A lot can happen in 17 months. Keeping track of who is in the cabinet is difficult enough, let alone remembering the finer details of a TV series you watched in June 2022. When that show is the complex time-loop thriller The Lazarus Project, that’s even harder.
So, to recap: season one established that the Lazarus Project is an organisation capable of going back in time to a set point – the first day of July – to undo cataclysmic events. Our protagonist, George (Paapa Essiedu) joined the Project thanks to his innate ability to remember multiple timelines, only to find himself in an ethical quandary when his girlfriend Sarah was killed in a road accident. Not content to focus on the task at hand, namely preventing apocalyptic events, he instead engineered the detonation of a nuclear warhead to force the Project to reset the timeline so that he could prevent her death. Unfortunately for George, saving Sarah didn’t mean rescuing his romantic life: as Lazarus project leader Wes (Caroline Quentin) says witheringly, “After all that, she dumped you anyway?”
Series two jumps in right as we left off, at least in terms of George’s perspective. We not only see his personal and professional life in ruins but are introduced to new rivals in the form of the Time Break Initiative – which is building its own time machine that may ensure the apocalypse – and its mercurial leader, played by Colin Salmon. To make matters more complicated, rogue former Lazarus agent Janet (Vinette Robinson) is stuck in the past after a time machine stranded her there. Now, not only is George single and stuck in Groundhog Day hell, but his loss of faith in the Lazarus Project’s mission means he’s untethered from a set of protocols and losing the will to go on. The time loops have shrunk from six months down to just three weeks, and this makes George feel all the more dissociated from time and space, as the very fabric of the universe seems to be disintegrating. While he longs to have a semblance of a normal life with colleagues and a girlfriend, there’s an increasing paranoia and jitteriness in Essiedu’s performance, which suggests he doesn’t really trust anyone but himself any more.
The series takes us across the globe into chic labs and Alpine retreats, extending the grasp of the Project. Part of this seems to be down to expanding the narrative scope, but, after the first series’ success, there appears to have been a subsequent loosening of the purse strings in its production budget, and the show feels significantly more lavish – with action set pieces bordering on Bond levels of spectacle. Trying to follow a complex plethora of timelines is no mean feat, but the show’s taut editing and sharp scripting keep things coherent even when characters are in a state of existential turmoil and barely able to make hide nor hair of the hellish time loops they become trapped in. At one point, Lazarus agent Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam), whose fate is to be eternally gunned down by George, grimly states: “Every three weeks possibly until the end of time I wake up being shot by you.”
Watching The Lazarus Project requires focus, and it refuses to become the sort of TV that can be half-watched while flicking through your phone. But the sense of pride that comes from solving the twisted puzzle box of the plot is part of the fun. Watching Essiedu, Quentin and Salmon face off is a more straightforward pleasure, but keeping abreast of the various timelines appeals to the part of the brain that gets flooded with dopamine after solving a tricky sudoku.
Even when the action pauses to make way for an exposition dump, the show injects enough humour to keep things afloat, with one plotline seeing Sarah castigate a time-travel physicist for never bothering to watch Back to the Future (“even my mum has seen it!”). But, more impressively, while most time-travel narratives ask you to stop thinking at some point, lest the gaping plot holes unveil themselves, The Lazarus Project stays true to its own internal logic, and the scrutiny only enhances proceedings. Not only do the time loops make sense, but the betrayals and shifting allegiances feel true to the characters.
By the end of the series, there’s another giant cliffhanger ending, meaning the inevitable third outing has even more chaos to contend with – and, given what a safe pair of hands series two has proved, this is no bad thing. If you somehow find yourself with an excess of time, watching this series is an incredibly fun way to spend it.
The Lazarus Project series two aired on Sky Max and is available on Now TV
