The following contains spoilers for Lazarus, Episode 2, “Life in the Fast Lane”, available onMax.
Summary
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The second episode ofAdult Swim’sLazaruswasnowhere near the level of the first episode, but gave us a little more to work with in terms of contextualizing Dr. Skinner’s decisions, and giving us little shards of information about the Lazarus crew, which was welcome.
The episode starts off with the crew following a lead on the missing scientist, turned into a wacky wild goose chase involving several factions, including the FBI. It wasn’t a bad episode at all, but there was definitely something missing despite all the action that takes place in the second half.
Setting Up Shop
Lazarus HQ Is Established and Members Start Getting To Know Each Other
Unlike the last episode,the surreal introductory sequenceis done by Leland instead of Doug, with the youngster detailing some of his experiences with Hapna, which he reveals became increasingly popular with teenagers and youths for its ability to make people feel good and even get them a little high. Like Doug, Leland grapples with the looming cataclysm that awaits the world in 29 days’ time. During Hersch’s briefing, Axel tries to take Chris hostage, but special bracelets put on all the members ensure their cooperation, lest they lose their hands.
After the briefing, the members talk about what they’d do if they found Skinner, discussing plans like monopolizing the vaccine or selling it for lots of money, but Doug, the apparent leader of the group, tells them that Lazarus wasn’t formed for personal gain: they’rea special group entrusted with saving the world.
Finally, Axel asks everyone who among them has used Hapna, and all of them raise their hands, so they all have stakes in the operation to find Dr. Skinner. With that settled, they start moving into the little rundown building, which now serves as their HQ. Doug shows Axel to his quarters and lets him know that he was actually against his enlistment, citing his antics as the kind of thing that ends up costing the team. Doug leads Axel to part of the property where mundane-looking steel doors hide a high-tech facility.
The World Tries to Find Answers
Wait, Is That Ariana Grande?!
With 28 days left until D-Day, the world is reeling, trying to find out more about Dr Skinner and if there were signs that he was always going to do something of this nature. We sort of watch TV, flicking from a press conference at the White House in which the speaker struggles to make journalists confident that there’s a solution on the horizon, while a pop star wholooks a whole lot like Ariana Grandesits on what looks a lot like the Tonight Show and laments the fact that the world will end before her new album drops and elsewhere, a man who used to tend to Dr Skinner’s gardens get his 15 minutes of fame, the reporters soon realizing he’s got nothing for them by way of information, sensationalist or otherwise.
Picking up from where we left off with the first episode, after the Lazarus crew assembled for their first briefing with Hersch, we learn more about the man, the myth, the legend Dr. Deniz Skinner (1996 –). Born in Istanbul, Dr Skinner lost his parents at age 12 due to local unrest, and has been alone ever since. He dedicated his whole life to scientific rigour and scholarship, managing to enroll at Cambridge at 20 years old and going on to lead a life full of promise as his accomplishments led people tocall him “the next Einstein”.
Doug Briefs the Lazarus Crew
Learning About the Cartoonishly Good Dr Deniz Skinner
The righteousness that Skinner displayed throughout his life is almost too good to be true; from winning the Nobel Prize three times and donating the money to charity, abandoning patents on drugs he developed and championing causes, sometimes all by himself. He attended environmental summits, and spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, pressing global powers to do more to prevent calamity. There is a striking moment at the UN General Assembly, shortly before his disappearance, where he passionately tries to get the world’s leaders to take climate change and the rapidly melting ice caps more seriously and work together to prevent tragedy, which all fell on deaf ears.
By his calculations, there were only three years left before the ice caps melted irrevocably, beginning a chain of further environmental devastation. It was most likely the cold response he received at this particular conference that may have kicked off his grand plan in the first place, as the various world leaders left the conference, ignoring his pleas. The Lazarus crew are surprised to hear that someone who was such a friend to humankind; one with not a single black mark on the report of his life,turned out to be a pharmacological terrorist. During the briefing session, the crew’s resident hacker, Eleina, finds a lead on Skinner’s location, and the crew head out to find the scientist.
