Lazarus

Episode 13

Well. There you have it. After thirteen episodes, Lazarus has finally come to an end. It didn't have to be this way, of course. Enough has been said about the talent at work behind the scenes that should have ensured that Lazarus was, if nothing else, a consistently good time. Adult Swim and Warner Bros. wanted Watanabe to try to spin straw into gold and conjure up another generational masterpiece like Cowboy Bebop out of thin air, but any reasonable fan would have never come into this new project expecting anything so grand. All Lazarus needed to be was pretty good, and maybe occasionally even excellent, if we were lucky.

We all know how things turned out now.

Lazarus has been so consistently inconsistent, so doggedly determined to trip over its shoelaces and counter every one of its successes by leaning into some of the dumbest nonsense imaginable, that I didn't have any real hopes that this final episode would miraculously resurrect the series' chances. The introduction of Soryu, the Dissociative Identity Disorder Super Assassin, and all of the “Hundun” symbolism over the last few episodes has only cemented the fact that Lazarus never really had any clear direction or goal in its storytelling. Without the clear voice and backbone of a seasoned writer like Keiko Nobumoto, it seems like Lazarus' motley crew of creatives treated the project as an opportunity to use her skeleton of story ideas as an excuse to throw whatever random shit they thought was mildly interesting at the wall to see what stuck. I may not have always agreed with Nobumoto's choices as an author in the past - look no further than my mixed (but fundamentally positive!) reactions to Wolf's Rain for evidence of that - but the woman was confident enough in her vision to see things through to the end. I honestly feel like I appreciate Wolf’s Rain even more now, with a show like Lazarus to compare it to.

Anyways, we're not here to talk about good anime. We're here to put Lazarus down once and for all. So, how does this convoluted mess of a misadventure conclude its story? Just about as you'd expect: By proudly and aggressively failing to deliver on any of its storytelling potential while embarrassing itself as much as it is capable of doing in a single 25 minutes of television.

Soryu and his background as a government-trained assassin orphan become the center focus of most of the episode, for some baffling reason. Our boy Axel manages to survive a showdown with him on top of a crumbling skyscraper, although his internal organs got turned into pulled pork when he got impaled by a spear a few days ago. I'm not sure what aspect of this scene ruins the dramatic integrity of Lazarus' narrative more: The insufferably sentimental way that Axel finishes the stupid Hundun story for Soryu after he brushes off the dust of an entire goddamned building falling on them, or the way that Chris just casually rolls up to the aftermath of a 9/11-scaled incident of destruction to pick Axel up on her motorcycle.

Oh, wait, never mind, the worst scene of the show is when the finale randomly reveals that every single character in the show was involved in that train station incident, which turns out to have exposed them all to Hapna and made them immune to the virus by mutating their genes.”Essentially,” Abel tells the crew, 'You all died and came back to life.” To this, Doug responds, in hushed awe, “The raising of Lazarus…”

Yes, of course! This explains everything. If only I had recognized this incredible and intricate metaphor earlier. Lazarus got raised from the dead, and Team Lazarus, a group of strangers, were randomly caught in a deadly toxin leak that ended up mutating their genes in such a way that they would maybe, kind-of be immune to the release of a deadly-bioweapon-super-drug-thing that would threatened the entire human race in a few short years - an immunity, by the way, that would have no material impact on the course of their adventures in any way. It's exactly like the Biblical allegory. My God.

Or maybe, the actual worst part of this finale is the truly final scene, where the apocalyptic crisis of Skinner's master plan is averted in the most anticlimactic manner possible: The gang finds Skinner sitting on a chair in that homeless camp from Episode 3, and he writes down the cure for Hapna on a scrap of paper before he dies. Then, Team Lazarus is immediately cleared of all wrongdoing and set free. Still, they all decide to immediately join up with the government again to solve…whatever problems their limited and vague skillsets could solve, because they all love each other and stuff. The cure for Hapna is instantly mass-produced and distributed on a global level, somehow, and everyone gets their happily ever after. Except for Skinner, I guess, whose corpse is just sitting there while the entire last scene goes down.

What a joke. As a complete product, I'd wager that Lazarus has precisely two (2) redeeming qualities: Some great looking fight scenes stand out from the generally high production values, and the soundtrack is an okay listen so long as you remove it entirely from the context of the episodes it was used in. Outside of that, this has been one of the biggest bombs I've covered in a long time. It reminds me a little of how loudly and terribly DARLING in the FRANXX squandered all of its promise back in 2018. Just like with that show, I doubt it will take very much time before the entire world agrees to collectively shrug its shoulders and pretend that this misbegotten anime never existed in the first place.

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Lazarus is currently streaming on Max and Hulu on Sundays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.