Review of Lazarus

Combine Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex with Cowboy Bebop and throw in some Mission: Impossible stunt-work and John Wick-esque fight scenes, and make it subpar. You will definitely enjoy the animation and much of the art, as well as the music, but that's mostly it. You'd think from the first few episodes this would be a great show - easily an 8 or 9 - but nope! Frequently emotionless voice acting (the ENG dub, anyway), combined with bad pacing, an underutilized setting, and a season length that is entirely too small for all the story threads, and you get a big disappointment like Lazarus. FromEpisode 1 we get, what, a 30-day countdown? That's how many episodes you need. I could see 18 episodes with very solid and tight writing working, but 24-30 episodes is what this needs. That would give you time to get into the setting, set up story threads better, get to know the characters more, and have more opportunities to ratchet up the tension. This is a thriller, after all. Of course, that many episodes with the mostly uninspired voice acting would REALLY grate on the ears, so you'd need to get them to put some real feeling into their lines instead of the room full of wannabe Spike Spiegels you have.

And it's not like the VAs are BAD; they sound great! They just rarely match with the emotion their character is showing (if they show emotion at all). I recently started re-watching both GitS:SAC and Cowboy Bebop to see whether I'm crazy, and I'm not; those VAs, English and Japanese, know what they're doing.

I honestly hope they don't do a 2nd season as I think it'd just be a whole bunch of disappointing and bland side-story junk.