The following is my opinions on the hidden symbolism regarding the show's
driving force: the complicated relationship among Spike, Vicious, and
Julia. If you do not agree with me, I am always open to other people's
takes and opinions on the show. Like I always say, nothing's set in stone,
just superglued.
Oh, and obviously I don't own Cowboy Bebop.
.
.
.
Cowboy Blues: Spike, Vicious, and Julia
It was a love triangle with too much passion, too many strings, too many wheels. There bonds were broken apart one rainy afternoon when the final remnants of the past assimilated into nothing and time for a gruesome cycle of slumber was set in motion. Spike came between Vicious and Julia, Vicious prevented Julia and Spike, and Julia tore apart Spike and Vicious. Whether or not it was fair was never an issue. It was just something that happened, something as inevitable as waking up, or dying.
Did Vicious really love Julia? Did Spike? Did Julia really love either of her leading men that eventually led to her demise? There were so many questions and so many pieces were missing from the puzzle. One could only hope to piece together the painful hopelessness of it all. What really happened between three human beings, two out of which appeared only five times during the twenty-six episode series? And yet again, how could you understand Spike? He stayed so silent about what he felt; it was part of who he was, that silence. In truth, he was trained to conceal emotion, he was trained to destroy things, to contradict any sort of moral ever inflicted upon humanity.
He had tapped into the sanctioned bond of friendship; he had betrayed his best comrade when he stole his lover. Was Julia really more important to him than Vicious? Was she worth the dreary confines of lucid dreaming to which he was subjected for the short remainder of his life after he betrayed Vicious? On one inevitable night, he had kissed those poisonous lips and "sealed his fate gratefully."
He must have seen something in her that others did not. Was that image merely a beautiful woman? It couldn't have been. He had encountered many beautiful women in his life but none had ever rendered him so speechless as a pretty blonde in leather had that warm, summer evening when he was plying billiard with Vicious after work. Was it those golden curls or those sad eyes? Was it the sound of her deep, rich voice, or the sensual movement of her fingers? Was he aroused by her knowledge of the game or the confident stroll as she made her way across the room and leaned against the table? Or maybe it was none of those things at all, maybe what he saw was something hidden on the inside of the Faberge?
At one point in his life, Spike was a killer. He seldom thought about it, he seldom pitied. He had never taken pride in what he did, but simultaneously, he never shamed in it. He never felt a characteristic thirst for blood, or perhaps he never allowed himself to feel it. Vicious made it plainly obvious when he said "Do you know what you look like, Spike- --a venomous beast---the same blood runs through both of us." Vicious was a killer too, but he did not treat his chosen profession in the same way as Spike. He killed because he had to, but if he didn't have to, he would kill anyway. He was ruthless and manipulative, and yet he had a strong sense of conviction. Why else would he be so distraught when Spike had chosen to leave the Syndicate? It may even have been his foremost reason for hating Spike, not that the latter had stolen his woman. Perhaps at once Vicious did see a "need to believe," and perhaps at once it might have been Spike who would have criticized that aspect. Why was Vicious so hesitant to hear from a man named Gren that he had looked up and believed in him? Why did he continuously reassure Lin that it would be a good idea to betray him? Perhaps he pitied them on some level (although he was a man who had no pity or was as afraid of it as Spike had been afraid of blood thirst) because he knew how they had felt. Perhaps at one point in his life he had believed into the idea of trust, trust with both, his lover and his best friend. A man like Vicious, who was without a past, could only hold dear the people of his present. Maybe Julia and Spike were the most important people in his life, maybe that was why it hurt him so much when they chose to betray him.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he did not love Julia at all. Did he not say at a certain point "Be careful when you're with that woman"? What did he mean by that? Did he mean to jealously caution Spike to stay away from her because if he did not Vicious would hurt him, or did he merely warn his good friend of the duplicity of a woman he could no longer trust because he sensed her inclinations to betrayal? Maybe it was not Julia who, in the end, ended up breaking Vicious' heart; maybe it was Spike.
