SPIKE: JUST YOUR AVERAGE BOUNTY HUNTER

If you've seen the entire Cowboy Bebop series, you know Spike doesn't last through Session 26. Knockin' on Heaven's Door takes place between Sessions 22 and 23, so we know Spike can't die in "Session 22.5"... but the movie is still very relevant as far as his character is concerned. The series does a wonderful job foreshadowing his death and playing with the notion that his present life is merely a dream, and the movie is no exception.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spike's role in the movie is his ability to survive what should kill him. To examine this further, let us first examine his death in Session 26: he was shot in the arm, stabbed with a throwing knife, and slashed across the leg. Halfway through KOHD, he was beaten up, had a hand plunge into his chest and twist his ribcage, was dragged by his neck and shoved through a window, was shot in the chest, and fell hundreds of feet from a monorail into a body of water, at which point he likely began to drown until he was rescued by a friend of Sitting Bull. How could Spike survive this, and many other seemingly fatal wounds he endures in the series, and not survive his climactic fight with Vicious?

Spike himself makes it clear later in the movie when he and Electra are imprisoned. "Long ago," he says, "I wasn't afraid of anything. I didn't think about dying for a second. I thought I was invincible. Then I met some girl. I wanted to live. I started to think like that. For the first time, I was afraid of death. I'd never felt it before." Spike survives most of his fatal wounds in the series and in KOHD because his love for Julia keeps him alive and fighting death. However, when Julia dies in Session 26, Spike's "dream" of a life has no more meaning, so he not only gives up his fight for life, but he willingly seeks his death. In the end, Spike's physical wounds are less important than his psychological and emotional drive to survive. As for his experience with Vincent on the monorail, Sitting Bull summarizes it best: it just wasn't a good day for Spike to die.

Midway through Knockin' on Heaven's Door, during the above-mentioned monorail scene, Vincent tells Spike that "I don't fear death. You quietly watch a dream. A dream that continues forever." Spike responds by saying Vincent is "messed up," but Spike himself reveals the truth of Vincent's words by paraphrasing them and applying them to himself after he revives in the movie as well as at the end of the series. When Spike is reviving by Sitting Bull's fire, he says, "I was watching a dream. I never knew what a dream was, and for the first time I tasted fear. Just a little something was off." As suggested above, Spike only fears death when the love of his life is alive; when his reason to live is gone, he ironically shares Vincent's bleak, quasi-suicidal outlook on his dream-like life... although he certainly expresses it differently.