There are not too many serious issues to note with the script in episode 1 because it was a fast-paced action piece. But the quality of the script is below the standards of what I have seen with most of Watanabe's work. It is a realistic-looking series set in the U.S. and has a trace of that kind of "mature tone" you might get from Cowboy Bebop, but Lazarus is like the little kid who smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and curses to feel mature rather than anything close to actual maturity. Maybe the worst offender when it comes to dialogue is when we get to our first round of banter (I have rendered the dialogue verbatim) with our five mains: "This team wasn't formed for personal gain or profit." "Okay then, what's it for?" "Well... [dramatic pause] We're here to save the world." "Oh? So basically, we're superheroes." "That's cool. We're like the Avengers or something." This is like a masterclass in terrible referential dialogue! As if the Team Avengers vibe (or Isekai Suicide Squad, which is not any better) were not already obvious from episode 1. It seems like they have a quota to fit at least one cringe reference in per episode, as we get "secret agent" and "License to Kill" from James Bond, and there is also the corny "Uh, layman's , please." The standard "Haha, I was thinking that!" go-to phrase to dumb down technobabble for the audience.
The problems with the writing are multi-faceted and not just the dialogue. One of the silliest things about Axel is that he is a veteran prison breaker who has been sentenced to 888 years and is like a flipping MAPPA monkey who bounces off walls, climbs up buildings, and is too nimble for the donut-sucking pigs to shoot. he should be in solitary or his hands and feet always cuffed and probably even some kind of other body restraint to keep him in check, like Hannibal Lecter with his muzzle, strait jacket, and chains. There are all kinds of odd moments, like when Christine and Leland get access to Skinner's home: Leland's solution to get past the guards by having them foot the cleaning bill is laughable, and you would expect Hersch to pull some strings with her government connections instead, so one has to conclude that the writers were desperately struggling to find some use for Leland, whose main role otherwise is to play with Tonka trucks and RC helicopters. They easily find a clue that the police missed without even trying. A hobo professor known by a member of Team Avengers just happens to have been a past colleague of Skinner and re some useless story about Skinner's grandma that turns out to be a hot lead. Later, Team Avengers are attacked by a vicious gang in Istanbul and one character yelling, "We want to see grandma Skinner and eat baklava" results in a deus ex machina and plot convenience because this gang happens to know her and immediately become tame enough to roll over and have their tummies rubbed. Axel finds a camera that Skinner left inside of grandma Skinner's apartment in about 10 seconds. Every scene is often convenience piled on top of convenience, which should form a mountain by the end.
Since a lot of American political hot topics are incorporated, the script is obviously watered down and cartoonish, with even the original Gundam from 1979 feeling more mature in its politics. Cutting edge social commentary incoming... "Can you help us find this person?" Leading to the non-sequitur of a minor character that does not need a backstory: "Hey, listen, I'm a bankrupt transgender woman who went to prison." Then, of course, the black Pirates of the Caribbean extra, instead of asking what that has to do with anything, has to compete and insert his sob story too: "Oh, yeah? Well, back when I was an academic researcher, a guy said to me, 'There will never be a black Einstein,' and it'd be impossible for people like us to win a Nobel Prize [at least 17 blacks have won the Nobel Prize, by the way]; so, uh, guess who that guy was... he was actually the dean of the university, and I knocked his ass out, LOL." Uh huh... For social commentary to work, it cannot be this fake and lazily written, and the writer is trying to cram in too many half-baked ideas, poorly inserted pandering, and stereotypical characters who are nothing but some boohoo backstory in the waiting. People will celebrate this as "trans and black representation," but this is abysmal writing, and these are presently not even characters: They are, at their essence, walking political talking points. This is Watanabe's fumbling attempt at engaging with social commentary, like Terror in Resonance or Carole & Tuesday all over again, but many times worse and overdosing on Reddit screeching and uptalking TikTok influencers.
