Just like Adult Swim’s previous hit original cartoon Common Side Effects, Lazarus is yet another title that looks at the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry, with our heroes raiding the facility that manufactures the drug. Today’s episode was another episode consisting of a cool fight scene and our heroes fruitlessly trying to find clues to the whereabouts of Dr. Skinner and getting absolutely no progress. So without further ado, let’s recap what happened this episode.

The episode begins with our heroes deciding to raid the pharmaceutical company that created Hapna, which I am quite surprised it took them five episodes to think this was a good idea. We get our cool fight scene early in this episode rather than towards the end like with previous episodes. It turns out that said company has been providing coded messages via Soundcloud that suggest they are up to possibly no good. Axel takes a ride in the elevator and is surrounded by lots of security guards and he shows his moves in a close quarters fight scene with lots of John Wick influence. As always, the big action scenes are the highlight, but the fight scene was a lot briefer than last episode as Axel easily beats all the guards and walks into the room of one of the pharmaceutical company executives.

Axel interrogates the executive and asks if there was an evil conspiracy to kill humanity. The executive says that he was just as surprised as the general public about Hapna being a killer drug and didn’t know it could mutate. Their attempts to contact Dr. Skinner via Soundcloud messages have yielded no response.  He did an experiment with monkeys to make sure Dr. Skinner wasn’t lying about Hapna being deadly. Indeed, it did kill a monkey and said monkey had a weird look in its eyes that resembled Van Gough’s iconic Starry Night. So now we know that Hapna is indeed going to kill everyone if something isn’t done, but our heroes get no closer to finding out how to cure humanity.

After this lead turns into a complete dead end, our heroes attempt another plan to find out what’s up with Dr. Skinner. The plan involves a press conference announcing a fake cure for Hapna to lure out Dr. Skinner or his followers. Someone tries to inject himself with the fake cure, but this person was just someone desperate to not die, not a Skinner minion trying to suppress the cure. Chaos ensues as a hacker gets into the system and causes lights to go out, bathrooms to flood, and the entire conference area to be a total mess. The hacker in question was operating out of a gaudy van in Islamabad.

Said hacker turns out to be a total ham as opposed to the flat monotone of Eleina. The hacker antagonist looks at the info for the cure, and the file ends up being a file labeled “Pretty Vacant” being our episode title drop. She calls our heroes up and the caller ID says “Popcorn Wizard,” apparently her pseudonym. She congratulates the protagonist team for outwitting her and giving the file name a reference to famous punk rock band The Sex Pistols. Both plan A for this episode, infiltrate the pharmaceutical company, and plan B, lure Dr. Skinner with a fake cure, turned out to be total washes as every plan our heroes have implemented these first five episodes. Based on the next episode preview, Lazarus infiltrates a cult where Eleina grew up, which sound like a much more interesting episode and one that could provide her with some much needed character development. This episode was a major step down from the previous episode, which was the best, but episode 6 seems to have a promising premise.

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