She's a crazy super-hacker kid whose parents are AWOL (you eventually see one of them at the end of the TV series). I get the impression that she mostly grew up on her own and is a bit of a wild, unsocialized animal as a result. That doesn't explain the fact that she's made out of rubber, but hey, these things happen.

She's on the ship because she more or less invited herself aboard, much like Faye, and no one seems to care enough to go to the trouble of booting her off.

And yeah, I found the movie kind of disappointing after the TV show too. It's still a cut above a lot of anime films, but it just isn't as sharp as the TV episodes.

You have to watch the whole series to figure out who Ed is. They do a section on each of the Bebop's characters and their history, as well as a couple episodes dedicated to just Ed.

They find Ed.. her name is Edward somethingsomething something Wong the third. i think. :D She and the dog lived togetherin this like.. thing she built. with computers. and she hacked spike's ship.

at least, that's how i understood it.

I got bored with some of the philosophizing in the film, but if you watch the whole show (the movie takes place exactly around the episode last night in timelines), it has a lot of character development, especially for where the different characters are at this point. I wrote a long review about it here, and spikespeigel and I got into a little debate about whether or not the film was too talky. I had seen almost of the episodes by that point, but I later decided I liked the show better than the film.

Ed is... she's like the other commentor said, a semi-wild girl who has a scatterbrained father (next episode) and no mother that we're told about. She's a genius level hacker, and she invited ehrself onto the crew in one of the early episodes by luring the ship to Earth for a bounty, and then hacking into the Bebop computers and controlling the ship until they would let her come along and join their crew. She's almost a parody of online anime fans, in how she is characterized and how she inserts herself into the group on a whim.

Ein, who becomes her and Jet's pet, was an experimental "data dog" that they ended up reluctantly keeping after episode 2. Ein is more intelligent than the rest of them, but mostly just acts like a dog.

Have you watched Hellsing? I watched the first episode last night, and am kind of intrigued.

Oh, a shame if they're not showing it there.

Hellsing is about an elite fighter group, charged to take out the vampires plaguing Earth. Interestingly enough, its head vampire hunter is a vampire himself, named Alucard.

The female lead is a police officer named Victoria, the only survivor of a squad who tried to take out a powerful vampire on their own. As Alucard faces the evil vampire, that vampire grabs Victoria and is using her as a shield. Alucard tells her he is going to shoot her to kill the vampire, and will change her into a vampire as well, if she wants. Changing a person against their will is a crime, but voluntary vampireism seems to be tolerated. Victoria agrees, and is brought into the Hellsing elite group.

So far (I've watched the first two episodes), it's pretty interesting. I couldn't find a website I really liked, but there's one here that can give you some idea of the feel of the series. There seemed to be some DVDs of the series for sale on eBay, maybe Netflix carries it? :)