Lazarus

Episodes 1-2

In my Preview Guide coverage for Lazarus' premiere, I wrote: “A new Shinichirō Watanabe anime is always a cause for celebration, and he's really swinging for the fences with Lazarus.” I want to amend that statement. After checking out the latest episode of the series, “Life in the Fast Lane,” I think it would be more appropriate to say that Watanabe is swinging for the fences with some of the show's ambitious ideas, in particular, even if the down-and-dirty execution of the show's story can turn out to be pretty damned basic. To be clear, I don't think a “basic” story is inherently less valuable or engaging. When a show like Lazarus demonstrates a lack of complexity or nuance with its plot and characters, it means that the other core pillars of the production have to work that much harder to pick up the slack.

The good news is that, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, Lazarus is living up to Watanabe's legacy as a director of extremely cool cartoons. The show has a grimy, gritty depth to its background art and character animation that goes a long way towards compensating for the shallowness of its scripts. Watanabe's famously keen eye for diverse “casting” and eclectic set design gives the entire world of Lazarus a lot of character, and the jazzy soundtrack is typically sublime. The action is crisp and incredibly fun to watch, thanks in part to Chad Stahelski's contributions as a choreography consultant. The whole affair comes together as a very cinematic vision of near-future dystopia that feels, in many ways, achingly close to the world we already live in. Then, of course, there are the ways that the world of Lazarus will struggle to hold up to the scrutiny of anyone who feels like thinking about the show too deeply or seriously.

By the end of the second episode, it is clear that Lazarus is effectively Watanabe's latest attempt at a “Big Ideas and Social Commentary” anime, with a basic premise that mashes together Suicide Squad and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. This is, inherently, a setup that lends itself to some fun capers, though it also invites so many questions that are probably best left unasked, even though Lazarus does go out of its way to at least acknowledge many of them. How could a high-inducing painkiller that has no negative side effects whatsoever become so ubiquitous that literally every human on Earth has it in their system? To paraphrase Episode 2's opening narration: “I don't know, we put it in all of the soda and stuff, and the whole world spent several years buzzed on a miracle narcotic!” How did the world-changing wonder-drug with a baked-in apocalypse killswitch get past every single government agency and independent research party in the world, especially since all of the patents were supposedly given to the public domain by the walking saint that is Dr. Skinner? The answer to that one is that nobody cared enough to look that deeply into what Hapna actually was, and also that Dr. Skinner is a superhuman mega-genius who cannot possibly be outsmarted. For most of the 2nd episode, I was a little hung up on how our humble band of antiheroes could get ahead of agencies like the FBI and the CIA in the Skinner hunt. While they do eventually show up, we're still obviously meant to just accept that our heroes are going to get all of the best leads well ahead of anyone else because they are the main characters, and they have a super-genius hacker girl to conveniently hand-wave any concerns about how we get from episode to episode.

I don't hate that Lazarus is so clearly unconcerned with telling a “realistic” or “believable” story, here, though it will undoubtedly end up turning off a lot of viewers before we'll be able to wrap up the season. Watanabe wants to make some big, sweeping statements about humanity's capacity for cooperation and advancement in the face of insurmountable obstacles, and he's going to get us to whatever destination he's got in mind no matter how many narrative conveniences and overly broad allegories he has to flog to death on the way. As one of the few critics who thinks the similarly silly-but-earnest Terror in Resonance is an underrated entry in Watanabe's catalog, I have a feeling I'll be down for whatever Lazarus has cooking, in the plot department. I just don't recommend expecting to have your mind blown when all is said and done.

If I have any real complaints to lodge at Lazarus this early in the game, it would have to be that the Lazarus team itself does feel legitimately undercooked. By the end of Episode 2 I could at least name the other main characters aside from Axel Gilberto, which is good, but I'll be damned if I could tell you anything meaningful or interesting about them. Much of “Life in the Fast Lane” is dedicated to splitting up the team and sending them out on their first official mission of the Skinner hunt, which involves investigating some leads related to real estate sales that Skinner was involved in some years previous. Riveting, but the relatively dull nature of this inaugural Lazarus outing is compounded by the fact that we still know jack-all about every single character in the show.

Axel demonstrates the same aloof personality and physical prowess that we saw him show off in the premiere, which is entertaining enough, but far from illuminating. As for Chris, Doug, Leland, and Elaina? The best we get is confirmation that they've all gotten involved in activities of dubious legality, let's say, Elaina, in particular, is the Taylor Swift of International Hacking Crimes. That's it. Their handler, Hersch, gives us even less personality and backstory to go with. In my notes, all I have on her is, “She's like Amanda Waller from Suicide Squad, except if she were played by Elizabeth Warren.”

I don't need a stylish and kinetic action-adventure fable like Lazarus to have the most compelling and multi-dimensional main characters of all time, or anything. I'm just saying that every good “Team of Ne'er-do-wells Assembled to Pull Off An Impossible Job” story lives and dies by the chemistry of the team. So far, the Lazarus gang doesn't really have any chemistry to speak of, unless you count a handful of mildly amusing one-liners that Axel and Christ share in the middle of their ultimately pointless shootout. If Lazarus is going to succeed, it needs to get us more invested in these “superheroes” that are ostensibly going to save mankind. Fun fights and a boppin' soundtrack will only get you so far.

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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.