It feels like ever since 2022, original anime has been in a death spiral. Fewer and fewer non-adaptations are coming out, and the ones that do mostly sputter out into obsolescence before they even finish airing. When was the last time an original show really, truly mattered? Lycoris Recoil, maybe? Does G-Witch count? And sure, every once in a while we still get a Girls Band Cry or Apocalypse Hotel, but the ones that stick the landing are rapidly being outnumbered by the ones that end up completely self-destructing. I don't want to live in a world where a Bones-original mecha tokusatsu about robots on Mars ends up as catastrophic as Metallic Rouge did. And I really don't want to live in a world where Shinichiro Goddamn Watanabe, of all people, puts out the worst anime of the season, possibly of the year. But apparently that's that world we're living in anyway. Yippee.

To be fair, it's not like I was ever Watanabe's biggest fan to being with. Outside of Bebop, I've found his work either too emotionally distant for me to appreciate the craft on display or put together so poorly that it can't do justice to its ideas. But somehow, Lazarus has ended up as both, a ten-car pileup of a show that embodies all the worst parts of Watanabe's prior work with none of their strengths. It's all of Champloo's impersonal apathy with none of its eclectic style. It's all of Dandy's awkward tonal confusion with none of its soaring creativity. It's all of Terror in Resonance's sloppy first-draft storytelling with none of its sheer aesthetic majesty. And it's all of Carole and Tuesday's embarrassingly naive politics with none of its warm, sincere heart. It's a show built on fundamentally bad ideas with even worse execution, one that feels like no one making it actually cared about the story they were supposedly telling. How the hell did we get here?

Well, let's start with the story and hope we can figure it out. In the near future, humanity has become obsessed with a drug called Hapna, a super-painkiller that doesn't just numb your physical pain, but fully deadens you to the malaise of living in a decaying world. With climate change getting worse and tech oligarchy taking over more and more of everyone's lives, people have mostly stopped trying to change the world for the better, accepting the fact they are most likely living through the end of humanity. So might as well numb the pain with a superdrug and enjoy however many years we've got left before we destroy ourselves. Not exactly the kindest view of humanity, but I can't exactly blame Lazarus for looking at the state of the modern world and deciding this is probably where we're headed. Lazy, apathetic, high as balls to block out the existential dread, blithely accepting our doom in the hollow shell of a world on the brink of collapse.

But that doom might come sooner than people realize, because after three years in hiding, Hapna's creator, the legendary Dr. Skinner, returns with a video message: his miracle drug was laced with a ticking time bomb of deadly poison. And in just about a month, that poison will prove fatal to anyone who's ever taken Hapna- which, at this point, is just about the entire global population. The very drug we used to hide from our responsibility to fix the world has now become our punishment for giving into our apathy, wiping humanity off the face of the earth much more immediately than a long, drawn-out civilization collapse. There is an antidote, but only Skinner has it... and if humanity wants one final chance to save itself from annihilation, they've only got thirty days to find him. Thus is born team Lazarus, a collection of criminals with rap sheets a mile wide apiece, pulled from imprisonment to be humanity's saviors. Only their near-inhuman skills in combat, hacking, tracking, subterfuge and resilience have a shot at finding Skinner before it's too late. Will they be the angels who save us from our sins, or will Skinner prove the devil himself and judge us for all eternity?

I realize that description probably makes Lazarus sound way more interesting than it actually is. So let me put the brakes on that before I fool any of y'all by accident: none of this rich thematic potential is explored in any kind of depth. In fact, it feels like Lazarus really doesn't give a shit about Skinner at all. Basically all of its episodes are spent on bizarre, disconnected one-off adventures with only minimal connection to each other. You'd think a month-long deadline would demand some hustle, but it feels like Lazarus- both the crew and the show- take every excuse they can to go off on random side-adventures that 9 times out of 10 result in dead ends with no leads on where to go next. You could argue that apathy is the point, I suppose- oh wow, humanity can't get off its ass to save itself even as its self-inflicted doom creeps ever closer, I wonder if this is topical commentary- but it doesn't feel like the characters are intentionally delaying facing the inevitable. It just feels like the show is getting distracted and forgetting to make its very urgent ticking clock part of the story.

