Banana Fish

Episode 8

The deceptively named "Banal Story" is an episode full of secrets we've been waiting for since the beginning. We finally learn the whole truth behind the drug "Banana Fish": how it was discovered and exactly what it does. We also learn just why Yut Lung/Yau Si feels like a much more compelling villain than the baddies we've met so far. But before we get there, there's a lot of heartache along the way to get through first.

As the end of last week's episode suggested, the Lee gang does indeed use Jessica and Michael to get to Max. They thankfully don't show us what happens to them, but from the mutterings about how "hot" Jessica is, her bruises, and Michael's trauma, it's heavily implied that they assaulted her in front of her son. As much as I'm glad her character isn't gone, this is honestly worse than the fridging that I had predicted. Banana Fish continues to go to the most familiar wells for melodrama and character trauma. When it happens to a woman, it only stands out how depressingly common this trope is for fiction in general. It's also clear that while this event is supposed to impact us viewers, it takes a back seat to what Yut Lung does to Eiji, a violation that we unfortunately get to watch take place.

He drugs Ibe and Eiji with two different substances: Ibe's leaves him unable to respond, but he can see and hear everything going on around him. (So he watches them incapacitate and kidnap Eiji, while being powerless to stop it.) Eiji can't see, hear, or react, though it's left ambiguous if his mind is still active through all this. Either way, Eiji is basically unconscious to the outside world, a "living doll" as Yut Lung puts it. While Ibe's drug starts to wear off by the time Ash and Max come back, he still needs Alexis Dawson to help him recover. Eiji is down for the rest of the episode.

What's more interesting is how Shorter gets to show his true loyalties through this. He refuses to let any harm come to Eiji and insists on remaining with him at all times. He does so enough in front of Ibe that he's able to communicate this information to Ash, who seems surprisingly understanding about his friend double-crossing him. The audience knows just how badly Shorter has his hands tied, and Ash quickly figures this out, too. The whole thing feels a little weird in that it undermines part of the goal of this "betrayal" for Lee and Golzine's group—to mess with Ash and make him feel like he can't trust anyone ever. I do appreciate how this develops Shorter as a character, as someone who always resolves to do things on his own terms. It also lets him be a hero in the confrontation at the airport. (On that note, are they all hanging out in the terminal? There's another reason that this "setting update" doesn't work, since they don't seem to want Shorter to go to New York with them at first. You can tell this story takes place before the TSA days.)

A jumpy Ash finds Alexis Dawson hiding in his own house, and all the secrets start spilling out from there. I'm glad his presence keeps their trip to LA from being a total waste of their time—especially since they lost Eiji in the process. It turns out the computer was just a decoy, with Alexis figuring out that outsiders could get into it too easily. So he tells them the full truth, after learning that Ash's brother was a test subject. Banana Fish was developed by the Dawson brothers while the younger one, Abraham, was in medical school, in the hopes of making money off the discovery. When they realized what they'd created, Alexis was terrified, but Abraham insisted on selling it to the government—leading to its use on soldiers in Iraq. We see hints ahead of time that it's not just a way to kill people, with Yut Lung expressing his own suspicions that something so simple would be so coveted. (After all, there are already plenty of drugs that kill people quickly.) It's not wrong that Banana Fish is "used in assassinations"—but not in the way you might think. Banana Fish basically gives users a really bad trip (illustrated memorably in the episode), unlike other hallucinogens that are more dependent on the user's mindset, and it makes them extremely susceptible to suggestion. It's "used in assassinations" in that it turns people into unwilling assassins, as a mind control drug. I guess I wasn't off at all last week in my comparisons to MK Ultra, since it's basically a version that actually worked.

It's not too hard to see why Golzine wants this or why the government is interested. Our characters guess correctly that if Golzine gets his hands on it while in cahoots with the military, he would basically be the boss of all bosses. He would run the New York underworld (and this show, it kind of feels like he does already). So that raises the question of why rival gangs are so willing to work with him. Episode 8 suggests to us that they aren't; people like the Lees are just waiting for their chance to get one over on Golzine. Wang-Lung instructs his younger brother to get closer to Golzine, so he can learn more about Banana Fish and how he plans to use it. It seems like they're just using Golzine for that info, and once they get it, their loyalty is less guaranteed.

Speaking of the Lees, let's talk about Yut Lung for a moment. I mentioned last week that he was a far more compelling villain than the previous bad guys we've met. He clearly has more going on than just being a rapey jerk, and episode 8 digs into his character more. Yut Lung is very smart, for starters—maybe all that stuff Shorter found out last week wasn't entirely a lie—so he can stay a few steps ahead of everyone. More importantly, Yut Lung has his own highly personal motivation. He's still upset by the death of his mother at the hands of his mobster older brothers when he was young. For now, he plays the obedient youngest brother, but he plans to exact his revenge at the first viable opportunity. It doesn't justify what he's willing to do to other people, especially Eiji and Ash and their friends, but it makes him more interesting to watch, which is something Banana Fish has desperately needed in its antagonists.

There's a lot in this episode that feels like a few steps back. The show has returned to throwing rape threats everywhere as a way to create peril, and it's reached the point where it's depressingly un-shocking. Thankfully, we also get a lot of important revelations about the larger drug plot and its most interesting characters. Even if I'm frustrated with how the same bad things keep happening to them, I'm in for the long haul with these characters—now on both sides of the conflict, with Yut Lung finally providing a worthy adversary for Ash. Banana Fish still has a long way to go, but it keeps moving along steadily.

Rating: B+

Banana Fish is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Rose is a Ph.D. student in musicology, who recently released a book about the music of Cowboy Bebop. You can also follow her on Twitter.