Created, storyboarded and written by Shinichirō Watanabe

Directed by Kazuo Miyake & Youhei Tsuchiya

Chief animation directed by Akemi Hayashi

In 2052, Doctor Deniz Skinner cured pain. The inventor of Hapna, an analgesic universal pain relief, Skinner changed the world and vanished. Until 2055, when he resurfaces to explain that Hapna was a terrible mistake, and has a three and a half year half life. Meaning everyone who uses it has six months to live…

The legendary creator of Cowboy Bebop hits the ground running, just like his characters. The info dump that opens the episode is graceful and cleverly sets the tone without overloading us. We meet the Lazarus team, including the magnificently deadpan Doug Hadine (Jovan Jackson) and Axel Gilberto (Jack Stansbury), a young Brazilian man with near superhuman parkour skills who is in prison for 888 years. That wasn’t his original sentence but Axel really, really likes escaping…

That’s the entire first episode, as the team meet Axel, and try to convince him to join them. He uses that as a chance to escape and they pursue him across a city that’s reacting very badly to the news about Hapna.

‘Fun’ is not an adjective you’d expect for the first episode of a show like this but, much like Cowboy Bebop, Lazarus dances with the darkness at its core. That’s literally the case with Axel, whose playful parkour escape from prison and the team takes up much of the episode. Stansbury is great as a just slightly off Peter Parker-type, a friendly, charming young man who has decided gravity doesn’t apply to him in quite the same way.

Chad Stahelski, a man who helped change action cinema forever in the west twice with his work on The Matrix and John Wick, is the action coordinator here and you can see it in every shot. Axel’s graceful, almost whimsical physical flow acts as both target and lens for the other characters, introducing us to them even as Axel runs rings around (most) of them. It’s incredibly fun to watch, and while the end of the episode offers no surprise it promises and delivers a lot.

Verdict: The clock is ticking, but Lazarus, and eventually Axel, are on the case. I like our chances. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Lazarus airs weekly on Channel 4 in the UK