LAZARUS commits what are—in my opinion—the worst crimes a series can commit, that being boring and forgettable. Don’t get me wrong, there are points in this that are actively bad but for the most part everything's just fine.

Our main characters are all assigned quirky backstories, many of which get expanded on in their own episodes but ultimately fail to provide meaningful character development or even distinct personality for our cast. Which could be fine to overlook if the central story was the focus.

Unfortunately, it’s not. I have specific issues with the premise of this show (that I will get into later in this review) but the format overall centers the effects of what is happening on our already lackluster team rather than the meaning of those events themselves. It’s a style of storytelling that I usually like but cannot work when the characters are as wooden as these ones. As a result, most episodes feel disconnected from the overarching story.

In isolation the episodes are fine. Usually, aggressively passable. They have clear beginnings, middles and ends. They introduce some concept or theme that they engage with in the most surface level way possible. There’s a fight scene that is well choreographed. Then they end with us no closer to our end goal than the episode before it. And our characters functionally unchanged.

I wish I could say that the episodes on their own were at least fun to watch. I think, because of the lack of major flaws, they might for some people. But the surface level engagement with the topics discussed really turned me off. It made me feel like I was being lectured. And I mostly agree politically with Watanabe, so I can only imagine how annoying this would be if you didn’t. One could argue that its ineffective rhetoric is actually the major flaw for the series as a whole.

Which leads into my main issue with this anime: LAZARUS is a story about drug use written by somebody I don’t believe has experience first- or second-hand with drugs.

Writing that down makes me feel like I’m calling Watanabe a dork and that’s not what I mean by this. The drug in the show has very clear parallels to opioids and the premise overall to the opioid epidemic in the US and Canada. I don’t know Watanabe personally, however, I do feel comfortable saying that I doubt he has a personal connection to or even experience with this issue. And you can tell by the way he’d write about drug users as being generally universal, socially acceptable, and open about their experiences.

The inciting event of LAZARUS is the world finding out that Hapuna, what was seen as a miracle drug, will kill you three years after you first took it. The show implies that everyone in the world has taken this drug, whether having it been prescribed to them or taking it recreationally—the exception being a single indigenous community that has no pain receptors. That fact alone is insane. I wanna emphasize that this is not equivalent to Tylenol, although there’s also plenty of people who don’t take Tylenol for various reasons. Hapuna is a PRESCRIPTION DRUG that is also used as a PARTY DRUG. It’s really unreasonable to say that everybody has taken this drug.

Superficially, this only raises the stakes of the show. The more people who have taken it, the more important it is to find a cure. However, it means that the show can’t meaningfully engage with the types of people who this would affect. A much more interesting show would ask who is taking this drug and why? What does it mean that we are going to kill off those types of people? Let’s compare it to the opioid crisis. Who is affected by the opioid crisis? There’s actually a lot of ways you could answer this but the simplest answer is that some communities are harder hit than others. I could think of a few lenses that Watanabe himself might actually enjoy looking at this issue through. It’s a disability issue because people who get prescribed it often have other medical issues. It’s a class issue because it is more likely to affect low income communities. I think both of those alone are spaces that Watanabe might have an interesting take on. But the fact that he isn’t conceptualizing those as being connected to drug use hurt his story.

AND it’s not something that gets talked about out in the open, even if you were to remove any criminalization of use. Your average person isn’t open about using oxy. A politician certainly wouldn’t be. I could see a world where this issue would feel really big and people wouldn’t admit that it’s as big as it is because that’s the world that we live in. It would make the team of rejects that he’s created as the shows main cast a little bit more meaningful within the larger story. I could see a version of this where only this team is seriously looking into it while other government agencies failed to admit that it’s a problem.

Instead, we get a story that says it’s about not needing drugs to feel happy? Or maybe it’s about wanting a world where you don’t need drugs to feel happy? Or maybe looking for connection in a world where people use drugs? It’s deeply unclear and I promise that you will get just as good fight sequences out of another show. Don't waste your time with this one.