Short Summary
While doing a bounty bust, Spike comes across a man named Rocco who is awed by his fighting moves. After pestering him for a brief training session, he leaves Spike with a mysterious plant which he needs to help his blind sister. However the mob boss he stole it from is hot on his tail.Long Summary
The episode begins on a commercial flight to Venus. Spike and Faye are on board, and they stop a group of hijackers. At the spaceport, Spike runs into a man who was on the same flight, who is desperate to get a parcel delivered to 'the middle of the nowhere'. Or rather the man, called Roco, runs into Spike, attempting to surprise Spike in a sneak attack. When he fails, he pleads for training. Outside, Spike tries to teach Roco to "flow like water", loose yet flexible. He runs away when one of his associates spots him, but not before forcing the package on Spike and asking to meet the next night at an old cathedral.This man Roco is the bounty, running from the rest of his gang members having stolen a tremendously valuable "Grey Ash" plant they had heisted, the leaves of which can be used to treat Venus Sickness, an illness unique to the planet. Opening the package and discovering its contents, Jet points out that the plant is worth many times the bounty on the man, but Spike sets out to find him anyway.
Spike arrives at a large spaceship wreck in the middle of the desert and is held at gunpoint by a young woman. After managing to defuse the situation (by mentioning that he knows Roco) they get to talking over tea. The woman is Roco's sister, Stella, and she is blind from Venus Sickness. The treatment to cure her sight would be very expensive and require seeds from the super-rare Grey Ash plant. Unknown to her, this is the plant that Roco has stolen from his own gang, intending to treat her with it. Also unknown to her is that a few seedlings of this plant are hidden in the lid of a music box that she shows Spike, a prized gift from her brother.
Spike meets Roco at the rendezvous point (the old cathedral) and returns the plant to Roco... but the gang catch up, and a shootout starts. Faye flies in and adds some fire to the firefight, killing a couple of the gang. During the chaos, the plant's vessel is smashed and it dies. Spike spots a goon sneaking up on Roco with a knife and calls out to him. Roco manages to disable the man with one fluid movement, and proudly declares this to Spike: Unfortunately, he gets fatally shot moments later. Laying there dying, Roco asks Spike to take care of his sister. The surviving gang members are captured by Faye.
Later in hospital, Stella is thrilled to be getting the treatment that will restore her sight, and says to a visiting Spike that the first thing she wants to see is her brother. Spike informs her of his death, then when asked what he was like, he reassures her that Roco was a terrific guy.
See You Space Cowboy...
- Bittersweet Ending: Rocco dies before he can see his sister cured of her blindness. Spike visits in his place to give her the news.
- Bowdlerise: In one of the funnier examples of this trope, the scene where Faye busts in on a gangster in the middle of having sex with a man. His partner was edited out of the scene in the [adult swim] version... but his partner's voice wasn't, making it appear that the gangster was humping the Invisible Man.
- Chekhov's Gun: The episode opens with a voice-over on a spacecraft talking about Venus sickness, which turns out to be the driving force behind the plot. Piccaro's gang stole a plant able to cure the sickness, and Rocco double-crossed them so he could cure his sister of the same, as well as hiding seeds for the plant in a music box he sent to her at the start of the episode.
- Chekhov's Skill: Spike spends a few minutes lecturing Rocco on how to move "like water" during a fight. Rocco manages to put it to good use at the end of the episode... and still dies less than a second later.
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Piccaro is modeled after Biggie Smalls aka The Notorious B.I.G..
- Helium Speech: Said to be a side effect of Venus's atmosphere unless one take a special pill for it. This is how Rocco manages coax Spike into training him.
- Hope Spot: Rocco uses Spike's training to take down one of this former comrades. Seconds later, he gets fatally shot.
- Knockout Gas: Faye manages to knock out the female hijacker with a little spray of this.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Rocco celebrates successfully applying the judo move that Spike teaches him in the middle of a shoot out. Moments later, he's immediately gunned down and dies.
- Tempting Fate: Rocco more then happy that he manages to pull off Spike's judo throw. Thing is, this was during a firefight with Piccaro's goons. While he's celebrating he promptly gets shot by a stray bullet which sadly claims his life.
- Twice-Told Tale: The premise of a good kid running with a bad crowd to get medicine for a disabled loved one, and dying for it, is also an episode of Samurai Champloo.
