Lazarus

Episode 7

Every week, I become more baffled by the decision to tell a serialized story about a team of rogues and outcasts on a globe-trotting manhunt for the world's most dangerous scientist through a series of almost completely unrelated standalone adventures. Outside of every episode's requisite breadcrumb of vaguely defined “clues,” you could rearrange the order of every last one of these adventures and change absolutely nothing about the experience of watching the show. This approach makes sense for series like Lazarus went out of its way in Episode 1 to establish a very real and incredibly high-stakes deadline of 30 days for the team to solve the case. To follow that up with several weeks of intentionally aimless and fruitless meandering is a bizarre choice, to say the least.

As I've said before, the one benefit to this approach is that each episode has just as much chance of being good as it does of falling on its face. The last couple of episodes have been total face-plants. The ridiculous detour into the genre of cultist folk-horror that we took last week has only become more embarrassing in hindsight, and my biggest concern was that Lazarus might not be able to recover. With “Almost Blue,” though, the show has at least delivered an episode that is watchable. It's not a high bar to clear, and it still isn't a terribly good episode of television, but it's functional enough to keep Lazarus on the rails. For now.

What is both relieving and frustrating about this episode is that it is, by and large, entirely fueled by atmosphere and mood. Once again, virtually nothing of relevance to the larger plot of the show is even hinted at until the final few minutes of the episode, but “Almost Blue” also has the distinction of barely featuring a plot within its runtime, either. The entire script can be summarized in one sentence: “The gang discovers that Skinner bought some islands once, though now they are underwater due to global warming, so they don their beachwear and go scuba-diving for a bit.”

Sure, Axel discovers that these islands were home to a native population with an alarmingly high percentage of people born without the ability to feel pain, which is maybe the source of the research that led to the development of Hapna, but I'm not even going to bother trying to glean anything insightful from this bit of world-building. If we take it at face value, it's nonsensical, and it doesn't do anything meaningful to develop Skinner's character or whatever social commentary that Lazarus is going for. It feels like another random Wikipedia dive that one of the writers decided to cram into the story for reasons that viewers can only guess. As for the reveal that Hersch has a more direct connection to Skinner than previously thought…who cares? I'll believe that it will lead to something genuinely interesting when I see it. Until then, it's just another breadcrumb for the show to drop and promptly forget about.

All those details amount to four or five minutes of this entire episode's runtime. The rest is mostly a series of montages and introspective character beats that see Team Lazarus cruising around the underwater ruins left behind by global warming. These effectively moody scenes are where Lazarus ceases to be an awkward attempt at executing a high-energy sci-fi thriller and becomes an extended music video for the show's consistently excellent soundtrack. Ironically, Lazarus' commentary on the state of the environment and mankind's capacity to willfully ignore the many Swords of Damocles hanging above its collective head is so much stronger here than it is when the story is shoving hamfisted dialogue and rushed plotting in our faces.

Once again, we must leave Lazarus with a shrug and hope to God that it doesn't shit the bed again next week. This week may have been an ever-so-slight return to form, but I've seen too much crap in my time as a critic to let my guard down. Even geniuses like Shinichirō Watanabe are capable of delivering hitherto inconceivable varieties of terrible anime, after all. Just go and re-watch that godawful cult episode if you need more proof of that.

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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.