The Lazarus Project: Season Two Review

"This is how it always starts. A small group of people trying to do a good thing."

This season review spoils everything.

I've watched this season twice, and both times I tried to imagine drawing a diagram of all of the timey-wimey loops our team takes, only to wind up with something that looked like kittens trying to knit a sweater with cooked spaghetti. That's not a complaint. I love this show.

While the first season introduced us to the world of the Lazarus Project, with George as our viewpoint character for both their goals and the rules of the "checkpoints," the second season develops from an external (not-George's-fault) event: the blackhole used to reset checkpoints has gotten close to another blackhole caused by someone inventing "real time travel." The result is an infinite three-week loop.

The loop is both hilarious and horrific. I loved George leveling up his fighting skills in the first episode: going through the same tussle over and over means he can anticipate his opponent's every move. Archie and Zhang's joyful nihilism at amputating a man's hand, only to realize they needed his eyeball for a retinal scanner, was a good reminder that those two lovebirds are just one step removed from sociopaths, but also that being caught in a loop like that, with little hope of it ever actually ending, would make everything feel irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. It's the nihilism of repetition, a vibe that very much reminds me of Covid lockdowns.

Once we started to get into proper time travel things got messy in the best way. In the seventh episode, I lost track of the Brysons, and I think maybe some of the characters did, as well. The end of the season raises some interesting questions about causal loops, too. For example, our team only figured out how to do time travel because of notes Janet left in the apartment back in 2012, but she wouldn't have had time to leave them after our team travelled back, since that moved up the timeline of the fire.

How long does it take for the changes in the past to catch up with the present? Or is it an irrelevant question, since our team remembers what happened even if it was erased from the timeline? The Beckys, too: will they stick around in 2024, or gradually fade out of existence, like in Back to the Future?

We'll never know, of course, since the show was cancelled. I assume showrunner Joe Barton was aware of the upcoming cancellation, because in the series finale Sarah says it felt like "the end of the story." It's heartbreaking, nonetheless.

There are many shows that I enjoy, but only a few shows that feel like they are a perfect fit for me, and this is one of them. Not just the time travel, which I love. Or the "plucky people banding together to solve problems despite conflicts" genre, which I also love.

It's little moments, like how the sixth episode allowed us to see the situation from Janet's perspective. Vinette Robinson did such a wonderful job exploring Janet's agony at losing her daughter, her tension at what was at stake, but also her affection for Dr. Gray and, I think, even Bryson.

Or how, in that same episode, we get just a few glimpses of Shiv's perspective as he misses his mother's death, then has the chance to be at her side, and then misses it again: I think in the final, set timeline his mother didn't experience him saying goodbye, but at least he has the memory of doing so. Not perfect, of course, but nothing on this show is anyone's ideal world. For a show about time travel, it's shockingly realistic.

George and Sarah spend a lot of time talking about fate, usually at Sarah's prompting. Their relationship, which only happened once in many previous checkpoint resets, raises interesting Sliding Doors-style questions, but I love the underlying work in those scenes. Those are the ideas Sarah would be interested in. George listens and engages and, at times, seems to humor her. But Sarah's incredibly insightful and thoughtful, especially compared to many of the other characters, who seem to mostly be in it for the thrills. (See above, re: Archie and Zhang.)

I didn't even mind the "Bryson is Wes's son and her ex-husband is a bad time-travel villain" subplot too much, because with jobs like these, how could you ever marry someone who didn't know what was going on?

I'm heartbroken that the show has been cancelled, because the end is so tantalizing. Sarah runs the Lazarus Project now, and her words to George at the end of the episode indicate that she may have memories of him, but they've never had a relationship in this new world created by the team having travelled back in time. Does that mean there's a chance that Rebrov and Janet and Archie and Bryson are all, somehow, alive in this new branch of the timeline tree? What about Rudy from last season? Or Dr. Samson, the physicist, who seemed to finally find a moral center right before getting shot?

We'll never know, I guess. Or maybe they'll reset a checkpoint and renew the show, or it will find a home somewhere else. It's more likely Joe Barton will move on to another show, which is a delightful possibility, and one I look forward to in the future.

Four out of four surprise Danes, because I forgot he was there, too.

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