With Lazarus, Cowboy Bebop’s Shinichirō Watanabe Is Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

After revealing the true nature of Hapna, Skinner issues a plea to forestall the end of humanity. “I have no intention of playing God, nor do I intend to unilaterally decide what the fate of humanity will be. All I am doing is serving as the Seventh Trumpeter […] But you should all know I have the cure. You have 30 days. If someone can find me within that time, then humanity will survive.”

As later explained in the series, “The Seventh Trumpeter” is a reference to the Book of Revelation, which details the events preceding the end of the world as related to John the Baptist through a vision he received from God. Throughout the entirety of Lazarus, Watanabe relies heavily on religious symbolism and allegory to buttress the story’s themes concerning the nature of life, death, temptation, and redemption. The title itself refers to the Biblical parable of Lazarus of Bethany, who in the Gospel of John was raised from the dead by Christ four days after his entombment. With this in mind, the title “Lazarus” can be interpreted not only as referring to the task force assigned to capture Skinner, but to the whole of humanity itself, with Skinner attempting — in a brutal act of desperation veering on genocide — to rouse the human race from their collective anesthetized “living death” before the species as we know it sleepwalks into extinction.

The religious parallels go deeper than simply the title, however. Besides the fact that the series takes place predominantly in and around Babylonia City, an in-universe analog for New York City named after the Biblical city of Babylon — complete with its own imposing tower — the first five episodes of Lazarus feature a cold opening with a dreidel spinning on a table, imagery, including a mural of seven angelic trumpeters, a tree decorated with Turkish eye beads, the interior dome of a church, and a statue of the Buddha, narrated by one of the five members of Lazarus, relating their personal experiences with Hapna along with their thoughts on the apparent imminent end of humanity.

Regardless of which of the five protagonists is narrating, the cold opening ends the same way: with the camera pulling back to reveal a shrouded figure, implied to be Skinner, watching as the dreidel falls to the table. Each time, the dreidel lands face-up on the Hebrew letter “nun” (נ), which translates to “none,” but in Jewish folk etymology symbolizes the word “miracle.” Considering that Skinner himself is a Turkish immigrant, presumably of Jewish descent, this opening offers a glimmer of insight into the shape of his personal beliefs and philosophy.

Skinner is inarguably the most important character in Lazarus, having set in motion the events of the plot long before the series began through his invention of Hapna and his involvement in the in-universe tragedy that immediately preceded its creation. Throughout Lazarus, he is framed as a not-so-thinly-veiled analog for Christ; if not in flesh, then in spirit. In the second episode, “Life in the Fast Lane,” we learn that prior to his reappearance, Skinner was a Nobel Prize laureate who was described by many who knew him to be “practically a saint,” having abandoned the patents on many of the drugs he developed and subsequently donating the vast sum of his wealth to charity. 

A passionate activist for ending economic disparity and resolving climate change, Skinner is later revealed to have purchased several islands threatened by rising sea levels to allow their inhabitants the means to relocate to safety. The aforementioned Christ parallels are even more explicit beyond his pious actions, however. In the third episode of Lazarus, “Long Way From Home,” Lazarus members Axel and Doug travel to an unhoused encampment on the outskirts of Babylonia City in search of possible leads to Skinner’s whereabouts. Unbeknownst to either of them, Doug comes face-to-face with none other than Skinner himself, albeit now rendered nearly blind due to the advanced side-effects of Hapna. This detail could be interpreted as an allusion to the Synoptic Gospels of Mark 1:40–45 and Luke 5:12–16, where Christ took refuge in “lonely places” after word of his healing powers spread in the wake of curing a man afflicted with leprosy. The Sprenger’s tulip, a flower that decorates Skinner’s home in the encampment and which later becomes a crucial clue in finding him, is classified as a “solitary species” of plant life, one which is exceedingly rare to find in the wild, if not outright extinct beyond human cultivation.

Despite the magnitude and severity of his actions, Skinner is not characterized as a conventional antagonist throughout Lazarus, nor even a character whose goals are necessarily diametrically opposed to those of the protagonists. Instead, his words and actions offer an unspoken invocation to any and all who choose to pursue him: To glimpse the world as seen through his eyes. In the seventh episode, “Almost Blue,” the Lazarus team is dispatched to four coordinates in or near Manila Bay, the Maldives, the Sakishima Islands, and Tuvalu — all real-life locations threatened by rising global sea levels. While investigating in and around the ruins of Tuvalu, taking in the beauty of the ocean juxtaposed with the devastation to human life, Lazarus member Christine ruminates aloud, “Maybe this is something Skinner wanted us to see.”

Between religious allegory and climate anxiety, Watanabe situates Lazarus as an exploration of the many maladies afflicting humanity in his fictionalized vision of 2052, be they existential or spiritual. The third and final crisis at the heart of the series’ premise is arguably the most apparent: that of the opioid epidemic. “The biggest inspiration [on Lazarus] was the opioid crisis that’s currently going on,” Watanabe said in an interview with JoySauce. “And a lot of my favorite musicians have passed away because of it—I was shocked when Prince passed away due to opioids as well. […] What’s even crazier is that he passed away due to prescription medicine that he received from his doctor. So that’s kind of the final straw, where I started thinking, ‘This is a big problem,’ and that I need to start talking about it.”

Lazarus is so much more than an anime cast in the aesthetic mold of Cowboy Bebop. When taken as a whole, and as a work on its own merits, the series is nothing short of a full-throated lamentation of the opioid crisis, of the abject defeatism by policymakers in the wake of climate change, of moral apathy and the death of the heart among individuals in the abject face of mass human suffering and death, as well as a rallying cry to collective action as a corrective to resignation and despair. It is also, importantly, a work in tribute to Keiko Nobumoto; the screenwriter for Cowboy Bebop and a close friend of Watanabe who consulted on the series prior to her death in 2021 from esophageal cancer. 

“[Nobumoto] was a part of the project from the very start when we were developing the story and characters. We got a lot of advice from her during that phase, but she did fall very ill while we were trying to write the scripts, so we couldn’t ask her for the scripts,” Watanabe told io9. “So we took that on ourselves, all the knowledge that she’s given us, to finish writing the story. If Lazarus does remind people of Cowboy Bebop, it’s probably because we worked with Nobumoto together to write the story.” The final image of Lazarus is a dedication to Nobumoto’s memory. 

To accuse Lazarus of being a superficial cash-grab attempting to ape the style and verve of Cowboy Bebop, or to say that “nothing happens” throughout the series, is to watch the anime through either a blindfold or through the rose-tinted glaucoma of nostalgia. Lazarus could never be to 2025 what Cowboy Bebop was to 1998. After all, what could be? Lazarus is not Cowboy Bebop. What it is though, undoubtedly, is a work from the heart.

For all the traits the series may share in common with Watanabe’s previous work, one of the most crucial differences is in how it ends. Both Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo conclude with their respective protagonists going their separate ways, the latter amicably, while in the case of the former not so much. In Lazarus, the task force agrees to stick together, not only in the interest of meeting the challenges to humanity head on, but out of their shared sense of camaraderie and connection with one another. It’s an ending that, for me, calls to mind one of my favorite quotes by James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Or, to put it another way, in the words of one of my favorite fictional characters, “I’m interested in one thing, Neo, the future. And believe me, I know – the only way to get there is together.”

Lazarus is available to stream on HBO Max.

Toussaint Egan is a culturally omnivorous writer and editor with over a decade of experience writing about games, animation, movies, and more. You can find him on Bluesky.