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Anime Director Shinichirō Watanabe's Corporate Dystopias

compared to the eventual cop-out of Carole & Tuesday, where singing Kumbaya fixes everything.

Feel like this article was written before Lazarus aired and assumed that it would be much better than it is...

Honestly, there's nothing really fancy about it. The number of dystopian future setting outnumber idealistic one probably 1000:1 (I can only think of star treck as a positive example, maybe aria I guess?). Its just the regular setting choice, like medieval fantasy with dwarf and elf.

Anyway, does Hapna actually cure all disease? They only ever mention it as a painkiller in the show and never actually "studies the ripple effects of the drug's introduction when it seemed to have only good intentions.". Like, how would that work for people who get old, would they just never die but keep getting old? That would have some massive consequence on society.

Also if you're motivated mainly by climate action, would a cure for disease really be the way to go? More people alive means more pollution, and the public is, by and large, fairly uninterested in environment issues compared to their own wealth, even free from disease, there's no indication that country would divert all resource toward environment rather than just cut tax.

If you'd really want to seriously study the setting, Dr. Skinner is a tale of failure of altruism and a fanfare for capitalism. If Skinner had instead heavily limited the supply of Hapna and only sold it to the highest bidder, he could have forced all the old rich people to give him momentous amount of money (pretty sure if Bezos find out he would die soon he'd be willing to give up his entire fortune for the cure). Using all that money, he could then drive society toward lower environmental impact, for example, buy massive quantity of solar panel to sell give electricity for free, driving fossil fuel generator out of business. Or push more research for environmentally friendly plastic and sell it for less than regular plastic.

I mean you're not wrong, but also any dude who decides to commit genocide (or hell, omnicide? what's the word for killing everyone?) isn't exactly thinking sane thoughts. He made up his mind that society as a whole would never change so he'd force it to change.

Never being sick again is, of course, a massive financial burden off everyone's shoulders. Perhaps Dr. Skinner's thinking is that financial stability leaves more room for solving the climate crisis and changing habits. While this is speculation at this point, as the show is not yet finished, the early episodes of Lazarus hint at this, as do comments made by Watanabe in the lead-up to the series' premiere.

The eponymous pair, the runaway rich heiress and wannabe singer-songwriter Carole and orphaned working-class girl Tuesday,

Dr. Wily wrote:

I mean you're not wrong, but also any dude who decides to commit genocide (or hell, omnicide? what's the word for killing everyone?) isn't exactly thinking sane thoughts. He made up his mind that society as a whole would never change so he'd force it to change.

Well the article seems to be written with the timeline being something like:

Hapna is release -> Skinner is disappointed with humanity response to it and its lack of of effort to combat climate change -> modify Hapna to somehow kill people in 3 year.

See below quote from article:

Quote:

Never being sick again is, of course, a massive financial burden off everyone's shoulders. Perhaps Dr. Skinner's thinking is that financial stability leaves more room for solving the climate crisis and changing habits. While this is speculation at this point, as the show is not yet finished, the early episodes of Lazarus hint at this, as do comments made by Watanabe in the lead-up to the series' premiere.

But maybe its actually that Hapna was always designed to kill people? Would be something we could figure out if the show actually bothered exploring anything rather than jumping from threads to threads without exploring anything.

I will point out, climate change works on a delay of around 15-20 years (more complicated than this obviously but rule of thumb). Even if humanity vanished tomorrow, climate change would continue getting worse over that period of time. Add in the effect of the thawing permafrost and warming ocean with methane clathrate, which will cause warming to reinforce itself, and we are most likely already way pass the point where humanity vanishing would actually fix climate change. At this point, we need to start doing geoengineering if we want to preserve life on earth as we know it. Humanity vanishing isn't a fix for climate change anymore, its now a worse case scenario.

I mean, look, to get grim for a second and to crawl into Skinner's head again, when you mentioned earlier making a worldwide hostage situation to threaten the rich dudes to get money to then change the world yourself in an earlier post, that's not a real viable solution for a lot of reasons, the primary one being you'd have to show you're not bluffing (we see in the show that some people actually doubt Skinner's threat early on) before bodies started dropping like flies and the rich dudes may not even be alive to pay you. So you'd have to have some sort of magical instant kill switch, and then we've just made the story into Death Note but with drugs instead of a magic book.

Quote:

compared to the eventual cop-out of Carole & Tuesday, where singing Kumbaya fixes everything.

Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought Carole and Tuesday dropped the ball at the end. The show teases the "seven minute miracle" at the start of every episode, but in the end the "miracle" just a jam session where everyone gets together and sings a song that's so vague and layered in hokey metaphors that it could be about almost anything. It sure as hell doesn't feel like a protest song.

The hilarious part is, the "miracle" turns out to be utterly pointless. The main conflict of the series (in which Tuesday's politician mother threatens to launch a Trump-style war on immigrants) is resolved via a conversation between her and her son, before Carole and Tuesday even sing their song. The girls never find out about this, so in the end they're (barely) protesting against a problem that no longer exists. Maybe people on Mars end up thinking that the song is what caused Tuesday's mother to resign, since the two events happened so close together, but the viewer knows that it's just a coincidence, making Carole and Tuesday completely superfluous to their own story, and making the much teased "miracle" a complete waste of time.

Watanabe is usually great at endings (I mean, this is the man who killed Spike) so I doubt Lazarus will end with such a poorly structured fart of a conclusion. But Carole and Tuesday's finale still bugs the hell out of me after all this time.