The year is 2052, which is most likely a reference to Jorgen Randers' book of the same name, who was a co-author of the well-known The Limits to Growth report that was commissioned by the Club of Rome, which is relevant because of the environmental focus. Our main villain, Dr. Skinner, after a disappearance of three years, delivers a video speech to the masses, which might as well be this: "Although I'm stoked that we finally got a female president--UOOOH #I Stand With Her... Blah, blah, blah, the evil of inequality, war, and cow farts must end, so I will now reveal that the unrealistic panacea drug that I have created was laced with super secret ingredient x [cue a sea of gasping soyjak faces] and has mutated, and you will all die unless you stop me. Let's play a game! Mwahahahaha!" It is hard to endure these preachy humanitarian Einstein activist/Bond villain plots nowadays, as they just keep getting worse.
Hapna, the super drug Skinner pumped onto the market, is basically like Brave New World's cure-all Soma but with a deadly twist (unless Hapna being a death drug is a 5D chess ruse to unify the population and have the UN enforce the Worldwide Butt Plug Filtration Act to reduce emissions). Watanabe's influence was the opioid epidemic, in large part spearheaded by the underhanded Sackler family, who went so far as to pay off medical journals and shill doctors to line their pockets. Instead of this potentially more interesting and complex story of pharmaceutical corruption, we have an evil genius and an incompetent FDA (and every other drug istration in the world) that failed to do due diligence with proper testing and rolled these drugs out immediately. You have to suspend disbelief for an oversight of this scale in what is effectively a global idiot plot. ittedly, while it might seem ridiculous for so many people to be using Hapna, if you compare it to aspirin usage instead of opioids, it becomes a lot more reasonable, as daily aspirin usage is quite high, the average person probably takes at least one aspirin a year for minor things, and Hapna appears to be at least as potent as opioids but without the side effects or a need for a prescription. It is also cheap. At the very least, a massive amount of the population will die and send the world into further chaos, should Skinner be telling the truth. Even though there are some ridiculous things about Hapna, there are not as many holes in this piece of cheese as quite a few other parts of the plot.
It does not help that I predicted cow farts would be a motivating issue by the first episode, and it turns out the reason Skinner embarks on his dastardly scheme is because "The ice in the north pole will melt and be lost forever!" Skinner then whines and goes into hiding once everyone laughs him out of the UN and he readies his plan. That is right, he has a butthurt hissy fit because the unwashed plebs are not doing anything in response to his soundbite, so his solution is global pharmaceutical genocide in hopes of getting his way. There is also the edgy opinion floating around that Skinner is a good boy, representing the change that humanity needs, but he is effectively punishing the powerless masses of the world, many of whom are too busy trying to make ends meet to worry about such bourgeois concerns. Of course, blame everyone who has no say in the matter instead of governments and corporations.
Regardless of what one thinks about this controversial topic, scientists have been casually throwing catastrophic predictions out for years, going back well before the 1960s (global cooling becomes global warming becomes climate change becomes WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE NEXT YEAR!), and the topic is more complex than the propagandistic way this is being depicted. The writer is taking a climate change idea commonly parroted in the present and applying it 27 years into the future. Problems arise from this, however, because the future the writers present is far more advanced than our time, the population is likely larger (we are at around 8 billion people right now), and the carbon and other emissions must be even greater. Well, the cited ice still has not melted and humanity has yet to die in the hypothetical future 27 years from now. Lazarus is just poorly written fiction, and we should not draw any conclusions from it concerning real world issues, but this plot point not only seems to downplay the speculative "problem" in the present that the writer presumably cares about, but it is so ill-conceived that it would probably be more likely to make one question whether or not the whole thing is baloney rather than persuade. We got 27 years into the future after all this doom and gloom, and we are still fine, so how seriously can you take Skinner's bellyaching? It feels like the author has no self-awareness.
We are immediately given dialogue to indicate how you are supposed to feel about the perspective of Skinner on climate change and whatever was presented on his Wikipedia page in this instance: "Sounds like a pretty decent guy." "Sounds too good to be true [Botox bimbo face]. Maybe he was doing some really evil stuff." As if his Hapna scheme were not enough, they have to find some other dastardly deeds in his early life. Oh, he won three Nobel Prizes and donated all of his money to charity. Whoop-de-doo and cue the Community "Ha Gay!" meme. "He was seen giving his seat to an elderly woman on the train... and helping out a homeless person... And there was this time that he tried to eat a sandwich, but then a stray dog took it away from him." "He seems like an all around good person." "The guy's practically a saint." Can I get a barf bag, please? There is example after example of this, and it becomes repetitive fast.
