Review of 'The Lazarus Project' 2.1-2.3

When I saw and reviewed the first season of The Lazarus Project on TNT last November, I said it was "the best time-travel series I've ever seen on television, bar none." Having just seen the first three episodes of the second season on TNT last night, I feel exactly the same.

Time travel as a genre brought to the screen excels in protagonists going back in time and doing the same thing with suitable modifications over and over until they get it -- saving a life or taking a life -- over and over, again, until they get it right, or not. George is the perfect character for this. And Paapa Essiedu's face shows just the right range emotion of someone going through this.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

But George is on the outside of The Lazarus Project at the beginning of the second season, excluded from the group, and the from the gun-carrying elite, because, as he aptly put it, he put love before loyalty to the project and its all-important mission. And this is especially hard on George, given that the recipient of his costly love, Sarah, has now taken his place with group.

The other big development in episode 2.1 is that a group headed by Dr. Kitty Gray, at first thought to be separate from Lazarus, has developed its own old-fashioned time machine. Wes, understably worried about what this H. G. Wells inspired machine could do to Lazarus's struggle to save existence, wants someone to keep an eye on Kitty and her work. All the more surprising, then, to see Wes in a photograph in the audience of a group taking in a lecture by Kitty. Apparently Kitty and her time machine are not as separate from Lazarus as Wes would want us to believe.

***

The shag in the alley was my favorite part of The Lazarus Project 2.2 -- more specifically, Sarah grabbing George for an unexpected, quick shag in the alley.

It was fun to see -- even though it causes George more confusion -- because their love is the truest truth in this series. Sarah doesn't quite see that yet. She has something going on with Cormac (I agree with George that that's a strange name, though how I would I know, I'm not from the UK), and she's now paired with Michael, whom she can't stand. But the way her face lit up before she started kissing George in the alley shows the way she really feels.

The Lazarus Project has all the explosive trappings of a hard science fiction story, which it most certainly is. But for me, what makes the series really unique are the similarities it has to The Time Traveler's Wife and even Outlander, two patently non-scientific time travel love stories. Romantic love is a key ingredient in The Lazarus Project, as are parents and children.

And George appears in a key scene at the end of 2.2, in which Becky, last seen as a little girl put into a time machine sent back to 2012, presents herself to George as a young lady in the London underground in 2024. When George asks her how she got so old so quickly, she tells him she's time traveled, "do the arithmetic".

If The Lazarus Project has any problem, it's that it probably has too many moving pieces to put together or even make complete sense of. But that's time travel, "do the arithmetic," right?

***

Let's start with the end of episode 2.3. A plane with most of our crew traveling back in time to 2012. It -- of course -- encounters some extreme turbulence. Will they survive? Can they?

Well, let's put aside the point that it's highly unlikely that the series would kill off so many major characters in the third episode of the second season.

But, wait, why would it matter if so many players were killed in this plane? Wouldn't the time loop give them another chance to get the flight right, as it does with everything else?

Here's where we get to the nitty gritty. The folks on the plane are time-travelling -- trying to time travel -- outside of the inevitable, infuriating, but life-saving loop. So, if they're beyond the loop, and have already traveled a few years back in time, doesn't this mean that they're on their own?

The loop is really cool. Over and over again, a character or characters make a wrong choice, die as a result, only to come back and get it right. There was an excellent example of this in 2.3 when Archie and Zhang (a great couple) mistakenly think a finger is needed to open a digital lock, die as a result, but come back next time around with an eyeball, which works.

Time travel outside the loop has changed everything, and I'm looking forward to seeing how those characters on the plane outside the loop fare next week.