If Vicious did not care for Julia, it could not have hurt him much to find out that his best friend was involved with her. He might have been bitter that Spike would do such a thing to him, but no frenzied jealousy every arose regarding Julia. Vicious may have caught the two in bed with a gun in hand that he intended to use on both, but he was more concerned for the shameless lover, not the woman whom he was supposed to have loved. Maybe that was why he was willing to spare Julia's life in return for her hands taking that of Spike's. It would seem reasonable, that it would hurt Spike more to die at the hand of the woman that he loved instead of the man whom he had come to hate. Yet he did little to prevent her from escaping, which was exactly what she did as soon as he left her apartment. And, indeed, did he not himself once claim, "I'm the only one who can kill you"? Knowing Vicious it was more probable that he would want to kill Spike with his own hands. He would not leave it up to a woman: he was expecting Julia to run away, and inevitably lead him to Spike's hideout. Julia was the living example of the tracking device Vicious put into the music box he had once given to Gren. She was specifically designed to unwittingly seal the faith of both of them. Ironically, the two lovers got exactly what was prophesized for them from Vicious. Julia did not kill Spike when she had the chance, and therefore lost her own life and propelled him to face Vicious and die as well.
And yet, while Vicious had mixed feelings about Julia, Spike was hopelessly and unconditionally in love. She was never duplicitous to him. To Spike, Julia was a strong and complicated woman who had gone through many things but managed to stay alive. What did "staying alive" mean to him? His life was based on taking life without a whim of pity or regret. But how can anyone pity when they cannot understand what it is that they are shattering? A prized artifact is worth much more to a collector than a thief. Was Julia's act of being "alive" what taught Spike to understand life? Was she the major turning point in his "life" when he had finally gotten a grasp on what he'd spent his entire "lifetime" devouring? Perhaps she was what transformed him from a "venomous beast" to a human being; she probably did so unwittingly.
"Like a devilish angel, or maybe an angelic devil," Faye once described Julia. She was not perfect, even though at first glance she seemed to be. Her heart was neither pure nor corrupted, she felt pity but never stopped from killing for advantage, she felt conviction but never stayed for too long in one place, she was loyal to one man but betrayed another. Her poorer qualities did not outweigh her faculties. She was not a bad person, simply an ordinary one.
That was another word Faye had used to describe the elusive woman of Spike's dreams, "ordinary."
But she lived in a world of ordinary people, people with flawed beauty. Julia was a mirrored image of both, Spike and Vicious, she was the link that connected them. Maybe that was why she fell for two very different men, because with her between them, they were not very different at all. Spike was not perfect, and neither was Vicious. They were three imperfect human beings who strove to survive, to go on, to stay in the game no matter what hands they'd been dealt. Folding was never an option for the trio. The loved the danger, the unrest, the shear hideousness of their lives. Spike and Julia enjoyed dreaming about a word of balance and safety, but they never treated that domain as anything but a "dream." Just as a less- adventurous person would dream of taking a walk on the wild side, the two "star-crossed lovers" dreamed of strolling along a sidewalk of safety.
"Let's run away somewhere, where no one else is," Spike told Julia once. She seemed less enthusiastic about the idea, almost bitter. "They'll kill you," she told him when he declared that he was leaving the syndicate. While she spoke of death, he spoke of dreaming. They both had conflicting associations with life. Spike believed that he could attain happiness by dispatching from reality and living a dream. Julia knew that the only detachment from the real world was death. Spike was the little boy who dreamed of getting a pony for Christmas; Julia was the mother who knew the pony would not fit through the front door.
It was not until Julia left Spike standing alone in the graveyard (ironically, among death) that his sugarcoated dreams of reality metamorphosed into nightmares. He always claimed that he had died, almost certainly referring to the occasion at the gravesite, and that the blow was inflicted by Julia's supposed betrayal. Obviously he did not know about the choice she was faced with by Vicious. Yet, unlike Vicious, Julia's failure to attend did not drive Spike to fall out of love with her. It, instead, made him even more hopelessly enthralled. While Vicious might have strove to attain her for revenge, Spike searched for her only to relive those moments of dreaming, moments when he dreamt pleasant dreams with someone else.
