Spike flips around on the tube while breakfasting on beer and cereal, but every vapid newscast, trashy talk show, and glitzy infomercial is droning on about the hot new cult SCRATCH, which sprang up overnight and has thousands of airheads and wastoids renouncing their possessions and bodies as they cleanse their souls to prepare to "migrate to electrons" and live forever as disembodied digital data streams. Yawn. Spike wouldn't even keep watching if he didn't catch sight of a particularly fetching and familiar face hiding amongst the crowd of slack-jawed, white-robed recruits. Either Faye Valentine has run off and joined a cult, or she's playing an angle for a pile of cash. Spike only needs one guess. Turns out the leader of the cult, Londes, has a bounty on his head - only one problem, no one has ever seen his head, or the rest of him, unless he's talking on the TV. No wonder Faye went inside.

Spike tracks Faye to the heart of the cult where a ziggurat of flickering boob-tubes turns lethal. Meanwhile Jet and Ed, thanks to some sharp code cracking and fast talking, dig up the real dirt on Londes and somewhere between Spike's showdown with a monument to consumerist mind-control and Jet's unmasking of the proverbial man behind the curtain, a great and powerful would-be cyber-deity vanishes ... leaving behind something even more insidious.

Faye stares at the videotape that is the only relic of her own past like a prisoner seeing photos of someone else's tropical vacation, only imagining that she remembers what she's looking at. Which makes it all the more odd when Ed actually does. Soon Faye gallivants across the planet (if it's Tuesday this must be Earth) with Ed lashed to the roof of her spacejet trying to hunt down just one familiar place, or face - anything to spark her memory.

By the time Spike has brushed his teeth and realized the girls are gone Faye has stumbled through a water fight in a landfill, lunch with a nun, and a friend she never knew she had; and Ed has stumbled across a message from her own long missing father. Spike just plain stumbles during a brawl with a pair of very enthusiastic cartographers charting the ever-changing meteor-riddled landscape, which doesn't hurt nearly as much as giving up a bounty that might have paid for his next meal. The way things are going Spike and Jet better get used to eating alone, Faye sure is getting used to crying alone; and they all hope that wherever Ed has gone off to she doesn't wind up like them. Ah well, even loneliness ain't that bad when you've got a dog. . .wait a minute, where'd Ein go?

The crime syndicate known as the Red Dragons controls half of the planet Mars and their tendrils reach into every corner of the interplanetary underworld. When the Syndicate agent known only as Vicious attempts a bloody coup against the elders, the wrath of the Dragons erupts and reaches out to terminate every partner, friend, aide and acquaintance Vicious has ever known. Including one ex-partner who is now Vicious' mortal enemy - Spike Spiegel.

Spike Spiegel nurses a drink in the Loser Bar commiserating with Jet and a bartender who uses too much vermouth in the martinis, but who still doesn't deserve to die in a savage rain of gunfire as he does when a squad of syndicate assassins burst through the door. They're after Julia too. So Shin, another of Spike's long-ago associates, takes the time to stay amidst the raging firefight.

Julia. Just the mention of her name brings back a flood of memories for Spike - memories of his previous life … and his previous death. Faye doesn't know the half of it when she tells him that her memory's finally returned, "But nothing good came of it." However Faye does know that Julia's in trouble. In fact Julia is the one that sent Faye back carrying a message for Spike. "I'll be waiting there."

Nothing good may come of it but Spike has to go back to "there," and to Julia.

The coup that failed was a ruse. When Vicious makes his real move he succeeds. He seizes control of the Red Dragon clan just as his old pal Spike flies into the Dragon's maw. Three years ago Spike left the Syndicate, much to the Syndicate's displeasure. Before he left he told Julia to meet him at the graveyard that night if she wanted to come with him. "I'll be waiting. . .by the graves, not in them," he promised. Things didn't work out as planned three years ago, thanks to Vicious, who overheard their plans and as a test of her loyalty offered Julia a sort of cyber-punk Sophie's choice - either she kills Spike, or Vicious kills her … and Spike. But now, thanks to Vicious, Julia finally meets Spike in that rainy graveyard, ready to leave it all behind and run away with him. Sadly, also thanks to Vicious, it won't be that easy.

The first twenty-two episodes of stylistic fusion, artistic innovation, multimedia, multicultural, eye-popping, expectation-defying medley of wit and thrills were merely a misdirection. The final four episodes collected on DVD Session 6, although just as eclectic and literate as the rest of the series, shift the focus from all that jazz to explore the Cowboy Bebop crew for who they are: sad lost souls drifting towards no particular future as they run away from their miserable pasts. Only the vagaries of fate threw them together in the early episodes, but it's the slowly dawning realization that there may be more to life than loneliness and leftovers that begins to pull the crew apart.

Card-sharking, sharp-shooting, wise-cracking Faye Valentine is the first to go. Ostensibly she leaves the Bebop only as a ruse to track down Londes and score a bounty; but the astonishingly ambitious "Brain Scratch" (episode 23) - which satirizes not only television as a new god, video games as brainwashing tools, and consumerism as a soulless way of life, but also hints at the hollowness of human dreams - unravels into so many layers that by the time the denouement rolls around neither the audience nor Spike ever stop to wonder whether Faye might actually have been sincere when she fell to her knees and begged the cult to help her escape her past and find a new future.

That deliberate ambiguity becomes all the more relevant when the next episode revolves around Faye and Ed's search for their lost families. "There's nothing better than belonging," says Faye, implicitly acknowledging that neither she nor Ed belong on the Bebop - a melancholic thing to accept for both characters and the audience considering the rollicking fun of the first twenty-two episodes. Although Faye is obviously right, director Shinichiro Watanabe balances the audience's gladness for Ed's choice, with regret for her departure; and balances empathy for Faye's failure to find anywhere to belong, with eagerness that her failure might presage a return to the Bebop for more hijinks.

Nothing can be finally settled, either for the Bebop crew or in the minds of the audience, until their story catches up to Spike's flashbacks. Dreamlike washed-out black and white flashbacks, accompanied by strains of sad music that sound as if coming from a children's music box, have provided glimpses of the memories haunting Spike. When Julia walks out of those memories and enters the series proper the present has caught the tail of the past signaling that the end is near. Just as Ed and Faye did before him, Spike has to confront his past to recover his chance at a life.

With a shot of a rainy street and a voice singing like a Japanese Billy Holiday the opening of "Real Folk Blues" Part 1 (episode 25) sets the tone for the bittersweet, hour-long finale. Watanabe sets aside the parody and irony that dressed up other episodes, and sustains a gripping, melancholic, character driven story through to the inevitable conclusion.

It's a testament to how artfully Watanabe has balanced the diverse elements of the series throughout, that he can continue to change tones, genres, and thematic content without ever betraying the audiences expectations. Despite Spike's dry wit and plenty of heavy slapstick and shtick the characters never degenerated into caricatures for the sake of a laugh, allowing Watanabe to tell a story about adult ex-lovers with the same characters that earlier parodied spaghetti westerns. Similarly the emotionally restrained, even-keeled Spike can anchor a lyrically emotional final story without changing the way he has been behaved thus far. Instead of giving in to overacting and bathos, Watanabe and the actors in both languages balance the Spike's cool with the heightened emotions of the story by blending the nuanced but restrained speech with Yoko Kanno's songs to provide a single evocative performance.

The stylistic richness, technical excellence, and character depth that distinguish Cowboy Bebop are done full justice by the breathtaking, heartbreaking "Real Folk Blues" Part 2. It's a fitting end to a new work that has become a new genre in itself and can be known only as. . .