Review of Lazarus

Shinichiro Watanabe was one of those guys who was impossible to criticize for years. When you’re the name people most commonly associate with a show as lauded as Cowboy Bebop fans are gonna be ride-or-die for you regardless of the quality of your successive projects. You can argue that Bebop isn’t perfect, and I’d agree with you, but it outshines practically anything coming out these days thanks to Watanabe’s direction and writers like Keiko Nobumoto at the helm. Bebop’s understanding of homage, Champloo’s anachronisms, and Space Dandy’s reverence towards of the previous 40-something years of anime all go to show that Watanabe’s reverence towards whateverhe was paying tribute to was enough to help a show stand on its own despite the peaks and valleys that may be there. Carole and Tuesday was Watanabe’s 3.0 moment and people still overlook its obnoxiously glaring flaws on the grounds that the non-humorous musical performances are great. Lazarus on the other hand is his Thrice Upon a Time, and you honestly couldn't get something this bad if you force-fed a script writing algorithm the last decade's worth of capeshit and MSNBC broadcasts.

The way Lazarus presents itself is as bleak, sterile and spiritually vacant as the setting. If Bebop was style before substance (not indication a lack of the latter or surplus of the former) then Lazarus is no style and no substance. It’s an unwelcoming range of greys, blues and dull browns compared to Cowboy Bebop’s prismatic spectrum. There’s no warmth to the color palette, which while mostly being an unfortunate side effect of the transition to digital animation, doesn’t excuse how muted and lifeless everything seems. This is supposed to be an episodic ensemble storyline but it feels like you’re watching a Marvel movie. The main cast even goes as far as to compare themselves to The Avengers once or twice, which makes all too much sense watching something that presents itself like a Joss Whedon flick instead of anything serious or intellectually present. The direction and animation are no better, in fact the only time Lazarus channels Watanabe’s old energy is the fourth episode with enough competent direction to emphasize Chad Stahelski’s technically impressive fight choreography (https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281409, https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281412, https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/281410, all look good if you ignore the jarring shifts in fluidity, detrimental camerawork and garish digital backgrounds). Episode 11 has a decently put together fight scene that also suffers from the inconsistent production. The audio mixing, voice acting and OST are fine, though, and I really like the instrumental opening. It surprisingly manages to emulate the style of Tank! without being a total rehash, which is sadly not the case for every other aspect of Lazarus.

Cowboy Bebop’s most glowing accomplishment was the writing teams’ ability to draft the foundations of credible characters with credible conflicts and then build upon them over the course of 26 episodes and a movie. Every ally, antagonist, or passerby Spike encounters is iconic in a nostalgic sort of way. The chatbots tasked with writing Lazarus might’ve been too comfortable in conformity, however, and opted to ride the coattails of Bebop and hope people like watching the same thing again, but shallower and with less feeling. I had to look up the names of the Lazarus crew just to try and remember their role in the show. Axel is just Spike without the regrets, the drive or the connections. Doug is just Jet if he wasn’t a philosophical asskicker. Christine is just Faye if she was a completely unlikeable bitch all the time without any of Faye’s charm, wit or sympathetic tenets. Leland is Canadian or something. Eleina is…fuc, I don’t even have anything to say on her, she’s just there. Ed’s equivalent would probably be Popcorn Wizard, a hacker who exclusively speaks in Katy teh penguin of d00m-tier dialogue. You’ll want to put your head through a wall every time she’s onscreen. There’s even a Vicious knockoff who shows up in the last third to try and form an emotional bridge between Lazarus and Bebop, which doesn’t work because he has about as much of a scarce connection to Axel as anyone else in his crew. If this show had another ten to twelve episodes maybe he'd be a compelling antagonist but that’d mean sitting through more of Lazarus.

The MyAnimeList page doesn’t even have a complete character list so the front page where you’d usually find the main cast has bit parts like “Police Officer” or “Loan Shark” which is both hilarious and a tragic indictment of how much of a non-factor the characters are in this show. 13 episodes go by and you barely learn anything about Team Lazarus or feel anything about them which is astounding because Bebop managed to get me to in less than half that time. These guys are trying to save the world together and by episode twelve they still feel like colleagues whose relationships begin and end at the water cooler.