It is therefore understandable why Spike was never able to open up to his shipmates on the Bebop. It was not that he didn't want to, merely that they lived in the real world and therefore could not understand. That was also why he could never fall in love with Faye Valentine, a romance so anticipated by fervent Bebop fans. To anyone else, Julia might easily have been overcome, but to Spike, the memories they shared together were unforgettable. They completed one another because they were the only ones who could understand the pain of living in a world but not believing that it was real. The only time Spike had ever felt happiness at his fingertips was when he was with Julia, and the life that she put inside of him made him feel real. That was when they only talked about "living in a dream" but didn't actually do so. Over the course of their lives, both lovers had been through plenty of heartbreak and despair, and when they met one another it was as if it was meant to be. The worldliness and wisdom of a woman like Julia (who was much older than Faye, and very well may have been senior even to Spike) was one that Faye could not even begin to approach in her yet unlived life. Spike was in love with a woman, but Faye was still very much a girl. Despite that Spike was willing to give up his comradeship with Vicious for Julia; he could never give up his love affair with Julia for Faye.
Julia was Spike's holy war; she was an idea that he was never able to relinquish until the end. He could never die while she was living. Even when absent from his side, this phantasm cradled him from death. It was only when Julia herself passed away, that Spike released himself from servitude to her. Nothing dies harder than an idea, and those that serve it die with it.
Ironically, Spike's first flashbacks of Julia after two years of bleakness occurred when he was plunging, possibly to his doom, out of a Cathedral window. But he did not die, although he should have died. Julia was with him along the way. Who saved him? Fate or Spike's inner will to live to finally ask Julia why she did not come that rainy day? To this man who had committed so many sins, Julia was a religion, the last keepsake that validated his humanity that he had not yet lost to death or betrayal.
Even Faye compared Julia to biblical characters when she had said that the woman was both, a devil and an angel. Ironically, she was both, Spike's salvation and doom. It was obvious from the beginning that he could not live with her, and yet everyone knew that he could not live without her.
Yet Spike did not remain static through the course of his three years apart from his lover. Constant urging from Vicious to awaken drove him to the edge. While at first he drew a line between death and dreaming, the two states of being were now almost the same thing. Your eyes are closed, your body is too heavy, and you have no control over the world around you. The planet keeps on spinning while you are still in one place. Julia seemed to change too, and while at first her silent grace seemed to deceive, when she began to speak at their eventual encounter, the pony situation reversed.
It was suddenly Julia who spoke about running away and watching dreams. She did not realize that Spike was on the verge of awaking from a very long night's sleep. They no longer wanted the same things; she liked dreaming over death while he preferred vice versa. They were incongruous once again, and when Spike hesitated to embrace Julia while she longed to be in his arms, one almost got the feel that he no longer loved her.
The same sense prevailed when, after the death of a trusted friend Anastasia, Spike was going to "go." It seemed that while before Spike could give up friendship for love, he no longer was willing to do so. Nevertheless, Julia stayed loyal and promised to be with him until the end. He received the news with nothing except a slight nod. He did not know what he had at that moment, nor would he realize it until, minutes later, he lost it.
"This is a dream," were her last words to him, but as soon as she stopped breathing the dream ended.
Julia's death was Spike's awakening, and his awakening was characterized by a fierce desire to know if it was still possible for him to die. He was not going to see Vicious to face his doom, although that was ultimately what resulted from the encounter, he was merely going there to "see if [he] really [is] alive"
The tale of the tiger-striped cat could not fit in better than at the moment when he walked away from Jet, Faye, and the Bebop. He was leaving his "owners" whom he "didn't much care for" while mourning his white lady cat. In a couple of hours he would die in a climatic battle with Vicious, stating those famous words "Julia passed away, let's end it all."
"If that is your wish," Vicious replied.
Why did he bring up Julia? First, he refused to embrace her, then he refused to run away with her. When asked by Jet if he was doing this for her, he replied "There is nothing I can do for a dead woman." Why did his final sentence before his final word have to be about her? Perhaps it was his final reference to a love triangle that shaped three lives, perhaps he was convincing himself that there was no longer point in living. And yet it is possible that he was simply reminding Vicious of a time in their lives when they were both in love with the same woman, when they both betrayed one another because of the same woman, and why now was finally the right time to invoke a ghost, and for them to kill one another.
