Episode 9 – Lazarus – Anime News Network:IN

For most of its runtime, “Death on Two Legs” makes it feel like Lazarus is just actively screwing with its audience. Most of the episode is devoted to a government hearing where the question of the day is, quite literally, “Is Lazarus just wasting everyone’s time on a bunch of wild-goose chases that have jack-all to do with finding Dr. Skinner?” It’s almost as if the show is self-aware. However, I will be awarding no points to Lazarus the show for winking and nodding to Lazarus the team’s completely ineffectual episodic misadventures. If anything, the fact that the aimlessness of the season has been so knowing and intentional is just more frustrating than if the show were merely incompetent.

Late in the episode, Dr. Skinner conveniently pops up with his first message to the world since the premiere where he chides the governments of the world for doing nothing in the face of certain doom, reminding them that he’ll be the first person to die from the Hapna time-bomb in ten days, which means that the secret to the cure will die with him. The allegory couldn’t be more on the nose if it tried, especially with all of the focus on environmental collapse and international tensions in recent episodes. The point is supposed to be that Dr. Skinner’s more expedient version of global annihilation is not functionally different from any of the other potential apocalypses that are knocking on mankind’s door in the real world, nor is it being treated any differently. Government infighting, international politics, and plain old human indifference are going to be the true cause of our self-destruction. Same as it ever was, am I right?

Except, no, I call bullshit. For one, Dr. Skinner is trying to play by the same rules as the Jigsaw killer from the Saw movies. He is acting as the mediator of an imposed game on a victim who must demonstrate a will to survive to overcome certain annihilation. Jigsaw is a crazy murderer, and he doesn’t earn himself a “Get out of being evil” card just because he’s decided that his victims were dead inside because of their own choices in the first place. Also, the metaphor falls apart when you consider that, for as much as we love to place the blame on certain individuals for the ruination of the world, the evils of society are deep-rooted in the foundations of our systems. There is no one immediate “Hunt down the bad guy” solution to climate change, or even the ever-present threat of thermonuclear war by a cadre of delusional superpowers. Dr. Skinner isn’t an avatar that mirrors the all-too-real ills of humanity back onto them. He’s a cartoon supervillain with a magic drug that will kill every person on Earth in a month.

If anything, the fact that the world’s governments have been so useless at finding this guy makes less sense when you try to treat his scheme as a broad metaphor for other social issues. If anything, he should be more like the fake alien squid from the end of Watchmen, since a singular, identifiable common enemy would be the perfect pretense for governments all over the world to get their shit together and earn the easiest PR boost in the history of civilization. If a gang of vaguely skilled but still completely regular humans had a shot at pulling off a Mission: Impossible-esque caper to solve the climate crisis, the world would be in a very different place. Then again, when you just try to treat Skinner’s plot as the schlocky premise for a B-level action thriller that it is, the writing falls apart, because it simply does not make a lick of sense that Lazarus is the one group on the entire planet that can save the day.

Do you want to know how I know that? Because this episode spends an egregious amount of runtime on a hearing that boils down to the following exchange:

GOVERNMENT: “Is it true that Lazarus has done some sketchy stuff to try and save the world, even though you haven’t saved the world yet?”

LELAND: “Yes.”

GOVERNMENT: “How can you possibly justify risking international incidents and government expense over a bunch of completely useless snipe-hunts that have gotten you nowhere?”

LELAND: “Because…the whole world will die if we don’t find Skinner? And our deadline is in ten days?”

GOVERNMENT: “Harumph! I don’t think we trust Lazarus to get the job done! We may just have to shut you down!”

SKINNER: “Hey guys, it’s me, Skinner. Just remember that you only have ten days until literally every person on Earth dies.”

GOVERNMENT: “Change of plans. Lazarus, you now have ten days to find Skinner.”

LELAND: “Okay.”

There, you just got every bit of important information from the episode, except for the big action sequence where an assassin kills a bunch of government guys on behalf of the government so that he can prove that he is a bad enough dude to kill a different guy who works for the government.

I know that I have entered full-on “angry sarcasm” mode, but I cannot stress enough how distracting the flimsiness of this script is. I just want to enjoy the scene where Assassin Guy kills a dozen armed soldiers with a knife and some string like any normal human would. The animation is sick, the storyboarding is fluid, and the choreography is just slick enough that you don’t get distracted by the fact that several dudes with giant guns spend a lot of time patiently waiting to get killed by this guy instead of shooting him.

You know what I can’t ignore? That niggling little question that is eating away at the back of my mind throughout this entire ending sequence, which is, “Why the hell would anyone care this much about assassinating Axel Gilberto?” I’m seriously confused by this. By the government’s admission, the only thing anyone – including the audience! – has learned about this guy is that he really, really likes breaking out of prison. He’s good at flip kicks and somersaults and stuff, but that’s pretty much it! Why would someone spend millions of dollars and sacrifice dozens of soldiers just to test an assassin out for the job of killing Axel? Are snipers just not a thing in this universe? And why Axel, of all people? He has contributed the least to the actual hunt for Skinner, so if the goal was to stymie Lazarus’ mission, several other candidates seem like better targets.

This show is starting to drive me nuts. It is actively trying to overcomplicate and oversimplify its story at the same time with opposing methods. I need you to pick a lane, Lazarus: You can either be a philosophical treatise on the fatal flaws of human civilization, or you can be a dumb-as-rocks action cartoon about badass dudes who do elaborate parkour flips while they punch other badass dudes. Attempting to follow both paths at once has gotten us nowhere.

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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.