Lazarus-“Life in the Fast Lane” Episode 2 Recap

With this episode we have firmly established this show’s premise as a mashup of Suicide Squad and Cowboy Bebop. While episode one delivered some dazzling action sequences, this episode wasn’t as thrilling and seemed to be a sophomore slump of sorts. Let’s recap the events of this episode.

This episode begins with Axel being debriefed by not Amanda Waller about him being recruited to track down Dr. Skinner. Axel pulls out a gun on Christine (Chris) and demands to be let go. “Not Amanda Waller” responds by inflicting a painful shock via the bracelet that was put on him. She says that any attempt to remove the bracelet will cause it to inflict unimaginable pain. If anything bad happens to not Amanda Waller, pain will be inflicted. This opening scenes is a pretty by-the-numbers Suicide Squad knockoff.

The next scene has the President of the United States questioned on how the FDA could possibly approve a drug that kills everybody who takes it, an issue that was widely seen as a plothole from the premiere episode. The president says that a drug mutating is something never seen before. The scene cuts to a late night talk show host interviewing a pop star. They exchange zingers as the talk show host says that nobody’s going to listen to her album by the time it comes out and she retorts by saying that nobody is going to be watching his talk show within a month.

The next scene cuts back to the Lazarus team and Axel declares that they are superheroes, “Like the Avengers or something,” a little less on the nose than if he said Suicide Squad. The team uses the most reliable source possible, and by that I mean Wikipedia, to research what the deal is with Dr. Skinner. We are basically told what we already know from the first episode in that the guy is an environmentalist who wants to save the Earth from destruction. They watch an old video of him giving a speech to the United Nations, and most of the countries involved in the meeting were so bored they were on the verge of falling asleep. The United States just up and left the meeting they were so bored. The crew also notes that Dr. Skinner has been seen helping the poor and homeless, which paints him in a different light than a “trees good, people bad” environmental extremist terrorist. Dr. Skinner’s whole MO of creating a drug that’s going to kill everybody has become a little muddier now.

Our heroes, or antiheroes, I should say, believe they have found a lead for where Dr. Skinner is, and use their slick cars to drive to where they need to go. The characters exposit what crimes they have committed, and most of them are just minor thieves, with the exception of hacker lady, whose committed some big time cybercrime. Axel admits that he has an 888 year prison sentence. Chris freaks out thinking Axel must be one depraved dude, but it turns out his sentence is so long because every escape attempt doubled his originally minor three year sentence. We unfortunately don’t really know anything else about this group of characters and they still come off as bland and boring.

Axel comes across Dr. Skinner, but is only the second episode so we know it’s not going to be that easy, as we quickly learn it’s just a decoy guy disguised as Dr. Skinner. A bunch of gangsters from around the world happen to be there to be the villains of the weeks and we have our big action scene for the week. Whereas episode one’s big setpiece was awe inspiring incredible, this one was merely adequate and nothing memorable. Chris seems to just stand around while our male hero does all the buttkicking despite the expectation of her being an action girl. Gangsters go down easy and the decoy Dr. Skinner reveals that he’s a suicidal person who wishes the drug would kill him faster.

The episode ends with the huge reveal that there are thousands of fake Dr. Skinners, implying that he hired a bunch of random people to cosplay as him to make it hard for Lazrus to find him. I’m really hoping this episode was just a sophomore slump and this series can right the ship. Admittedly, the first episode’s hype was mainly the big action sequences rather that anything plot or character related. The fact that it is hard to believe that Shinichirō Watanabe could possibly lose his way has me holding out hope. Fans have still not given up on the show as it has a relatively high 7.74 MyAnimeList score at the time of this writing, probably due to the goodwill the first episode’s action scene gave. This was a middling episode of anime, but there’s potential for Watanabe to work his magic.

Discuss this article on the Toonzone Forums!