Guess who’s behind again! It’s me! This week has been absolutely one of the most intense since last semester, so I’m just happy I’m only one challenge behind at this point. Bear with me!

Anyway, these challenge days are always some of the hardest for me to do, since most of the time, the movies or TV series or comic books or whatever have some obviously talented people writing for them, which means my opinions are amateurish at best. With Cowboy Bebop, it’s a bit more difficult to do this since … well, it’s such a tightly curated show, with only 26 episodes and a movie (which I’ll get to later on this month).

But I think I’m going to have to gripe again about Gren being killed in “Jupiter Jazz, Part II.” There is definitely a part of me that realizes Gren had to die, since their story was over at that point, but … what if it wasn’t? What if Gren could have grown as a person, like Spike, Jet, Faye, and Radical Edward, grown past their need for revenge? Like I said earlier this month, how much could Spike and the audience have learned about Vicious to humanize him a little bit? Maybe I’m just looking for more of a reason to connect with Vicious as something more than just a Big Bad. Like the Mayor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He was, without a doubt, the best villain the show ever had (Glory was a close second), and he was so incredibly nuanced with human weaknesses like love for Faith and his own hubris. Vicious was just that: vicious. But not much else. Gren’s presence in the story had already started to give Vicious some new layers, but imagine how kickass that final battle could have been had Gren faced him again? And we would have had a main character who was androgynous and intersex on a major television show!

Oh, the possibilities that were wasted for another “bury your gays” moment …

Art Credit: PennLive