As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Mad Pierrot. Basically a Nigh-Invulnerable Monster Clown who can't be hit by high kinetic energy objects such as bullets, he goes around killing ISSP officers and perpetually has a Slasher Smile.
- Not only his smile, but also the red eyes, the eerie way he floats... He can't be hurt. He'll always be there, following you. And when he catches you, he'll brutally murder you.
Mad Pierrot: "Good evening, gentlemen; I've journeyed here in order to take your lives."- And the manic laughter. The audio for the preview short of the episode is just Tongpu madly cackling for 30 seconds.
- What really sets him apart is the fact that Tongpu's design doesn't immediately scream "unkillable demon", he's just a big, rotund guy with a cane, who looks pretty jovial and whimsical. Sure, he's a good shot with his gun-cane, but Spike's faced tougher guys than him before, right? WRONG. When Spike rounds the corner of that alley, he walks right into the most terrifyingly one-sided battle that's inflicted on him in the entire series. Spike Spiegel, who barely flinches at knocking down dozens of Mafia goons, has to do all he can just to survive, let alone win.
- Another scary bit was his last victim before confronting Spike in the amusement park. He kills his targets' bodyguards all without appearing to move and lets the target run, or attempt to for his life, all the while smiling that same sinister Slasher Smile.
- The scariest part about him hunting Spike down with such psychopathic obsessiveness? Spike wasn't even going after his bounty, he just happened to be shooting billiards nearby and then walked down that alley at the wrong time. Forget the sci-fi elements of that, forget the fact that Pierrot seemingly cannot be killed: imagine you accidentally walk down the wrong alleyway at night and find yourself face-to-face with a cold-blooded killer who will stop at nothing to see you dead. And a guy as badass as Spike Spiegel can barely withstand him, so somebody like you? You might as well just give up and pray he'll kill you quickly.
- What makes Spike's first encounter with him even more creepy is that, when he first wanders upon Tongpu and his handiwork, Spike seems unfazed as usual for a brief moment - he seems to think he's just wandered across another two-bit criminal, or an unfortunate gentleman that's walked into the same crime scene he has. But then Tongpu greets him with a tip of the hat, and when Spike sees the look on his face, all that calm and confidence in Spike's demeanor flies out the window as he realizes that this thing is going to fucking kill him if he doesn't pull out all the stops fast.
- Also his Villainous Breakdown when he gets hit by the same knife he used on Spike, doubling as both horror and Tear Jerker worthy, while the cheery carnival music plays in the background.
- Made worse when his backstory is revealed. He was subject to numerous mysterious experiments in a laboratory, with the end result of him being deemed a failure since the intense agony caused by the experiments also warped his mind into a child-like state, causing him to be sent to be quarantined in a hospital where he would be held indefinitely. Ultimately, due to his deteriorating sanity from his memory of the experiments, he snaps and slaughters the scientists and all staff members and escapes from the hospital.
- We learn all of this backstory through an extremely creepy reveal sequence, filled with disturbing images of the surgery and experiments performed on him, and some sort of trippy, pseudo-electronica music in the background.
- That "trippy, pseudo-electronica" is a cover of "On the Run" by Pink Floyd. The original song is about the fear of dying in a plane crash. This version is about being continuously, tortuously experimented on by dispassionate technocrats, warping a human being into a living weapon.
- The fight between him and Spike at the amusement park can count as this, basically putting the Monster Clown character in the area where he'd be the absolute scariest for anyone with a fear of clowns. Many sequences feature the amusement parks music playing over the fight scenes in a quiet, creepy manner. The lights from the rides and machines that have been activated are then often contrasted by the fact that this fight is taking place at night, allowing for everything to look that much more eerie. Then there's the fact that the basic premise of it is one man being stuck in an empty amusement park with the monster clown...
- The deaths involved, both in flashback and in the present, are some of the bloodiest in the series. Especially the guards from Pierrot's escape in the past - visible shattered ribcage bones are poking out of a guard's back on-screen. And the mad man himself? Smashed beneath a giant walking parade animatronic's foot, just.. disappearing with Sickening "Crunch!". The fact that we don't see the mess along the ground afterwards is only barely a Gory Discretion Shot since we get to see it happen otherwise.
- Pierrot specifically kills anyone who catches even a glimpse of his face, with no one before Spike ever living to tell about it. So the animation department seemingly decided to be cheeky and make sure his face gets a close up in as many shots as humanly possible during his and Spike's first confrontation.
- Oh, and above all of this is a subtle but equally terrifying note: Pierrot somehow finds out the Bebop's contact info and personally invites Spike (via Ed's email) to "a wonderful party" at the amusement park. Who knows how much he figured out about the crew or their location?
- Spike Spiegel is Brilliant, but Lazy, an aloof bounty hunter who happens to know his way around guns, piloting and martial arts. He seems totally affable besides when he gets irritated, and while more of an Anti-Hero than Jet, ultimately is rather moralistic. Then he gets pissed. There's a handful of cases in the series where he loses his temper enough to kill, and they usually involve Vicious, but in the cases that he doesn't, he still suddenly transforms into a One-Man Army that demonstrates he's an ex-Red Dragon Syndicate member that was considered one of the best for a good reason. And when Vicious is involved, twice over Spike leaves a sizeable body count of Syndicate members in his wake without even a second of hesitation, caring only for what he's lost to his involvement more than he ever does what he's done.
- The fridge monster in Toys in the Attic, which it goes around to bite and poison Jet, Faye and Ein, turning the situation into something reminiscent of Alien. It's revealed to be drippings from a Ganymede Rock Lobster that spoiled after being in a now-disabled fridge for more than a year. No wonder Spike is horrified when he opens the damn thing to check on it and then tosses it out the airlock soon after. And speaking of which, the extremely-decayed contents of the fridge are frightening to look at. By the end of the episode, Ed, who hasn't been bitten by the monster, eats it.Spike: "And what's the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."
- "Brain Scratch" and "Sympathy For The Devil" are also pretty damn creepy. The former is based around Mind Rape, and the latter has plenty of Body Horror (remember the Rapid Aging?).
- Vicious. He's a cunning, nihilistic psychopath with little regard for human life and a lethal combatant, to boot. He's not a Knight of Cerebus for nothing.
- Rain, the song that plays as Spike walks to the Cathedral and faces Vicious in episode 5. The full version contains even more delightful lyrics.If there is a Hell, I'm sure this is how it smells. I wish this were a dream but no, it isn't.
- This track from the movie (elevator music with gunfire and panicked screams in the background).
- The Monkey Business virus from Gateway Shuffle, which alters the genes of humans to turn them into violent, terrified ape creatures. The concept is bad enough, but the mook we see subjected to the virus spends most of his screen time being dragged around and screaming pleas to be spared. A vial of the stuff is the main subject of the episode, and at the end, it shatters inside the villain of the day's ship, much to her horror.
- The effects of Red Eye abuse, as seen in "Asteroid Blues." Asimov not gains superhuman strength and speed while under its influence... at the cost of becoming unhinged and animalistic, as his eyes become bloodshot and bulge out of his skull in an extremely painful-looking manner. What's worse is that all these effects grow more severe throughout the episode as he takes more and more Red Eye. By the end, his eyes are so grotesquely swollen he looks like a demon.
- Asimov himself can verge into this territory. His brutal slaughter of the gangsters that've come to kill him, along with his design's massive narrowed eyebrows and bulging eyes with tiny pupils (from before we first see him injecting Red Eye, implying that bulging eyes are a side effect) create the implication that this man is a ticking time bomb liable to explode at any moment.
