The Boxing Day Special: Talking about Lazarus (the anime)
Time to return Christmas presents
This one doesn’t have anything to do with videogames.
Shinichiro Watanabe is a name that every anime fan is familiar with. He’s the man behind Cowboy Bebop, one of the highest rated animes of all time. This info isn’t from the scores at My Anime List, mind you, they have Frieren as the number one show of all time, head and shoulders above everything, with Cowboy Bebop down at number 48, but still, it’s a hit with critics and fans alike. It’s really, really, really good. One of the few pieces of media that deserves its incredible hype, kind of like Breaking Bad.
Watanabe then went on to make Samurai Champloo, which was another instant classic, blending hip hop with samurai. Before all this he directed Macross Plus, an astonishingly beautiful movie set in the Macross universe, with a great story and fantastic visuals. Seriously, go watch it, it’s criminally underrated. In 2013 he made Space Dandy, a creative sci-fi comedy that managed to combine high-minded scientific concepts with funny plots. One episode was a spat between a four-dimensional universe who is in love with someone from a 2D universe. It was like if you made an entire show out of only the good episodes from Futurama.
All this preamble is to set up what kind of work he’s done, and why he has such a lofty reputation. One day, Adult Swim approaches Watanabe to strike a deal: Make us an anime. Now, that’s like going up to Michelangelo and asking him for a mural. When word got out, we were expecting gold.
Thing is, Adult Swim went and said “Hey, you know that Cowboy Bebop thing of yours we aired twenty years ago? That masterpiece that got great ratings and helped bring anime to the west? We want that again.”
Watanabe: You want me to make something as groundbreaking as Cowboy Bebop?
Adult Swim: No, we just want you to make Cowboy Bebop. Again. Maybe call it Rancher Jazz, or something. I don’t know. You’re the ideas guy. Surprise us, but not too much. We still want Cowboy Bebop.
That’s like going up Michelangelo and asking for him to paint the Sistine Chapel again. “You know that thing you did with the ceiling and all the saints and the little angels? Could you do that again? Just that, but like, different, but exactly the same?”
That’s how I imagine the meeting went, because that’s what Lazarus is. A half-hearted retread trying to remind everyone of Cowboy Bebop. It had similar promotional art, a jazzy soundtrack, a team of weirdos lead by a cool guy, with a girl, a younger hacker girl and a little mascot animal.
The show itself is incredibly underwhelming. It’s about the end of humanity. Dr. Skinner announces that his wonder drug, Hapna, will kill anyone who took it. Anyone who took it means almost everyone on the planet, since a huge percent of the population took it. We’re never given a concrete figure, but it’s assumed to be around 90% of the population. They have 30 days to live. If they want the antidote, they have to find him. That’s where the Lazarus team comes in. They’re going to find Skinner, and get the antidote to save the world.
This incredibly lofty, high-stakes plot is mere set dressing for a slow, trudging series of events that has all the urgency of a trip to the corner store for a pack of New Ports. The world is going to end in 30 days, but no one acts like it. Everyone’s calm, they go to work, there aren’t any riots. You can walk the streets and go to the mall, and every store will be open, with the lights on, with no one looting.
Now that you have the appropriate context (that isn’t really necessary for this, but we proceed) I can move on to the point of this post, which is about one single scene. A scene that stuck with me for a while.
The Elevator Scene
I’ve included it here for your viewing pleasure. It’s only one minute and thirty four seconds long, and you have to watch. It’s required reading for this lesson. It has audio, but it’s not essential. I’ll be going over this one scene bit by bit, and trying to figure out what’s going on.
What’s the context of the scene? The main character has to go into a building and do something, and some guards risk life and limb to stop him. Friendly reminder that they all have less than a month to live, and instead of spending that time with their families, they’re about to have sex in an elevator.
Wait, what? That’s not what happens. It’s a fight scene. Sure it looks weird at the start, but that’s how every good fight scene starts, with palpable sexual tension. Don’t you remember all those steamy action scenes in Mission Impossible?
After that bodice-ripping setup, we get an insert shot of another main character saying something in Japanese. I’m sure it’s something important to the plot, or a funny, Marvel-style quip. “I hope Axel is retrieving the thing he needs and not having intercourse in an elevator”. I need to workshop that one. That’s his name, by the way. Axel. Not the guy quipping, Axel is the guy in the elevator. He’s Jesus. More on that later. Back to the elevator love scene- I mean- fight scene.
Suddenly, Axel is beset on all sides by baton strikes from all the guards, which he dodges with relative ease.
He lands in a hand stand, landing with his face inches away from a guard’s knee. The guard, being the specially trained killing machine he is, remembers his Green Beret training, and recognizes he’s in position for maneuver 46A: KNEE-INDUCED DEATH.