Lazarus also has a plot, surprisingly, which I think the writers forgot because absolutely nothing happens for 90% of the show’s runtime. Nearly every single episode ends with the team back at square one with maybe a shred of evidence towards the location of the guy who wants to give everyone on earth the vaxx. Because that’s the running storyline, even though most of the show is pointless sidequests building up to character moments that never happen. Dr. Skinner made a miracle drug that cures all pain and disease, got every single person on the planet to take it, announced it’s gonna kill them all in two more weeks like a /pol/ schizoposter and then dipped. The problem is that there’s no urgency. Even after Skinner’s announcement we don’t see any social unrest, no riots, no television debates, no internet shitposting, nothing. We’re just told the whole world is kinda on edge and that's really it. It takes THIRTEEN EPISODES for the team to go “Hey, isn’t Skinner a bigger deal than whatever we’re doing right now?” There’s no before or after, the whole world seems to be living in some kind of equilibrium of apathy but if that’s intentional it’s never actually demonstrated in ways becoming of an intelligent writer.

And if you thought the show would spend any time telling the pretentious mass murderer off, you’d be wrong, because apparently this show was written by fucking Dan Harmon or something. I swear there’s a corny speech every episode about how humans are le bad because of war or racism or climate change. Episode 7 had the most eye-rolling instance of this where one of the characters states that “the last beautiful place on earth is only like that because there’s no humans” because there’s water and trees and stuff despite the fact that they were literally a minute away from occupied civilization. The ending of the show even goes as far as to completely vindicate Skinner and his ideology. I know Watanabe’s always been a bit of a progressive type but this hysterical neolib fatalism isn’t his style. Carole & Tuesday’s obnoxious showboating and political caricatures look tasteful compared to these WEF-sponsored diatribes. Lazarus’ moral barometer is on the same level as those childfree millennial couples to brag about how they “hate those breeders, man” because having kids destroys the environment or causes racism, or whatever insane notions of moral grandstanding you can think of. If you wanna own the chuds you made up in your head write something that doesn’t make you look like a shallow, immature misanthrope. I don’t watch anime to listen to reddit-tier haranguing and neither does any self-respecting human being.

The narrative’s self-righteous moralizing crumbles when you consider how it fails to reasonably convey any sort of justification for it, or any meaningful solution for that matter. Episode 1 begins with Skinner’s plan being put into action. There’s no glimpses of the world before his announcement, everyone who took his miracle drug reveling away in their newfound carelessness, no sign of the underlying problems with the world, we’re just thrown right into it. Where’s the conflict, where’s the prejudice, where’s the indifference? How would there even be any in such a racially harmonious world? It’s practically utopia compared to Bebop’s setting. The worst you get is the occasional government hitman or a couple one-off villains being sex pests being menacing towards the female cast, but they’re more like ideological punching bags than real antagonists. (Side note, making the rapey cretin of the week a Wall Street jerkoff or an AI-touting Silicon Valley techbro doesn’t make your hackish social commentary any more insightful.) And when characters start spouting monologues about racism or the struggles of being transgender it feels like lipservice more than anything else. Am I even supposed to care when the entire world is at stake? It doesn’t feel like it. Every single character in this show would rather be off doing something else of talking about whatever social cause the script guys were incensed about that week.

Did I mention this show is predictable? Because it is to an insulting degree. Lazrus doesn't know when to show and when to tell, and it does both in the most infuriating ways imaginable. You’ll figure out every turn of events an episode before Team Lazarus manages to combine their 5 brain cells and get anything accomplished. It takes them a month to find Skinner when the audience already knows he’s off larping as a hobo. The final plot twist regarding Skinner’s drug is staggeringly obvious to anyone with the most surface-level knowledge of The Bible. The final episode convolutes what little we’ve already learned to try and turn it into some big “Gotcha!” moment and make Skinner look smarter than he really is but it falls flat.

I can’t make heads of tails of Lazarus. This show is a piece of trash and I feel sorry for everyone who wasted time making it and writing it. What was anyone involved in its creation expecting us to see in it? A pretentious, half-assed spiritual sequel to Cowboy Bebop without any of the soul and none of the passion where everything is explained through flashbacks and infodumps and none of the characters seem to care about anyone or anything going on around them until the last few minutes of the show? At least two-thirds of the show can be described as “nothing happens”. You could watch only the first and last episode and you’d have the same exact experience as watching the entire thing. The characters are lame, unlikeable retreads of better ones from a better show, the message is so far removed from reality it sends me into a schizophrenic episode trying to figure out what any of this was trying to say and the production isn’t enough to justify watching outside of AMVs. Maybe Watanabe's at fault or maybe he's innocent in this whole affair. For all I know the Toonami execs could've pigeonholed him into making something more generic. I can tell there were promising paths he wanted to explore, that the writers took as an opportunity to build around their pseudointellectual rambling. Everything that happens in Lazarus is in service of faux-socially conscious moralizing that’s naïve at best and outright ignorant at worst, timewasting garbage plots that go nowhere, idiotic navelgazing hackish bullshit. This isn’t anime, it’s cynical westernized slop pretending to be something it hasn’t earned the right to be. This isn't anime, it's more cultural detritus courtesy of Hollywood.