Short Summary
With no bounties to go after, the crew are left to their devices while the Bebop heads from Jupiter to Mars via "Route 66". When Jet is attacked by an unknown entity and falls sick from the bite it gives him, the crew find themselves hunting it before it claims them too.Long Summary
The episode opens with a red-tinted first person view, of something racing through the vents on the Bebop.
The crew have no bountys at the moment, so are on some enforced downtime. As this also means no money, Jet is trying to make a quick buck from gambling with Faye, but she cheats and he loses many items to her (including his clothes). Jet goes to find a blanket in storage, and spots a large refigerator he doesn't remember seeing before. An alarm rings through the ship. Faye and Spike find Jet on the floor, complaining that he was bitten by something. They brush off his complaints (thinking it just a rat), but while Spike feeds him herbal remedies Jet collapses, which reveals a large purple wound on his neck.
Taking a sample, Spike can't find any matches for the virus on their database. He theorizes that the Creature is a mutated rat, while Ed think it's a space alien. Spike gives Ed a thermal imaging device to track the Creature, but she runs off chasing Ein before he can test it properly. A distraught Faye arrives, rambling to Spike about "the life she's got left to live" before collapsing, a large purple wound on her leg. She's laid out in the lounge next to Jet.
Looking for Ed, Spike finds Ein bitten and unconsious in a vent. He sees a blob-like creature in the shadows, which charges at him: Spike escapes.
After taking Ein back to the lounge, Spike sets the ship to full autopilot, gears up with weapons and another tracker, and hunts the Creature. He meets the creature again in a corridor off the centrifuge room: Spike traps it in the corridor, throws in a couple gas grenades, then toasts the Creature with his flamethrower.
Spike suddenly remembers what was in the refrigerator: He'd found a Ganymede Rock Lobster a year ago, hid it for himself in the fridge, and since forgot about it. He checks inside the fridge to find, to his horror, a world of spores and growths. Spike turns off the gravity, pushes the fridge to an airlock and ejects it, but not before its door falls open, and the Creature re-appears and bites him. He manages to stay inside the ship as the airlock closes, then he loses consciousness.
Ed is shown sleeping peacefully. In a daze, she grabs and eats the approaching Creature. The fridge is shown spinning through space, scattering its contents.
For the post-credits narration, Ed declares that everyone passed away, and thanks the viewer for their support over the series... but the rest of the cast interrupt her to report "there really is a next episode!".
- Affectionate Parody/Whole-Plot Reference: Of Alien.
- Alternate Aesop Interpretation: In-universe example. Each of the crew give one during the episode: Jet's is about having to relearn lessons through our lifetimes and catching divine retribution for living entirely at the expense of others. Faye's is essentially "survival of the fittest". Ed's is a quick and nonsensical bit about following strangers. And Spike takes the sitution literally, "Don't leave stuff in the fridge".
- Bathos: Jet delivers a moody monologue on the nature and morality of bounty hunters... while wandering around nude in the cargo hold looking for something to wear, having gambled away all his clothes in a game with Faye.
- Blob Monster: The not-lobster is very fast and very blobby.
- Bottle Episode: The entire episode is set on board the Bebop, with the show's five main characters (and the "blob") being the only characters to appear in it.
- Breather Episode: Between the previous episode’s dive into Jet’s Dark and Troubled Past and the Wham Episode two-parter that follows, this episode’s conflict is comparably small-scale, and a fair amount of it played for comedy.
- Deadly Bath: Faye gets bitten by the “blob” (and provides some Fanservice) while taking a bath.
- Drama Queen: Faye after she gets bitten. "I haven't committed any crimes! Or at least no really bad ones! I'm still so young and full of life! Everything is so unfair! Why me?"
- Downer Ending: A very silly example: the creature is defeated and the fridge ejected, but it has knocked out everyone on the Bebop except Ed (and even then, she may have been effected by the toxin from eating it). Fortunately the toxin does not appear to be lethal or even dangerous (everyone bitten just falls unconscious); presumably the ship's autopilot landed on Mars, woke the crew (or they recovered during the trip), and they collectively resolved never to speak of it again. Or, perhaps, it was a dream.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Ein detects and barks at the blob. As usual, nobody pays attention to him.
- Fully Absorbed Finale: The fridge is found drifting in space centuries later in the kinda-sorta-sequel series Space☆Dandy, and births a second blob. Meow promptly eats it.
- It Came from the Fridge: The blob is revealed to be born of a lobster that Spike had forgotten about and left in an unpowered fridge for a year. It's essentially sentient food poisoning.
- Kill It with Fire: Spike tries to subdue the blob monster with a flamethrower. He fails.
- Lock-and-Load Montage: Spike as he prepares to take on the blob monster. For some reason, he decides to include barbecue forks.
- Mood Whiplash: The tone shifts between a genuinely creepy Alien pastiche and a genuinely funny Alien parody.
- Mundane Made Awesome: Never has a drifting fridge been so magnificent.
- Mundane Utility: Spike makes use of a handheld flamethrower to barbecue dinner, and later to light a cigarette.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Most of the episode, until it's revealed exactly what the "creature" actually is. Even then, we only catch a glimpse of what the source of it really looks like.
- Pet the Dog: As much as Spike grumbles about Ein, he's concerned when he finds Ein unconscious from the blob, makes sure to pick him up when escaping, bandages him like the other crew-members, and makes him comfortable on a cushion.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The episode ends with "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker playing over the final scene.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: While trying to find out what the bacteria is, Spike comes up with a theory that it may be a mutated rat secreting toxin. Faye chides him over it, though after she get bitten, she admits before she passes out that it could be possible. It's not a rat - it's a rock lobster, but it's certainly mutated and secreting toxin.
- Shout-Out: Alien, Aliens, and in the end 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Spoof Aesop: "Don't leave stuff in the fridge." Ironically, it's probably one of the more apt aesops to come from a TV show, at the very least being applicable to everyone who's ever watched it.
- Also a subversion, as Spike's philosophy is "be like water", trying to draw a universal lesson from a single incident would be limiting, preventing you from adapting to every situation as needed.
- Sole Survivor: Subverted. Ed is the only one who isn't bitten by the creature, but it turns out the creature's bites aren't lethal, so the rest of the crew will be fine as well.
- Standard Snippet: "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker plays over the end montage of the fridge hurtling through space while the Bebop crew members lay unconscious.
- Strip Poker: Faye and Jet play a variant of it with dice. They apparently started off gambling whatever possessions were on hand, but by the time the scene opens Jet is down to just his shorts. He loses those too as Spike walks in, causing the latter to mildly comment that he warned Jet not to play with Faye.
- Technicolor Toxin: The blob "bites" leave a bruise-coloured mark on the victim's skin.
- Titled After the Song: The episode takes its name from an Aerosmith song.
- Unreliable Narrator: In the preview for the next episode, Ed claims that the whole crew was killed by the blob monster and starting next week the show will be replaced by The Adventures Of Cowgirl Edward. The rest of the crew protests that they're not dead and there really is a next episode.
- Worst Aid: Spike's offerings of "herbal medicine" - what appears to be a dried gecko and scorpion - make Jet feel a lot sicker than the actual bite he receives from the blob.