Vicious said something compelling that let another clue as to Spike's hibernation. He said, "So, you're finally awake." This suggests that Spike had fallen asleep after Julia left him, and did not wake up until finally comfronted with his past. Julia's reappearance was Spike's awakening. This would suggest that Julia and Vicious, remnants of Spike's past, represented true reality to him, but not naked reality, but a safe one. As long as he had these two people, he was not alone. Meanwhile, his experiences on the Bebop were really his dream. That was why when he left, he had completely "awoken." He began to sober up with his encounter with Julia. Her death and his decision to face Vicious signified that he had once again rediscovered his cusioned reality.
Vicious died first, and Spike had a moment to reflect on his victory as he descended from the "stairway to heaven" to the amazement of everyone who was fortunate enough to witness this moment in time. Spike died before he had to face the new reality, the reality in which Vicious and Julia were no longer alive. It was only reasonable for him to die; he would have been truly unhappy, truly hopeless if he had stayed alive. There was no longer Julia to love, nor Vicious to hate. With the departure of two people who had the most bearing on Spike's life, he only had two choices, resting in peace or having to endure living even though he was already dead. That made his decease seem, on some level, less tragic. Spike was still alive when he proclaimed his now-famous words "I'm going there to see if I really am alive." He died when he killed his last tie to reality, Vicious.
The entire secession of a man's life ended with a "bang," and as he fell down on the floor, nobody knew why he passed away. Was the cause of Spike Spiegel's death the harsh wounds inflicted by Vicious or loneliness?
His soul ascends, but someone else must carry that weight.
Will it be Faye Valentine, with her unrequited love for a man who never believed he was alive?
Will it be Jet Black, who lost not only a friend but also a son?
Or the show's viewers, who wished they did not have see the inevitable end, but simultaneously felt fortunate that they had?
A little bit on a personal note: It was not that Spike had died that left me so unsatisfied with the show. It was that it dealt so little with the two people he had left behind, Faye and Jet.
Oh, and obviously I don't own Cowboy Bebop.
.
.
.
Cowboy Blues: Spike, Vicious, and Julia
It was a love triangle with too much passion, too many strings, too many wheels. There bonds were broken apart one rainy afternoon when the final remnants of the past assimilated into nothing and time for a gruesome cycle of slumber was set in motion. Spike came between Vicious and Julia, Vicious prevented Julia and Spike, and Julia tore apart Spike and Vicious. Whether or not it was fair was never an issue. It was just something that happened, something as inevitable as waking up, or dying.
Did Vicious really love Julia? Did Spike? Did Julia really love either of her leading men that eventually led to her demise? There were so many questions and so many pieces were missing from the puzzle. One could only hope to piece together the painful hopelessness of it all. What really happened between three human beings, two out of which appeared only five times during the twenty-six episode series? And yet again, how could you understand Spike? He stayed so silent about what he felt; it was part of who he was, that silence. In truth, he was trained to conceal emotion, he was trained to destroy things, to contradict any sort of moral ever inflicted upon humanity.
He had tapped into the sanctioned bond of friendship; he had betrayed his best comrade when he stole his lover. Was Julia really more important to him than Vicious? Was she worth the dreary confines of lucid dreaming to which he was subjected for the short remainder of his life after he betrayed Vicious? On one inevitable night, he had kissed those poisonous lips and "sealed his fate gratefully."
He must have seen something in her that others did not. Was that image merely a beautiful woman? It couldn't have been. He had encountered many beautiful women in his life but none had ever rendered him so speechless as a pretty blonde in leather had that warm, summer evening when he was plying billiard with Vicious after work. Was it those golden curls or those sad eyes? Was it the sound of her deep, rich voice, or the sensual movement of her fingers? Was he aroused by her knowledge of the game or the confident stroll as she made her way across the room and leaned against the table? Or maybe it was none of those things at all, maybe what he saw was something hidden on the inside of the Faberge?
