Lazarus

Episode 10

It's a damn shame that we've reached this point. With only a few episodes left to go in the season, I doubt that Lazarus can save itself from this months-long tailspin, and that's just a sad thing to see in a project coming from such a venerated team of creative talent. The thing, too, is that it isn't even possible to take ironic pleasure in Lazarus' failures, as grim as such pleasure would be, because the show isn't even bad in a particularly interesting or memorable way. The animation and direction are fine enough that you can't just dismiss the show outright. Yet, the dramatically inert scripts of each episode make it equally impossible to take anything that is happening with an ounce of seriousness. The result is the worst of all possible anime failures: a show that is boring to watch.

We have officially reached the point where it is becoming legitimately difficult for me to find ways to make interesting points about the show's missteps, because they have been so doggedly predictable. Take the lack of characterization, for one. In “I Can't Tell You Why,” Lazarus is trying to course correct on its complete lack of meaningful character development by dropping a half-episode's worth of exposition for Leland. We learn about how he comes from a world-famous and ancient clan of super-rich aristocrats; we see him throw down with his sister over being such an absentee sibling since the death of their father; and the whole back-half of the episode, where the gang goes to seek out the clinic where Skinner got his artificial heart, is capped by Skinner's doctor making a bunch of schmaltzy observations about Leland's character, since she was also conveniently the same doctor who operated on the Astor's patriarch.

(I forgot to mention that the big sci-fi satire gimmick of this episode is that the pill that Chris rediscovered last week leads Team Lazarus to a secret hospital that only caters to the extremely rich. The show doesn't have anything meaningful to say about healthcare, income inequality, or anything else that could even be tangentially related to the concept of a Secret Hospital for One Percenters. It is just one more stop in the wild-goose chase.)

Anyways, the point is, Lazarus is clearly trying to do something with Leland, who has gotten the lion's share of the pathos throughout this entire season. The thing is, art is not one of those “A for Effort” institutions where you automatically get kudos for merely attempting to do the bare minimum. Leland's backstory and relationship with his family may have possibly meant something more if we'd learned about it weeks ago, and thus had the chance to have this knowledge factor into how we look at the boy and his actions throughout the series. It still probably would have come across as trite, melodramatic, and shallow, but it would have given us something to work with. Here, the attempt to suddenly act like people are starting to have emotional reactions to the oncoming apocalypse highlights how inept Lazarus has been at taking advantage of the ticking time bomb it devised for itself.

All of the talk about mankind needing to reckoning with “its last peaceful Sunday” is unintentionally hilarious, because the show is trying to sell us on a grave, species-annihilating disaster, but it also wants to act like this motley crew of nobodies is this close to cracking the case. We've been following the supposed last, best hope for society for ten straight weeks, and their most recent adventure was instigated by a character ing that they shoved an apparently vital clue into their pocket back in Episode 2 and just forgot it existed until just now.

I could go on about the other boneheaded choices that the screenplay makes, but we've all seen how little Lazarus cares about the concepts of “logic” and “meaningful emotional stakes.” This is the anime that wants us to earnestly take seriously the big find of the week, because Team Lazarus is convinced that they've got a lock on Skinner's location now, even though it has also gone to extraordinary lengths to remind us that Skinner can have anything hacked, anything faked, and any number of false leads planted. All Lazarus has to offer us at this point is the dramatic equivalent of Lucy pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown's feet for fifty years in a row. I no longer care if it swears to me that the next episode is going to be the one where things really start to matter. I'm not falling for it again.

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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.