And besides, even the Bebop-style disconnected episodic side-plot storytelling method wasn't the worst possible fit for this kind of premise, you still have to make those side plots... you know, good. And hooooo boy, Lazarus' side plots are not. Each one feels like a new and distinct way to fuck up storytelling on such a basic level you have to wonder how any of these writers graduated college. An attempt to trick Skinner with a fake cure leads to a near-magic hacking battle where the stakes don't matter because the participants can just do whatever tech wizardry the plot needs them to. One of the protagonists' backstories is an inexplicable Wicker Man pastiche. There's an ongoing government conspiracy that never intersects with the main plot and feels like it's siloed off in its own little world wasting time. Then for some reason the show's back half takes a turn into John Wick with an untra-lethal assassin bad guy who has his own separate backstory that connects to nothing and has no influence on the Skinner plot, because... they hired the John Wick action directors and thought this was the only way to use them???

Actually, let's talk about that action for a second, because so much of this project's baffling failure is centered around it. Which is wild, because taken on its own, the action is the one thing Lazarus gets right! It's all Watanabe's skill as a director and all the money Mappa's willing to shell out on some of the most lavishly detailed chases, shootouts, punch-ups, car races, and explosions you're likely to see all year in TV anime. But it's impossible to ignore how every single aspect of this show is utterly decimated for the sake of shoving as much of that action on screen as possible. The story is twisted out of shape to justify a jarring recreation of the Winter Soldier elevator fight, a comically over-the-top freeway brawl, a raid on a Russian oil rig that breaks every single international law imaginable and walks away like it's no big deal when the dust settles. And it quickly starts to feel like the only thing this show cares about is getting that sweet money shot over and over again, no matter how much of its own fiction it has to break to do so. What's a coherent story, meaningful themes, or even just entertaining characters, if not something easily tossed aside to justify another punch-out that will stop mattering the second the credits roll on the episode in question?

Well, it turns out those are some pretty essential fucking parts of storytelling. Because without them, Lazarus is left so empty that bleeds right past boring and into infuriating. Why is there not a single attempt to grapple with the morality of Skinner's plan in the meaningful way? Why do none of the characters form any real connections for all the time we spend together? Why is even minute, every second, every frame of this show so utterly disinterested in exploring any aspect of itself beyond how high it can crank the FPS for the next meaningless fistfight? And even that gets off easy next to its politics; the only consistent note it hits is how shitty humanity is, how awful our society is, how maybe we're the real virus killing the earth and maybe we're better off just giving up and accepting our doom. At times it feels like listening to the paranoid ramblings of a mass shooter right before he pulls the trigger. But even assigning that kind of malicious intent to Lazarus feels like giving it too much credit; this show is so utterly devoid of purpose it trips headfirst into ecofascist-adjacent propaganda entirely by accident. Because it couldn't be bothered to think about what it was actually trying to say beyond surface-level preachiness that has no grounding in the world we actually live in.

And that's what really leaves me kind of appalled at how Lazarus turned out. This isn't just bad, this is soulless. This feels like a show willed into existence by a sheer indifference to art the likes of which are usually reserved for the heaps of cash-grab isekai slop we get every season. But you expect those to be hacked-out trash. You don't expect that same level of artistic laziness from the guy who made Cowboy Goddamn Bebop, let alone the staggering team of hotshot creatives who worked on it as well. Was it Adult Swim's fault for pigeonholing Watanabe back in the Bebop mold when his interests were clearly elsewhere? Was it the fault of writer Dai Sato, who's track record with originals lately has been nothing short of catastrophic? Is Watanabe himself really just that washed? Or were there too many cooks in the kitchen, so many people trying to shove their own ideas into this meal that it ended up such a formless mess with no point of view and no understanding of what it's even trying to be?

I don't know. All I know is that Lazarus is a hollow, cynical void of a show, a mangled mess of contrivance and contradiction that says nothing of value even as it browbeats you with its preachy, paranoid moralizing. It's hard to even know who to blame here, because for all the clear talent on display in the animation itself, the finished product feels like it was never touched by human hands at all. You could tell me a machine made every decision in bringing this show to life and I'd believe you. And that suffocating cynicism makes me hate it and everything it stands for. Humanity is too complex for this show to ever understand, and even our sins deserve clearer condemnation than its godawful writing can manage. If we're ever to fix our broken world, it can only come by seeing our situation clearly and accepting our responsibility with full understanding of what failures got us to this point. And there is nothing here that can help us reach that point, nothing worth learning from, nothing that might spark any kind of even miniscule change in how we view our place in the grand design of existence. You don't have the right to judge humanity, Lazarus. You don't even have the right to judge a fucking sixth grade debate club.

Then again, we as a species did put out this piece of crap. So maybe it's got a point after all. Humanity is doomed, we deserve death. Please, God, let Dr. Skinner come down and wipe us off this planet before we can make another show as bad as Lazarus again.