Lazarus

Episode 3

I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach the minute the baklava showed up. This is not because the third episode of Lazarus is outright bad, nor because I suspect that the show is going to turn out to be a dud, either. Rather, the baklava was the sign that confirmed that this anime is more likely than not going to be one of those shows that I spend a lot of time complaining about, even when I don't actually dislike the show. The same thing happened with Demon Slayer (except for those last two seasons, which I do genuinely think stank). If I can be thankful for one thing, I guess, it is that I don't know if Lazarus is going to develop the kind of rabid following that is likely to hound me in the comments for the incongruity between the amount of criticism I have to level at an episode versus the score I give it.

Here is the thing about Lazarus: It looks really good, it's got an excellent soundtrack, and it's got style out the wazoo. I love the lush background art and the diverse settings, which go a long way towards creating the general vibe of effortless coolness that the show captures so well. Whenever Axel has cause to do his badass flips and jumps on the bad guys of the week, it's a wonder to behold. This is great, as a viewer, because it means that Lazarus is, at its absolute worst, a decently entertaining half-hour. The problem for me as a critic, though, is that I don't expect these positive qualities to change or be complicated very much, as the season goes along, which will make them very hard to write about.

Instead, I will have to devote my time and energy to laying out the things Lazarus is not doing anywhere near as well, which are numerous, even if they don't end up sinking the show. Nearly all of these glaring issues are coming from the script. For as effortlessly cool as Lazarus' sense of style is, its writing feels effortless in an entirely less flattering way. Many of the elements of these scripts come across as slapdash, first-draft attempts at tying together all of the set-pieces and big ideas that Shinichiro Watanabe and Co. are trying to cram into this one series. It can be quite distracting.

Take the baklava, for instance. Half of the episode is spent on Axel and Doug's trip to a shantytown to find one of Doug's old university colleagues who may have clues to Skinner's whereabouts. The script spends a long time highlighting the injustices felt by the marginalized people who live, either figuratively or literally, on the outskirts of respectable society. Axel's friend Jill is a trans woman whose bankruptcy has led her to be cast aside by the world along with all of the other members of this community, and Doug goes into detail about how punching out his racist dean nearly got him blacklisted by the academic world, with Professor Claude being the only one to stand by him. It's a refreshingly thoughtful take on addressing bigotry and the marginalization of vulnerable communities for an anime to explore, which is what I'd expect from a Watanabe joint, but it's also pretty surface-level stuff.

The characters are functioning more as stand-ins for different perspectives and backgrounds than they are as genuinely fleshed-out figures for the story to revolve around. This is fine when a story like Lazarus is trying to use allegory to make a point about the human condition. Still, my general rule of thumb about allegory is that the story has to function both as a metaphor and as a compelling tale in its own right. The social commentary here is fine, but when it comes to the plot of finding Skinner and preventing the imminent genocide of all mankind, this whole sequence feels rather aimless, especially because all it leads to is Claude vaguely remembering that Skinner once mentioned a grandmother in Istanbul who made delicious baklava.

This is such a random and seemingly meaningless detail for the show to make a point of that I figured that it had to be a red herring, or some foreshadowing to a deeper mystery. Later, when Axel and Leland take the hypercube (!) to Istanbul, they are instantly swarmed by a mob of…well, just people on the street, but they are stopped from chopping off Leland's hand when he cries out about only being in Turkey to find Granny Belinda's delicious baklava. This works, insanely enough, which clinched it for me. “I get it,” I said, 'Granny Belinda's baklava' must be a code that the locals are clued into, and this is going to lead the gang down a rabbit hole of contacts and info-dumps that will set them on the path to the next stage of the Skinner hunt!”

Except, no, that isn't the case. Axel and Leland were just randomly jumped by a bloodthirsty-but-also-totally-chill gang of random Istanbulites who also just so happened to be the exact locals that would be familiar with the very real Granny Belinda, who has pounds upon pounds of quite literal baklava to feed to anyone in need of a sweet treat. This bafflingly ridiculous turn of events is compounded by the fact that Lazarus doesn't even learn anything of import by finding this woman. She is just a nice old lady who raised Dr. Skinner when his parents died, and Skinner has been able to hide her identity and connection to him…somehow, I guess, even though he is one of the most famous (and now infamous) people to ever live, and there is no possible way that the world would just overlook his only living relative, what with him about to murder everyone on Earth.

Do you see what I mean when I said this whole thing feels like a quickly thrown-together rough draft of a story? Watanabe and his team of writers knew some of the issues they wanted to represent about bigotry and the diverse struggles of the human experience, and they also knew that they wanted to frame all of these issues against an exciting, globe-trotting tale of intrigue and adventure. When it comes to making all of those disparate pieces fit together, though, it's like the team producing Lazarus just shrugged their shoulders and tossed in whatever random scenes they could come up with, regardless of whether they make any sense. It's how you get the episode's one action scene, the chase in Istanbul, despite there being no narrative reason whatsoever for this chase to take place. It's how you get nonsensical scenes like the one where Chris and Leland somehow con the cops into letting them into the home of, again, the most dangerous and wanted human to ever live, simply by dressing up as cleaners and threatening the cops with a bill. It's how you get the gang munching on a fresh plate of baklava in the Ghibli-esque house of Skinner's cute ol' grandma. I can only presume that locus of conception was one of the artists saying, “I've always wanted to include baklava in an anime, and I have some cool designs for a fantasy tree-house setting that would pair well with a tasty Mediterranean dessert!”, which resulted in Watanabe crying out, “Screw it, that's going in the show!” and tossing his napkins of notes to the poor writers that had to find some way to make them all work.

Like I said up top, you might be surprised to see that my score down there is technically erring on the positive side, despite my litany of complaints. That is because a mediocre script can still hold up a crackerjack collection of set pieces and cool songs, which this show has no shortage of. The experience of watching Lazarus in the moment is, by and large, perfectly fine. It's when you take even a second or two after the credits roll to think about what you've just seen that the cracks in the foundation start to form.

Rating:

Lazarus is currently streaming on Max and Hulu on Sundays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.