He slams his knee into Axel’s jaw with the force of a mighty bronco. A hit of this caliber would pop any normal man’s head like an overripe watermelon, but this is Axel we’re talking about. Axel, who is literally Jesus Christ. Axel, whose name I’m not 100% sure I’m even spelling right, but I’m not going to fact check this because this is a ramshackle operation I’m running here. Axel doesn’t care for things like physical force exerted on his face.
The force of the knee, backed by years of Army training, is enough to send Axle into the other guard, knocking her over, but he remains calm. Somehow, he uses that momentum to flip the guard over onto his head.
The guard, who I’ll call Bradford from now on for no particular reason, decides to stay on his head while Axel fights Jawson over there. Why does he stay in that position? Is it because it was easier to animate, and it clears the elevator so Accel can have his moment? Probably. I like to think it’s because Bradford has been trying to do a headstand for months, but never got it down. Now, he gets put into that position, and he thinks “Damn, I need to kill this guy, but I just hit a sick headstand. Let me see how long I can hold it.”
While Bradford is hitting a sick freeze, Axcsel fights Jawson. They swipe at each other in a really weird, strobing staccato rhythm that looks more off-putting the more I look at it. It’s like the reverse of one of those magic eye posters. It starts as an image, but the longer you look at it, it devolves into nothing.
Suddenly overcome by Axel’s masculine charm, Jawson leaps into the air, begging him to choke him out (Jawson’s kinky like that. I don’t judge)
Once Jawson gets his fix, he falls onto the ground in pure bliss, Billy sees an opportunity to deal some quick damage while Axel is in counter hit state during his recovery frame. Thing is, Billy forgot Axel has super armor on all his normals. Billy’s punches are ineffective.
That’s when Bradford comes back to life and goes for round two. After being in a headstand for so long, for the first time in years, enough blood reaches his brain and he formulates a thought. He’s going to press the advantage, and end Azxcel once and for all.
He reels back, storing up momentum and goes in for another top-secret Army technique… THE KILLER-
The killer… hug? Headbutt? Oh no. Don’t tell me he heard the phrase “chin strike” and thought it was an attack you did with your chin. He rears back once more and… does it again? I genuinely don’t know what he’s doing here. It’s like a really bad headbutt, or maybe he’s trying to squeeze him between his chin and his chest, like when you want to carry three things but you have your hands full, so you tuck your phone under your chin? That’s not an Army technique. Maybe he’s trying to bite him? Blow his nose on him so he gets a cold? Either way, Bradford gives it his all, but it’s not enough to take Axhel down.
Billy, inspired by Bradford’s tenacity, throws his own weird chin strike, which bounces off Axel’s bullet proof shoulder.
Axel fights them off- wait, he doesn’t fight them off- he kind of stands there and they tire themselves out.
Then there’s a really long sequence of Jessica trying, and failing, to choke Axel out. There’s a lot of choking going on in this scene. Again, not kink-shaming, just pointing it out. Axel just stands there.
She punches Axel, tries to strangle him, does everything in her power, but Axel is protected by plot armor, so he doesn’t face any hardship or challenge. She’s fighting a brick wall, but instead of bricks, it’s Jesus.
Then there’s this wonderful shot. I don’t have much to say other than that’s a great face.
Axel uses his Stand, Go With The Flow, to redirect momentum once again, and turns the tables on Jessica’s attack. Now he has her in a headlock (more choking) and uses her as a human shield while Jawson comes in and punches her-
Jesus Christ, man! Not Axel Jesus- the real one… Jawson just straight punches her right in the crotch. Jawson, man. You gotta stop listening to those podcasts.
Then there’s some more… fighting? Tussling? This barely even looks like scrapping. They’re just shoving each other with their shoulders, but somehow Assel is winning.
He goes on the offensive for the first time, and starts beating Billy like a piñata, while Bradford and Jawson are taking their afternoon naps. They’re very eepy, and need to take a quick lil’ snooze.
Then Axel, sensing it’s been more than ten seconds without strangulation, chokes Jessica out for the heck of it.
Axel steps out of the elevator, victorious in his fight, where he… stood there and let the guards tire themselves out.
This scene is bizarre and incredibly funny to me. The weird way in which it starts, the unfitting music, the janky animation, the way everyone morphs around from pose to pose, the baffling direction. There’s a solid chunk of the scene that’s spent from the perspective of the wall behind Alex, where 80% of the frame is covered by his back, and all you see are the two guards trying to bite him. It looks less like a fight scene, and more like an abstract mukbang video by David Lynch.
