English Dub Review: Lazarus “Close to the Edge”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Axel awakens to find that less than twenty four hours remain before the Hapna effects take hold, while the rest of the Lazarus team close in on Skinner’s location.

OUR TAKE

Well, turns out Skinner didn’t show up at all in this episode, so if you bet that wasn’t going to happen…I dunno, I guess email me and I’ll send you five bucks. But yeah, second to last episode of Lazarus and it’s pretty much just build up for the finale. That’s to be expected, of course, since every episode has technically been building up to the end, but this one honestly felt more like business as usual than anything all that significant. Yeah, Axel is still coming back from getting impaled last week, Doug and Eleina are now in Pakistan and meet up with Popcorn Wizard, and the rest of the team are trying to get Herschel back from the higher ups, but it not much development happens on most of those fronts, and the one that does is just Axel getting ready to for a rematch against his unhinged rival. Wait, now that I think of it…this feels kinda like a watered down version of the build up to the final fight between Spike and Viscious at the end of Cowboy Bebop, except Soryu is not nearly as memorable as Viscious was, and Axel seems like Diet Spike. And this is all without mentioning the weird kiss between him and Chris, who he kinda seemed like he might have some chemistry with, but this still feels pretty out of left field.

Doug and Eleina do learn a little bit more about Skinner, mainly that he helped Popcorn Wizard with her people’s village some time ago, as well as the return of Doctor 909 from a different earlier episode. He’s the hacker who helped Skinner disappear and erased his online presence, but now that mankind is literally hours from ending, I guess he had a change of heart. And boy does the “mankind ending” feeling high right now due to real world events, but even if this was tapping into more recent political developments, it probably wouldn’t help. For as well animated as this is, it’s hindered greatly by its story and characters, to the point that I don’t even know if I care what happens in the finale. I’m still gonna cover it and talk about it a bit as per my job here, but it’s definitely not something that keeps me up thinking about it. But perhaps when we get the final episode next week, we’ll be surprised by something mindblowing, and this whole show will have to be worth it in the long run!