The final countdown has begun. As the world braces for its inevitable doom,
Team Lazarus finds its search for Skinner impeded by a rival intelligence group
with ties to the very heart of this mystery.
And theyre a group that will stop at nothing to ensure Lazarus doesn’t
learn their dirty little secret. The
final clues lead Axel, Chris, Doug, Elaina, Leland and Hersch across the globe
and into the line of fire of deadly enemies with Skinner waiting at the finish
line. Will Humanity be saved or is it
too late to make a difference?
Even by the lowest of low standards, I wasn’t looking
forward to the finale of Lazarus. By the
end of last weeks penultimate chapter, the search for one man suddenly became
cluttered with conspiracies, assassins and infighting among the intelligence
community that seemed petty when the end of the world was less than a week and
a half away. Suffice to say, Lazarus had a lot to wrap up with only four
episodes left and, well, it did. It
brought it’s story to a close in a self contained 13 episode series. However, that’s not much of a compliment when
the finale is probably the worst part of a series that hasn’t been great from
the start. In fact, I had to double
check a piece of information from the final episode, just to be absolutely sure
I heard what I heard so I could pull up a specific meme that sums up my
thoughts on not just the revelation, but Lazarus as a whole. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see how Lazarus managed to tie up all
loose ends after it collided into a wall at half speed.
Honestly, where to even start? Let’s start with this shows length. Lazarus clocks in at 13 episodes which has
become a mostly standard practice in this day and age, only Shonen Anime seems
to get double the length if not more.
Lazarus’ story presents itself as a nail bitting race against time to
prevent a cataclysmic event but it also wants to spend time building up its
world and its cast. And hey, a lot of
Anime can pull this off nicely. However,
Lazarus isnt one of those shows. The
amount of last minute revelations and plot twists thrown into the mix never
feel built up or even earned. And some
of these are “have you been paying close attention to this little detail” level
reveals. Lazarus thinks it’s being
clever with what it reveals but it’s not.
It feels more like they ran out of time after wasting most of the first
9 episodes on pointless action scenes and dead ends for the team and now theyre
trying to wrap everything up like this was the plan all along. Now here’s my solution: Lazarus should have
been 30 episodes long. Watanabe should
have treated each episode as a countdown.
Run with the 30 day timeline by showing maybe one major happening in
each episode. This way you can even
allow for downtime with the cast, exploring backstories, giving them depth and
allowing for a more natural build up to the rivalries and final bombshells
about Skinner and Hapna. I don’t care
about current Anime broadcast trends but 13 episodes was not nearly enough time
to do what Watanabe thought he was doing.
Cause if you’ve toughed out this show like I have, I doubt any of what
was presented was satisfactory, it really wasn’t.
Alright, let’s get into it. Hapna.
Skinner. I always knew that this
was going to be a Samurai Champloo situation where the destination was gonna be
worse than the journey. Only in this
case the journey absolutely sucked but not nearly as much as what was waiting
at the end. In a huge info dump that
felt compiled in little time at all, we learned that Hapna was originally going
to be used by INSCOM as a bioweapon and Skinner wanted to expose them. However, the attempt to smuggle it out caused
an incident with a lot of casualties, including the Lazarus team itself (hold
that thought). Skinner was so broken by
the experience he decided the best way to expose INSCOM’s crimes was to expose
Hapna to the world by making it a cheap drug for the world and then put this 30
day doomsday plan into motion. The man
risked the whole worlds existence just to prove a government agency was up to
no good. I had to listen to this scene
twice to make sure I heard what I heard.
Annnnnd now I can quote Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: “It’s just…so
dumb.” “Yes it’s so dumb it’s
brilliant.” “NO…IT’S JUST DUMB!!!!”
Ok, um, hmmmm. Why
were people calling this guy the next Einstein?
Even if he sealed his own fate by not taking the Hapna cure that should
not let him off the hook for being the biggest idiot in all of history. Schineder and INSCOM definitely had their
comeuppance coming but Skinner risked everyone and everything just to bring
them to justice? I mean he knew
Hersch. She works with the
government. Pass the info onto her. Have her start an investigation which leads
her to Abel which leads to INSCOM’s eventual downfall. Speaking of Abel, the man who’s the original
founder of Lazarus didn’t really need the team at all after he found the
footage of the Airport incident. He basically
brought down INSCOM with a couple of quick ask favors from the President…which
made Lazarus’ existence all the more useless in the end. Point is, there were plenty of other ways
than risking the lives of every man, woman and child on Earth. The fact that they try to play Skinner’s
death as sad in the end only pisses me off more. All of this and then he dares to ask if
mankind is worth it? Ugh…I really hate
this ending, so freaking much.
Oh yeah, the founding of Lazarus. Turns out Axel, Doug, Chris, Leland and
Elaina were all there when the proto Hapna device went off and all died but
suddenly recovered. I had a feeling this
was a possibility since Chris’ backstory of how she left Russian
Intelligence. But then they kept piling
on and on everyone talking about hospital visits after that “incident” or that
“one time”. And how did they suddenly
return from the dead? Yeah that’s not
explained beyond “oh your cells mutated, awesome.” I mean we had to name them “Lazarus” for a
reason, right? RIGHT!? Soooo…does this
make Team Lazarus immortal? Axel took a
spear through the gut and somehow shuffled out of bed for one more highly
acrobatic battle with Soryu that he should not have been able to do in his
condition, much less walk. Elaina
survived the initial fever that meant Hapna was about to kill her. It would also explain why Axel survived the
prison bio weapon trials conducted by INSCOM.
Honestly, that last part makes the whole “Axel is the key to all of
this” kind of mute since you have four other candidates with Hapna immunity
blood that could make a case for bringing down INSCOM and seriously, I’m
putting more thought into making this story work than Watanabe did.
BTW what was INSCOM’s end goal sending Soryu to kill
Axel, and presumably the rest of Lazarus once that was done? Were they really gonna take their bio weapons
crimes to their graves? For an
“intelligence agency” it seems sorely lacking in intelligence. But at least we always knew they were
douchebags. Soryu went from being a
potentially awesome addition to the show to a quickly complex tragic figure in
the span of an episode and also threw in secret Chinese assassin program
because why the hell not. Even Soryu’s
connection to Axel felt less compelling the more screentime they shared
together. Again, this is something the
30 episode approach could have strengthened, especially if they were going to
make Soryu the Vicious to Axel’s Spike.
But no, Soryu ends up dying taking down an INSCOM chopper, bringing less
to the overall proceedings than he already did.
What a waste.
That sentiment is a nice segue into my Final Thoughts on
Lazarus. The show is a waste of 13
episodes of hard work and animation and a rare disappointment from Shinichiro
Watanabe. The characters never grow beyond
their roles (heck I don’t think Doug even got a backstory compared to everyone
else and the only reason I didn’t rag on Axel as much in this review is because
there were worse things about the finale than him), the situation never feels
truly dire even at the final episode, and the motivations and machinations of
the villains range from nonsensical to “why was this even introduced in the
first place?”. Again, had this been
maybe 26 instead of 13 and the writing were tighter (develop the villains, tone
down Axel’s ego, make the reveals more natural than forced) this could have
been a passable offering from the man who brought us Cowboy Bebop and Samurai
Champloo. As it is however, Lazarus isn’t
befitting of its namesake and I hope that this is the end of it. No Season 2.
To quote Thanos “No resurrections this time”. Case Closed.
2/10
Next Week, we return to the universe of Macross. Will Macross Delta soar as high as Macross
Frontier or crash and burn as hard as Macross 7? The need for speed is back Next Monday right
here at the Gundam Anime Corner.