The first time I saw this with some friends, we were laughing and audibly going “what the hell is going on here?”. We still don’t know, and it’s been an inside joke ever since. It’s not even a particularly clever joke, we just mention “lazarus elevator” every now and then.
That was the Boxing Day special, I hope you enjoyed-
What about the Jesus thing?
Oh, right. That.
There is a review on My Anime List (a website to catalogue and discuss anime you’ve seen. Kind of like Letterboxd but for even bigger nerds). That review is massive, rivaling a typical Load Last Save dissertation. It’s somehow even more insane, too. It goes on to analyze most of the show, not all since it was written before the show finished airing, and it has a lot of weird theories, but some that kind of make sense. One of those more coherent theories is that Axel is Jesus, or more precisely, a Christ-like figure.
The show has a lot of biblical references for its theming. The name, Lazarus, comes from the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrects. Skinner refers to his plan of killing everyone on Earth as “blowing the seventh trumpet”, a reference to the book of Revelations. The basis is there for the connection.
The review mentions that, in the show’s end credits, we see the camera zoom around a street littered with what looks like dead bodies. Then near the end, the camera focuses on Axel, who’s laying on the ground, as he suddenly gets up, seemingly being resurrected. The review also mentions Axel’s use of the color red, as in the color of blood, as in the blood of Christ.
The review also mentions how Axel hangs out with outcasts and sinners, as Jesus did. Going into more dubious territory, it references Axel’s prison sentence. In the show, Axel is in jail for an unknown crime. His sentence is 888 years, a number associated with Jesus in gematria/numerology. His original sentence was 3 years, but it kept getting increased every time he tried to escape. If we put on our tinfoil hat and take our InfoWars brain supplements, we can assume that this is also a Jesus reference, since he was falsely accused and imprisoned, and the 3 years of Axel’s sentence can be read as Jesus’ 3 days spent “dead”.
I read this review along with the same friends who suffered through Lazarus with me, and we already had a joke about how Axel was Jesus, since he is completely immune to everything and can never be in trouble. The review’s confirmation of this, along with how off-the-rails it goes, stretching into connections that would take an actual author to make, made us keep coming back to it. One of these galaxy brain reaches is that Hersch, the director of the Lazarus project, is named that because Hersch translates to “Deer”, and there are mentions of deer in the book of Psalms. Reed Richards couldn’t stretch that far. This is the kind of thing that would have your English teacher saying “The curtains were just blue, bro, let it go, there’s no deer symbolism”.
Thing is, the joke was then taken to the extreme in a later episode when Axel fights an antagonist, and is suddenly speared in the side and suffers a seemingly fatal wound. A pretty blatant reference to the spear of Longinus and Jesus being lanced on the cross.
This led to a moment where we thought the reviewer was right, that he was some sort of savant that had cracked the code of Lazarus, and that the show was going to turn into something a lot more interesting/crack-headed than it was.
I even came up with a theory that the show would lean into the Axel=Jesus thing and give us an ending where Axel’s blood is used as a component for the Hapna antidote.
Nothing like that happened. If it had happened, I could at least excuse the show and enjoy it for being a bad retread of Cowboy Bebop with a hackneyed biblical parallel on top, but no. It wasn’t anything nearly as shocking, creative or interesting. It was the opposite.
In fact the ending was more of a reference to the movie 12 Monkeys of all things.
Imagine the most boring way the show could end. With the plot summary I gave at the beginning, you already have the information you need. Just think of the most dull, unimaginative ending possible to that set-up, and that’s the ending. I don’t have to spoil it, you can do it for yourself.
Try to guess the ending, dear reader
In fact, post a comment guessing the show’s ending, and I’ll tell you if you’re right. You probably won’t be. I think you’ll come up with something more creative and interesting than the real ending.
Conclusion
I don’t recommend Lazarus. I saw the first few episodes because it was a Shinichiro Watanabe production, and was sorely disappointed. Then along came this episode with that wonderful elevator scene, and I thought the show would keep delighting me with funny weirdness like that, but it didn’t. It kept trudging along, each episode more boring than the last. No laughs, no mockery, just quiet boredom.
That was the non-videogame Boxing Day special. I hope you enjoyed the nonsense and got a laugh or two out of the scene. It amused me so much that I had to write an entire article on it. This also serves to let off some steam after deciding to make daily content for 12 days, in the middle of Christmas. I probably won’t do that again.
Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Kwanza, Happy Festivus, Merry Wintereenmas, Happy new Year and all that other stuff.
And a happy Decemberween.
A sincere thanks to everyone who tunes in to read this nonsense, and to all my subscribers, including my future readers. I hope you come back next year for more Load Last Save ramblings.
