English Dub Review: Lazarus “Life in the Fast Lane”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Having been recruited into Lazarus, Axel and his team get to work searching for Dr. Skinner.

OUR TAKE

We’re still basically at the beginning and getting to know the story, setting, and characters, but now things are more fully introduced. Axel is given the fully breakdown of joining Lazarus, a team made specifically for tracking down Dr. Skinner, the creator of Hapna, and getting a cure out of him before the thirty days remaining run out and just about everyone in the world dies. And just in case there was any doubt about it, Axel and everyone else on the team have also taken Hapna, meaning their lives are also on the line here. So, with Axel more or less getting the focus last time, this week is mainly about helping us better get to know the other members of this team. Doug is basically the muscle of the group but pays attention to little details. Christine is the spunky older sister of the team who likes guns and drinks a lot. Leland is the teenage tech wiz who doesn’t think before he speaks. And Eleina is a covert hacker who has a hard time talking to people. All eccentric personalities with unique and useful skills to go with Axel’s ability to basically escape any situation and you’ve got a team!

Even though Axel name drops the Avengers, it’s probably closer to say these guys are some sort of Suicide Squad, with them all about to die at any time but with the reward of having certain sentences revoked, such as Axel and his near millennium long prison sentence that has gotten that way because of his constant attempts to escape prison, presumably because he was bored. He definitely proves himself useful in this episode, with the group successfully tracking down a few different leads, but it seems that Dr. Skinner, who I can’t stop thinking of the Simpsons character when I type that, is one step ahead of him. By the end of the episode, it seems he has projected his face onto several thousand citizens, identifying them all as him. Obviously this is just a way of throwing people off his scent, but it’s also only the second episode and they have four full weeks left to find him, so I’m pretty sure things are only going to ramp up even more. In the meantime, I hope we get more time to get to know these characters, because currently their personalities have a lot of details and traits but aren’t super interesting. I guess we’ll see.