At one point in his life, Spike was a killer. He seldom thought about it, he seldom pitied. He had never taken pride in what he did, but simultaneously, he never shamed in it. He never felt a characteristic thirst for blood, or perhaps he never allowed himself to feel it. Vicious made it plainly obvious when he said "Do you know what you look like, Spike- --a venomous beast---the same blood runs through both of us." Vicious was a killer too, but he did not treat his chosen profession in the same way as Spike. He killed because he had to, but if he didn't have to, he would kill anyway. He was ruthless and manipulative, and yet he had a strong sense of conviction. Why else would he be so distraught when Spike had chosen to leave the Syndicate? It may even have been his foremost reason for hating Spike, not that the latter had stolen his woman. Perhaps at once Vicious did see a "need to believe," and perhaps at once it might have been Spike who would have criticized that aspect. Why was Vicious so hesitant to hear from a man named Gren that he had looked up and believed in him? Why did he continuously reassure Lin that it would be a good idea to betray him? Perhaps he pitied them on some level (although he was a man who had no pity or was as afraid of it as Spike had been afraid of blood thirst) because he knew how they had felt. Perhaps at one point in his life he had believed into the idea of trust, trust with both, his lover and his best friend. A man like Vicious, who was without a past, could only hold dear the people of his present. Maybe Julia and Spike were the most important people in his life, maybe that was why it hurt him so much when they chose to betray him.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he did not love Julia at all. Did he not say at a certain point "Be careful when you're with that woman"? What did he mean by that? Did he mean to jealously caution Spike to stay away from her because if he did not Vicious would hurt him, or did he merely warn his good friend of the duplicity of a woman he could no longer trust because he sensed her inclinations to betrayal? Maybe it was not Julia who, in the end, ended up breaking Vicious' heart; maybe it was Spike.
If Vicious did not care for Julia, it could not have hurt him much to find out that his best friend was involved with her. He might have been bitter that Spike would do such a thing to him, but no frenzied jealousy every arose regarding Julia. Vicious may have caught the two in bed with a gun in hand that he intended to use on both, but he was more concerned for the shameless lover, not the woman whom he was supposed to have loved. Maybe that was why he was willing to spare Julia's life in return for her hands taking that of Spike's. It would seem reasonable, that it would hurt Spike more to die at the hand of the woman that he loved instead of the man whom he had come to hate. Yet he did little to prevent her from escaping, which was exactly what she did as soon as he left her apartment. And, indeed, did he not himself once claim, "I'm the only one who can kill you"? Knowing Vicious it was more probable that he would want to kill Spike with his own hands. He would not leave it up to a woman: he was expecting Julia to run away, and inevitably lead him to Spike's hideout. Julia was the living example of the tracking device Vicious put into the music box he had once given to Gren. She was specifically designed to unwittingly seal the faith of both of them. Ironically, the two lovers got exactly what was prophesized for them from Vicious. Julia did not kill Spike when she had the chance, and therefore lost her own life and propelled him to face Vicious and die as well.
And yet, while Vicious had mixed feelings about Julia, Spike was hopelessly and unconditionally in love. She was never duplicitous to him. To Spike, Julia was a strong and complicated woman who had gone through many things but managed to stay alive. What did "staying alive" mean to him? His life was based on taking life without a whim of pity or regret. But how can anyone pity when they cannot understand what it is that they are shattering? A prized artifact is worth much more to a collector than a thief. Was Julia's act of being "alive" what taught Spike to understand life? Was she the major turning point in his "life" when he had finally gotten a grasp on what he'd spent his entire "lifetime" devouring? Perhaps she was what transformed him from a "venomous beast" to a human being; she probably did so unwittingly.
"Like a devilish angel, or maybe an angelic devil," Faye once described Julia. She was not perfect, even though at first glance she seemed to be. Her heart was neither pure nor corrupted, she felt pity but never stopped from killing for advantage, she felt conviction but never stayed for too long in one place, she was loyal to one man but betrayed another. Her poorer qualities did not outweigh her faculties. She was not a bad person, simply an ordinary one.
