Review of Lazarus

Lazarus is… fine. It’s good-fine. Not great, I didn’t love it, but I did like it. It has strong parallels with The Great Pretender, Black Lagoon, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – yet it fell short of those. The plot felt very inspired by the comic series “The Beauty” – look it up, you’ll most likely agree. TL;DR – it’s a fun watch, but it’s not a perfect show either. If you love any of the 4 anime I mentioned, you should definitely check Lazarus out. You probably will not fall in love with it, but you’ll have fun watchingit.
The bad: Okay, this list is longer than I thought it’d be but bear with me! Lazarus suffered most from episodes which are too short for such a large cast. The intro and outro each eat of a sizable chunk of that 23 minutes. There are just too many POV characters for such short episodes.
Plot armor is applied too liberally as the cast circles closer to finding a cure for Hapna induced doomsday. The plot has some very large holes in it – shouldn’t human trial subjects have already been dying long before Skinner’s video? A very weird oversight, and no, the unwilling test subjects we learn about don’t count because there would have been real trials for Hapna.
Episodes jumped around between the too large cast so often that backstories had to be filled in much later in the show than what felt appropriate, and some characters didn’t really get a backstory, they’re just in the anime to be there
A couple of times the show was extra af about being super PC just for the sake of being extra (i.e. during the night club episode). It was Velma levels of extra.
The writing itself was weakest when the predictable plot armor was welded onto the story to progress things along – the elite hospital episode is a great example of that. The writing here was not great. The entire show overall was at its weakest when the plot focused in on the hackers – the “catch the hacker” angle to this tale should have been left on the cutting room floor to leave room for more engaging elements of the story.
The conclusion was mid. It was not awful, but it felt like the writers hammered out a fun story and lost inspiration at the end so took the safe route of “let’s solve this at the last possible minute”

The good: Lazarus is action packed and moves along at a very fast pace. The animation and art are mostly stellar. The choreography was very fun, like Bebop levels of good! The setting felt realistic, though much of the art for world and some of the characters is too clean, a little grime here are there could have done wonders.
The scoring was good, not remarkable but not bad either. The plot – lifted from The Beauty imho – is engaging and had there been a little more care taken, this could have been the thought provoking series the marketing implied it to be.
There was a transgender character portrayed in a positive light who felt like a fun character who was underutilized – this was nice to see and unlike the night club episode, it did not feel like she was there just for fluff and points. Some thought was actually invested into creating her character.
Overall, I liked the show. I did not love it, but it was engaging enough that I kept coming back to watch more. Had the studio ran with longer episodes and made the overall tone more mature and toned down some of the silliness, I think this show could have joined the ranks of Cowboy Bebop.