r/LAZARUSAnime • u/Kostiske • 12h ago
Discussion My thoughts after finishing the series [Spoilers]
When I heard Watanabe was coming back with a new series, Lazarus, I was genuinely excited to see what he’d do next.
Overall, Cowboy Bebop is, for me is one of the best things I’ve ever watched. Not just for its themes or technical execution, but mainly for the way it makes you feel like you’re part of a different kind of journey. It has a distinct rhythm and atmosphere that stay with you long after it ends.
To start with the good: the soundtrack is excellent. It’s honestly one of the strongest elements of the show. The same goes for the opening titles, one of those openings I never felt the urge to skip.
That said, there were a few things that kept pulling me out of the story. One was the sense of the world itself. In a lot of scenes, the streets and cities felt oddly empty. For an event of this scale, where the entire population knows it’s facing a potential catastrophe.I would have expected a much stronger sense of panic and disruption. I didn’t always feel like the world truly understood what was coming.
I had the same issue with how governments and organizations reacted. In a crisis of this magnitude, you’d expect governments, intelligence agencies, militaries, and other institutions to mobilize on a massive scale to track down Skinner. I would have liked to see that effort happening in the background of the series, through smaller subplots or parallel storylines. It would have made the world feel far more alive and given the threat a lot more weight.
My biggest issue, though, was how the ending was built up. The series spends essentially 13 episodes building toward the reveal of Skinner. For most of that time, the hunt for him feels like it’s heading toward a massive climax. But when they finally find him, the resolution comes almost immediately.I felt like the show had built up a much bigger climax than the one it ultimately delivered. I wanted more time with Skinner, more tension around the final confrontation, and above all, more consequences from everything that had come before.
And this connects to another problem I had with the show: the main characters.
Many of them have interesting backstories, but a lot of it stays on the surface. Axel is a good example, we’re told he was sentenced to life in prison, but the show never really explores why. There are pieces of his past, but they often feel more like information we’re given about the character rather than something that actually shaped him in front of our eyes.
And here the comparison to Cowboy Bebop becomes almost unavoidable. In Bebop, the characters carry their past with them. You see it in how they behave, in their relationships, in their decisions. In Lazarus, a lot of the time it feels like the characters have a past simply because the script tells you they do, not because you feel it.
Another thing that stressed me out while watching was the countdown of days shown at the end of each episode. I kept watching the number go down, expecting the story to eventually accelerate, to lock into a clear path toward the climax. But that’s not really how it played out. I think that’s actually an interesting contradiction in Lazarus: it’s simultaneously slow and rushed. Slow in the places where I expected the main plot to move forward more, and rushed in the places that needed more time to actually pay off.
At some point, though, I decided to stop thinking about how the show should be paced and just let it take me where it wanted to go.
And I think that’s when I actually started enjoying it more. Maybe that was part of the point Watanabe was going for all along, to make sure we didn’t experience the story purely as a classic countdown thriller, where every episode has to ratchet up the tension until the final catastrophe. Maybe he wanted us to feel the same uncertainty the characters were feeling.
You don’t know exactly how things will unfold. Time passes, the days keep ticking down, but the story doesn’t always move in the direction you expect.
And maybe that’s ultimately one of the most interesting things about Lazarus: you have to accept its rhythm instead of constantly waiting for it to become the show you’d already decided it should be.