That was another word Faye had used to describe the elusive woman of Spike's dreams, "ordinary."
But she lived in a world of ordinary people, people with flawed beauty. Julia was a mirrored image of both, Spike and Vicious, she was the link that connected them. Maybe that was why she fell for two very different men, because with her between them, they were not very different at all. Spike was not perfect, and neither was Vicious. They were three imperfect human beings who strove to survive, to go on, to stay in the game no matter what hands they'd been dealt. Folding was never an option for the trio. The loved the danger, the unrest, the shear hideousness of their lives. Spike and Julia enjoyed dreaming about a word of balance and safety, but they never treated that domain as anything but a "dream." Just as a less- adventurous person would dream of taking a walk on the wild side, the two "star-crossed lovers" dreamed of strolling along a sidewalk of safety.
"Let's run away somewhere, where no one else is," Spike told Julia once. She seemed less enthusiastic about the idea, almost bitter. "They'll kill you," she told him when he declared that he was leaving the syndicate. While she spoke of death, he spoke of dreaming. They both had conflicting associations with life. Spike believed that he could attain happiness by dispatching from reality and living a dream. Julia knew that the only detachment from the real world was death. Spike was the little boy who dreamed of getting a pony for Christmas; Julia was the mother who knew the pony would not fit through the front door.
It was not until Julia left Spike standing alone in the graveyard (ironically, among death) that his sugarcoated dreams of reality metamorphosed into nightmares. He always claimed that he had died, almost certainly referring to the occasion at the gravesite, and that the blow was inflicted by Julia's supposed betrayal. Obviously he did not know about the choice she was faced with by Vicious. Yet, unlike Vicious, Julia's failure to attend did not drive Spike to fall out of love with her. It, instead, made him even more hopelessly enthralled. While Vicious might have strove to attain her for revenge, Spike searched for her only to relive those moments of dreaming, moments when he dreamt pleasant dreams with someone else.
It is therefore understandable why Spike was never able to open up to his shipmates on the Bebop. It was not that he didn't want to, merely that they lived in the real world and therefore could not understand. That was also why he could never fall in love with Faye Valentine, a romance so anticipated by fervent Bebop fans. To anyone else, Julia might easily have been overcome, but to Spike, the memories they shared together were unforgettable. They completed one another because they were the only ones who could understand the pain of living in a world but not believing that it was real. The only time Spike had ever felt happiness at his fingertips was when he was with Julia, and the life that she put inside of him made him feel real. That was when they only talked about "living in a dream" but didn't actually do so. Over the course of their lives, both lovers had been through plenty of heartbreak and despair, and when they met one another it was as if it was meant to be. The worldliness and wisdom of a woman like Julia (who was much older than Faye, and very well may have been senior even to Spike) was one that Faye could not even begin to approach in her yet unlived life. Spike was in love with a woman, but Faye was still very much a girl. Despite that Spike was willing to give up his comradeship with Vicious for Julia; he could never give up his love affair with Julia for Faye.
Julia was Spike's holy war; she was an idea that he was never able to relinquish until the end. He could never die while she was living. Even when absent from his side, this phantasm cradled him from death. It was only when Julia herself passed away, that Spike released himself from servitude to her. Nothing dies harder than an idea, and those that serve it die with it.
Ironically, Spike's first flashbacks of Julia after two years of bleakness occurred when he was plunging, possibly to his doom, out of a Cathedral window. But he did not die, although he should have died. Julia was with him along the way. Who saved him? Fate or Spike's inner will to live to finally ask Julia why she did not come that rainy day? To this man who had committed so many sins, Julia was a religion, the last keepsake that validated his humanity that he had not yet lost to death or betrayal.
Even Faye compared Julia to biblical characters when she had said that the woman was both, a devil and an angel. Ironically, she was both, Spike's salvation and doom. It was obvious from the beginning that he could not live with her, and yet everyone knew that he could not live without her.