I would think this were satire of the left-right divide in the U.S. if not for script cues looking to enshrine Skinner as a saint and ascended master. However, what the script is doing is saying that everything about Skinner, on the surface, is "good," but that this veneer conceals the evilest of evil bastard geniuses, which is made obvious when you realize Skinner is supposed to be an Anti-Christ figure. The comparison is not altogether different from the sympathetic portrayal of Lucifer/Satan in Paradise Lost, where Milton must have realized the best way to depict a convincing villain is to make him relatable so that you could imagine yourself becoming him, were your circumstances similar. Hapna is seen as a godsend, an "opium of the masses," yet this wonder-drug harbors the doom of humanity. Skinner is seen by Lazarus as being good and like a saint, yet the description of the Anti-Christ in the bible is that he will appear to be good as a means of deception; Skinner is also from Turkey and appears to be half-Turkish, as his first name is the Turkish Deniz and his surname is the English Skinner. The reason that he is from Turkey is because this is one of the theorized locations for the appearance of the Anti-Christ. Gog and Magog are associated with end times prophecy, and Turkey is sometimes interpreted to be Magog. Skinner is probably a reference to the traditional meaning of the name. One who skins an animal, and it is a name pertaining to the surface and what is underneath, much like how Skinner appears a certain way but hides a darker nature.
Aside from Team Avengers being called Lazarus, the character Christ brought back to life after 4 days, there are other references to Christianity. Axel is supposed to be a Christ figure, which might not appear obvious at first, but he frolics with the "sinners" and dregs of society, much like Christ; Axel is also (involuntarily) doing a good deed for humanity, much like how Christ, um, washed dirty feet, I guess? A minor point is that Axel's good luck charm is a wing, like that of an angel's, supposedly protecting him from harm; he wears a red shirt, and red is associated with him on the cover art and OP: The color is evocative of Christ's sacrifice on the cross and the symbolic significance of blood in religious practices. More serious points include the name Axel being derived from the Danish Absalon, which is thought to be a corruption of Absalom, a Hebrew name. One of the sons of King David is named Absalom, and the name means "Father of Peace." Christ is supposed to be descended from King David as well, even if this makes no sense in respect to the supposed "virgin birth"; speaking of which, even the desaturated ED is "pregnant with meaning," as the camera tracks through a highway of seemingly dead bodies, only for Axel to "resurrect" and stand up at the end of the road. The other hint is the symbolic 888-year prison sentence that Axel received. In certain Christian numerological or gematria circles, Christ is associated with this number, just as 666 is usually said to be the number of the beast and associated with the Anti-Christ.
There is also plenty of Judaic and Christian imagery as well, such as flocks of doves; the seven angels sounding the seven trumpets of Revelations, each resulting in a cascade of cataclysmic events, until the seventh ushers in the kingdom of Christ; the ugly post-post-modern crucified figure on a building that looks like the cat coughed up the Tower of Babel; and the dreidel in the introduction, with the letters on the four sides often thought to be associated with enemies of the Jews, such as Babylon, Rome, etc. Christine could be viewed as having a meaning like "follower of Christ," and the name is close to the word Christian. Another notable name is Hersch, the old hag leading the Avengers: Hersch/Hirsch has German, Hebrew, and Yiddish associations and means "deer." Quoting Psalms 42 might be the best conclusion here: "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God." And Psalms 18: "He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he causes me to stand on the heights."
Ultimately, this is a hokey Abrahamic-filtered eschatological (scatological is easier to say and just as accurate) thriller in the vein of the Left Behind novel series, only it is a mixture of seinentard realism and clownish political dystopia rather than a fantastical exploration of the Revelation prophecy, the Anti-Christ's plans, and the rapture; the Anti-Christ in LB similarly gives a speech before the UN, but he is a smoother operator than the crybaby Skinner, and the "Tribulation Force," sounding quite similar to a Team Avengers-like entity, is organized to stop him. Other than that, Lazarus has the John Wick guy choreographing fight scenes that look like Jackie Chan flipping around on a spaceship with zero gravity and toppling baddies far bigger than him, along with some zany hijinks along the way that resemble the scattered neo-noir subplots of CB, yet the action is the only compelling aspect of the series and this new "current thing" kind of political angle is unlikely to age well.
