Gettin' My Eps In: Lazarus S1E5

Every show has at least an episode or two that are less than optimal...

Lazarus
Season 1, Episode 5: “Pretty Vacant”
Written by Tsukasa Kondo
Directed by Kazuo Miyake
Streaming on Max

Does computer hacking ever work on screen? It seems like something that should provide exciting drama, since one character or group of characters are trying to break into a protected system to access secret information or something, while others are trying to stop them. But while performing break-ins and overcoming security systems can be exciting when characters are performing physical feats (it’s what the Mission: Impossible movies have been built around, and there are countless other examples of cool heists in film and TV), it becomes lifeless when the action is limited to characters staring at screens and typing furiously on keyboards.

To make this stuff work, directors often have to rely on dumb visual signifiers, like progress bars inching dramatically toward 100%, waves of pop-up windows appearing on screens, or text scrolling by quickly as if a character is typing out dozens of lines of code per second. They also have to resort to characters shouting things like “He’s breached the firewall!” It almost invariably smacks of desperation, trying to wring some excitement out of a situation that’s not visually interesting. Occasionally, it even veers into glorious stupidity, like the notorious scene from the old-people show NCIS in which two “computer expert” characters try to stop a hacker through high-speed typing on the same keyboard.

I’m not sure why Shinichiro Watanabe and company decided to build an episode of Lazarus around fighting a hacker, but in doing so, they fall prey to all of the issues discussed above. They do at least try to make it work as part of their ongoing plot. In the last episode, the Lazarus team had made a slight bit of progress in their search for Dr. Skinner, the creator of the “miracle drug” Hapna that’s going to kill everyone on Earth, learning that a pharmaceutical corporation may have had knowledge of the drug’s lethality before it was announced to the world. There’s some technical talk about how someone on the inside had shared information about clinical trials publicly by disguising the documents as music files posted to SoundCloud, and this prompts the team to try to get on the inside and find out what’s going on.

This gives us the action scene for the episode, with Axel brashly deciding to march into the company’s headquarters and confront the higher-ups. After he walks past security and gets on the elevator, a bunch of security guards join him, and when they try to subdue him on the journey to the building’s upper floors, this leads to a close-quarters fight. It’s an interesting idea, providing an opportunity for something different that we had seen previously, but it’s less visually arresting than we’ve come to expect on the show, and a lot of it consists of Axel and the security guards trying to choke each other out with batons or neckties. I do like that the opponent who gives him the most trouble is a woman, and her long hair gets to swirl around stylishly as they struggle against each other, but overall, it’s just not an especially dynamic or exciting fight.

Plus, it seems like kind of an empty victory, since it simply allows Axel to confront the CEO, who had lost all sense of hope after learning that humanity is doomed. Like most everyone else the team has come across, he can’t provide very much information about Dr. Skinner, so the whole thing seems like a dead end. These frustrating results lead the team to try a new tactic: have the CEO announce that they’ve discovered a cure for Hapna, and they’re going to hold a conference of medical professionals to release their findings. This will hopefully cause Skinner to come out of the woodwork to either verify the cure or stop it from being released.

And thus, we get the aforementioned hacking scene, with the team being ready to take on an expected attack from Skinner or others who will be trying to access their data during the announcement. The show tries to make this exciting, with the characters rushing around the conference center to try to nab suspicious characters they believe are part of the plot, as well as revelations about the surprising methods the hacker has used to gain access, but it’s all a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t really lead to anything interesting.

The hacker turns out to be reminiscent of the character of Ed from Cowboy Bebop, being a flamboyantly-attired young woman with an “extreme!” attitude, someone who seems overly excited by these goings-on and who revels in causing chaos. We’ll see if she ends up being a recurring character, but if so, she’ll probably be most palatable in small quantities. For a show that has seemed pretty smart in the way it has approached ideas about the collapse of society due to a general sense of ennui and pointlessness, it’s surprising to see it fall back on corny stereotypes about excitable young people who use technology to disrupt the lives of others.

Perhaps that fits in to the show’s slowly-developing look at a crumbling global society that is primed to fall when given a push. The details we’ve seen about the world these characters live in indicate that most people are going through the motions of their lives, without much in the way of purpose. Dr Skinner’s miracle drug was meant to be a painkiller, but it served to numb people’s feelings so they could stop thinking about the increasing ugliness of reality. The revelation of the drug’s true nature may be finally causing them to wake up and try to make a difference. We see that in the way the CEO chooses to reverse his despondent attitude and do something, as well as in how the hacker is sowing chaos as a way to provoke a reaction from the squares that run the world.

At least, that seems to be the nature of the ideas that Lazarus is developing. We’ll have to see whether this will be a direction of further exploration, as well as whether it will actually be a worthwhile set of themes to provoke thought about. Whatever the case, I’m hoping that the show will find a more interesting and exciting way to build conflict around these ideas than it did here. Not every episode is going to be perfect, but I’m hoping that this one is more of a momentary stumble rather than a sign of decline.