Yet Spike did not remain static through the course of his three years apart from his lover. Constant urging from Vicious to awaken drove him to the edge. While at first he drew a line between death and dreaming, the two states of being were now almost the same thing. Your eyes are closed, your body is too heavy, and you have no control over the world around you. The planet keeps on spinning while you are still in one place. Julia seemed to change too, and while at first her silent grace seemed to deceive, when she began to speak at their eventual encounter, the pony situation reversed.
It was suddenly Julia who spoke about running away and watching dreams. She did not realize that Spike was on the verge of awaking from a very long night's sleep. They no longer wanted the same things; she liked dreaming over death while he preferred vice versa. They were incongruous once again, and when Spike hesitated to embrace Julia while she longed to be in his arms, one almost got the feel that he no longer loved her.
The same sense prevailed when, after the death of a trusted friend Anastasia, Spike was going to "go." It seemed that while before Spike could give up friendship for love, he no longer was willing to do so. Nevertheless, Julia stayed loyal and promised to be with him until the end. He received the news with nothing except a slight nod. He did not know what he had at that moment, nor would he realize it until, minutes later, he lost it.
"This is a dream," were her last words to him, but as soon as she stopped breathing the dream ended.
Julia's death was Spike's awakening, and his awakening was characterized by a fierce desire to know if it was still possible for him to die. He was not going to see Vicious to face his doom, although that was ultimately what resulted from the encounter, he was merely going there to "see if [he] really [is] alive"
The tale of the tiger-striped cat could not fit in better than at the moment when he walked away from Jet, Faye, and the Bebop. He was leaving his "owners" whom he "didn't much care for" while mourning his white lady cat. In a couple of hours he would die in a climatic battle with Vicious, stating those famous words "Julia passed away, let's end it all."
"If that is your wish," Vicious replied.
Why did he bring up Julia? First, he refused to embrace her, then he refused to run away with her. When asked by Jet if he was doing this for her, he replied "There is nothing I can do for a dead woman." Why did his final sentence before his final word have to be about her? Perhaps it was his final reference to a love triangle that shaped three lives, perhaps he was convincing himself that there was no longer point in living. And yet it is possible that he was simply reminding Vicious of a time in their lives when they were both in love with the same woman, when they both betrayed one another because of the same woman, and why now was finally the right time to invoke a ghost, and for them to kill one another.
Vicious said something compelling that let another clue as to Spike's hibernation. He said, "So, you're finally awake." This suggests that Spike had fallen asleep after Julia left him, and did not wake up until finally comfronted with his past. Julia's reappearance was Spike's awakening. This would suggest that Julia and Vicious, remnants of Spike's past, represented true reality to him, but not naked reality, but a safe one. As long as he had these two people, he was not alone. Meanwhile, his experiences on the Bebop were really his dream. That was why when he left, he had completely "awoken." He began to sober up with his encounter with Julia. Her death and his decision to face Vicious signified that he had once again rediscovered his cusioned reality.
Vicious died first, and Spike had a moment to reflect on his victory as he descended from the "stairway to heaven" to the amazement of everyone who was fortunate enough to witness this moment in time. Spike died before he had to face the new reality, the reality in which Vicious and Julia were no longer alive. It was only reasonable for him to die; he would have been truly unhappy, truly hopeless if he had stayed alive. There was no longer Julia to love, nor Vicious to hate. With the departure of two people who had the most bearing on Spike's life, he only had two choices, resting in peace or having to endure living even though he was already dead. That made his decease seem, on some level, less tragic. Spike was still alive when he proclaimed his now-famous words "I'm going there to see if I really am alive." He died when he killed his last tie to reality, Vicious.
The entire secession of a man's life ended with a "bang," and as he fell down on the floor, nobody knew why he passed away. Was the cause of Spike Spiegel's death the harsh wounds inflicted by Vicious or loneliness?
His soul ascends, but someone else must carry that weight.
Will it be Faye Valentine, with her unrequited love for a man who never believed he was alive?
Will it be Jet Black, who lost not only a friend but also a son?
Or the show's viewers, who wished they did not have see the inevitable end, but simultaneously felt fortunate that they had?
A little bit on a personal note: It was not that Spike had died that left me so unsatisfied with the show. It was that it dealt so little with the two people he had left behind, Faye and Jet.