized crime is thriving, and the economy is so screwed up that freelancers like Spike and Jet can barely afford dinner at a crappy diner even after using a two-for-one coupon. The planets have been colonized by people who built crappy replicas of the same cities we had on Earth.

Space is cluttered with billboards for fast food and beer.

One of the best things about Cowboy Bebop is how it convincingly makes the case that humans are going to screw up the galaxy too.

Cowboy bebop series ending song