On Skinner’s Trail
The Calm Before the Storm
According to Eleina’s lead, Skinner purchased a survival shelter from Kobayashi Shelters, one of those doomsday prepper companies, but they aren’t reachable by phone. Such a shelter could allow Skinner to live away from outside contact for close to a century without issue. The crew splits up to pursue this lead, with Axel and Christine in one vehicle, Doug and Leland in the other, while Eleina stays at headquarters torun facial recognition techon global surveillance cameras to possibly find a lead. The pairings miss out on the opportunity to have Chris and Leland, who are voiced by Uchida Yuuma and Maaya respectively, together on the same mission, but there’ll be more time for meta-antics as the show goes on.
While on their way to their destination, Chris asks Axel how long his sentence was, and upon hearing how long he was in prison for, she immediately kicks him out of her car, sayingshe doesn’t want to be working with “Leatherface”, but she’s relieved to learn that Axel’s sentence was all because of his little jailbreaking hobby. Each attempt to escape from prison earns the offender double their original sentence, so before he knew it, Axel Gilberto, the absolute madlad, raked up 888 years. This episode of Lazarus features a lot of backgrounds, with loads of aerial, long-range and establishing shots to give us a sense of the changing landscape as the operatives leave the city and get to their respective destinations. For Axel and Chris, it’s the Arizonan desert, a region littered with shelters, while Doug and Leland locate Kobayashi Shelter Sales to talk to those in charge, but they have company.
Chaos! At the Bunker
Multiple Factions All Looking For the Same Guy… Or Not
In the final third of the second episode ofLazarus, things go left pretty quickly for both pairs. For Doug and Leland, thugs waiting at the Kobayashi sales offices hold them up, while Axel and Chris find a man sitting on a chair in the middle of a dimly lit room and are soonaccosted by armed squadronsof Russian and Mexican gangsters, as well as the gangsters of the state, the FBI and police, who we see literally racing each other to get to the site first. More of Axel’s personality is revealed as the idea of being pinned in by multiple factions of armed thugs is something he relishes, holding on to the pendant that hangs off his neck like a powerful artifact that wards off evil.
Chris is not as foolhardy, so the two are separated as we’re treated tomore of Chad Stahelski’s impactwith the action as Axel evades gunfire, runs on walls to leap into action against multiple enemies and disarm his opponents. In the midst of his antics, he runs into Chris again, and they head back to the hall where they first found the man passed out in the chair, but as they reach him, they find themselves in the middle of the crosshairs of the FBI and the DEA. There’s a funny moment with Axel when the FBI and the DEA all set their guns on him yelling their respective organizations, and he responds by pulling his fingers into the shape of a gun and yelling “Lazarus! Put your hands up!"
The Wrong Guy
The man on the chair wakes up to the terrifying sight of multiple heavily armed men surrounding him. After using a DNA analyzer on the man,it turns out that he isn’t Skinnerin some kind of elaborate disguise, but Kobayashi himself, someone who owes several groups money and decided to hide out in one of the shelters he built for a client. It almost feels like the episode was more for set up, until the final moments of the episode, with Kobayashi dishing out an eerie monologue about his life being a big gamble and how much he’s dreamed of making it big and getting rich, but it all failed. He ended up taking Hapna to speed up his own death, but it’s clear there’s an internal conflict he’s experiencing about wanting to live a full life but being resigned to the mess he’s made instead.
Could Kobayashi end up beinga more significant character? We’ll have to see. In the meantime, the search for Skinner continues, as Eleina’s search brings up literally thousands of hits. With 28 days left until the end of the world, the search for Dr. Skinner isn’t off to the best start. The second episode ofLazaruswas quite pleasant to look at with its varied landscapes, and while it was still enjoyable, the feeling that all the episode ended up doing was showing us Skinner’s Wikipedia page is hard to shake.
