The Lazarus Project: Season One Review

"You can time travel."

I could tell you that The Lazarus Project is Groundhog Day meets Mission Impossible, but that wouldn't be accurate. It's a set of fascinating character studies, an exploration of the complexity of human relationships, and one of the few shows I've watched recently that accurately portrays how messy human actions are, not just for an individual, but for entire groups.

This review is safe to read before watching the show. Also, I don't think this show has anything to do with the Paul Walker movie that I have not seen.

Here's the premise: George Addo (played by Paapa Essiedu) is an app developer in London with a great girlfriend who suddenly slips six months into the past. That's how he sees it, at least, but the truth is that there is a shadowy governmental organization that occasionally resets reality to stop an "extinction-level event." Remember how quickly we got the Covid vaccines? This group made that happen, by resetting reality enough times that we didn't totally die out.

The resets are limited in scope: time can only be reset back to July 1 of a given year. Most people don't remember the resets: George is a "mutant" who developed the skill naturally as an adult, but many of the operatives are former secret agents for various governments who chose to get an injection that allowed them to remember each erased past. Most of their missions are about making small tweaks that lead to big results: an assassination here, a flat tire there.

A lesser show would leave it at that, but showrunner Joe Barton teases out both the drawing-diagrams-with-straws plot twists of time travel, as well as the impact on characters who remember the resets. Special Agent Archie (Anjli Mohindra), for example, has lived through dozens of nuclear explosions. Or, rather, she has died in a dozen nuclear explosions, then woken up in her bed on July 1 once the world gets reset. Special Agent Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam) is a mutant like George, but he's had the ability to remember the resets since he was an infant. You can imagine how weird that was for him, not to mention his parents.

After watching the first two episodes of this show, I assumed that it would follow a case-of-the-week model, with George as the newbie hire acting as an exposition delivery device and occasionally drawing on his pattern-recognition skills. But I underestimated Joe Barton, even though I should know better. The first season, in just eight episodes, epitomizes the phrase "well, that escalated quickly." Nothing goes that way I expected. Plots abound, but not in a nonsensical way. In fact, the chaos is very sensical, because people are messy weirdos.

That is not to say that this show moves too quickly. Joe Barton's greatest strength is the way that he respects the complexity of his characters; he allows time within each episode for actual conversations meant to help us understand that complexity. I don't want to spoil too much, but I'll just say that the sixth episode features a long series of conversations between George and a man named Rudy (played by the amazing Alec Utgoff). We get to know Rudy, as well as some of his mates, and we get to enjoy how the two characters talk around issues and go on tangents, just like real-life humans do. Some of the scenes between those two felt like they could be used in a drama class as examples of building character without exposition.

I feel like I'm the only person who knows about Joe Barton, although I suspect/hope he's more well-known in the UK. I say this not to toot my own horn (I don't even have a horn) but to praise the Netflix algorithm, because it keeps recommending Joe Barton shows to me, and then I tell all my friends, and anyone who takes my advice is happy they did so. Black Doves was marketed as a spy thriller with Kiera Knightly and Ben Wishaw, but it's so much more than that. Giri/Haji's marketing campaign was impenetrable to me—I expected it to be deeply Orientalist, which it isn't—but it's my favorite Barton show, for all the same reasons I love The Lazarus Project: complex characters living in a complex world. A rejection of pat solutions or easy answers. I'm going to review both of those shows soon to complete my life goal of being a Joe Barton proselytizer.

Season One of The Lazarus Project ends on a cliffhanger, and luckily there is a second season, which I will review as soon as I've watched it. If you like action, adventure, apocalypses, time travel, nuanced characters, great subtle acting, surprise, and humor, then this is the show for you.

Four out of four Singularities.

P.S.: Although this review is spoiler-free, I encourage spoilers in the comments so we can talk about all the twists!

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)