Cowboy Bebop Episode “Pierrot le Fou” Turns 25 as One of the Anime’s Darkest Installments

Most Cowboy Bebop episodes hand Spike Spiegel a bounty, a complication, and enough time to crack a couple of jokes while he puffs on a bent cigarette. He’s always in trouble. He fights for his life in shootouts where he’s vastly outnumbered and dodges explosions left and right. Even when he takes a beating, he stays the coolest guy in the room. He’s an uncanny marksman and a master martial artist with no actual superpowers, but you rarely worry for him. Part of the reason is that he’s one of the luckiest anime characters ever.

That’s why “Pierrot le Fou” is so frightening. The episode takes the familiar thrill of watching Spike get into trouble and bends it toward horror. For once, he’s outclassed in every way by a grotesque, portly, bulletproof madman with a clenched grin. Mad Pierrot, whose real name is Tongpu, is the product of dangerous experiments meant to manufacture a supersoldier. They gave him superhuman strength and speed, the ability to fly, and an innate psychic barrier that stops most projectiles. Nobody who has seen his face has lived to tell about it, until Spike.

Pierrot grits his teeth so hard that he drools out of the corner of his mouth, and that’s unsettling enough. The scariest part is the possibility that Spike could actually lose to this freak.

Cowboy Bebop is jazz, but “Pierrot le Fou” scratches the record

“Pierrot le Fou” first aired in the U.S. on Adult Swim in the early hours of Nov. 5, 2001. I was too young to be watching this kind of thing late at night. After-school airings of Gundam and Dragon Ball Z on Toonami had left me hungry for more anime, and Cowboy Bebop was fun, cool, and often rather sexy. What more could I want? I didn’t understand then that the series relies on a rhythm that makes it feel safe to watch Spike take risks. And I sure as hell wasn’t ready for this episode to scare the living daylights out of me.

Cowboy Bebop is a lot like jazz. Every episode remixes familiar story beats: a bounty, a lead, a chase, a fight that goes wrong somehow. Those pieces get rearranged into something fresh that suits the story. “Pierrot le Fou,” episode 20 of 26, still uses many of them. But its distorted narrative makes it seem as if Spike has wandered into a full-on nightmare. Part of that comes from how random it all is.

There’s no bounty to pursue and no other job to worry about. Spike simply ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time after leaving a bar on Mars. He stumbles upon Mad Pierrot murdering a high-ranking official of the Inter-Solar System Police (ISSP) and his bodyguards. A shootout and a fistfight follow, and Mad Pierrot soundly defeats Spike. He even juggles Spike in the air with flying kicks, like a clip out of Super Smash Bros., and nearly kills him. Only a meowing cat saves Spike, because the sound sends Pierrot into a panicked frenzy. The first encounter is a chaotic, one-sided beating that leaves Spike so bandaged that Faye calls him a mummy.

The Batman connection

A popular fan interpretation holds that “Pierrot le Fou” draws heavily on Batman: The Animated Series. Sunrise, the studio that animated all of Bebop, also worked on several episodes in Batman‘s first season. The comparison has some pull. This version of Mars at night feels a lot like Gotham, cloaked in shadow as a clownish supervillain murders what looks like a group of gangsters. It casts Spike as a Batman with no money, no gadgets, and no cowl. Mad Pierrot already looks like a cartoonishly exaggerated Batman villain, spliced together from the Penguin’s rotund silhouette and the Joker’s grin.

Pierrot’s origin story may be the scariest part of all. It plays out over a brisk three minutes or so in the back half of the episode. The black-and-white sequence, set to an unhinged synth track, shows dangerous experimentation that evokes MKUltra. The experiments succeeded in giving Pierrot superhuman powers, but they also severely damaged his psyche and caused him to regress to an almost childlike state.

A cat with heterochromia was in the lab, which explains why Pierrot’s only real weakness is a fear of felines that remind him of the torture. The sequence’s only splash of color arrives after the experiment is deemed a failure and Pierrot murders dozens of people while escaping. His killing spree continues as he seeks vengeance on those who tortured him, and it’s unclear whether his bloodlust will ever end.

While Spike is still recovering from his injuries, he receives an invitation to the Space World theme park to face Pierrot again. Their extended fight through the park is an off-kilter brawl, and animatronic animals and cheerful attractions make the violence even more surreal. Spike’s guns can’t get through Pierrot’s shield as the two battle on and across rollercoasters and pepper stuffed animals with bullets. Just when it looks like Pierrot will shoot Spike dead, a glint in Spike’s mismatched eyes gives the bounty hunter an opening. The eyes look just like the cat from the lab, and Spike lands a knife in Pierrot’s leg.

The memory of the cat sends Pierrot spiraling into panic as he wails for his mother. He ends up lying on the ground while a parade of animatronics slowly marches forward to crush him. Spike survives, though he’s bruised, battered, and shot through the shoulder. As the dust settles, Jet calls Spike to explain Pierrot’s whole backstory. “Forget it,” Spike replies. “I don’t need the info anymore.” Then he ends the episode with a sigh and his typical tired quip: “Man, I hate theme parks.”

Thanks to Mad Pierrot, I do too.

Source: Polygon