What even is a popcorn wizard?
I have no idea what’s with Lazarus’s release schedule. It was being ‘simulcast’ 12 hours ahead on various Indonesian websites as well as Abema, but all of Abema’s streams are now pushed back to Wednesdays, and when the Indonesia subbed rips were MIA, I assumed it was all streams, but I guess not… but this showed up about 8 hours later than previously, so… I give up on trying to follow anything, let alone trying to follow it in Indonesian. At least they’re still speaking Japanese.
Impressions:
On the upside, we get the action scene early in the episode. On the downside, it’s a ripoff of the elevator fight scene from Captain America and the rest of the episode continues to be the same meandering nonsense. The elevator fight also felt pretty weird as the protagonist was doing all these light little tie-based chokes that put people down for the count while simultaneously shrugging off having entire grown women tackling him and punching him in the back of the head. The frame rate was also… having issues, shall we say. It was far from the best action scene in this show, but an attempt was made.
The same can’t be said for the story. That fight was just to menace a pharma CEO. Then they went to pharmacon where a wacky totally not racially offensive hacker made the lights go all buzzy and played 80s hacker cartoons on the computer screens. So this episode was focused on the good guy hacker girl, right? …No, not really. She said a few “I’m fleeping the data-florps” and the like, and then the other hacker… drove off in her crazy VW. At this point in Cowboy Bebop, we not only had the Spike intro episode, but a two episode arc of recruiting Faye, adopting Ein, AND introducing Vicious and Annie of Spike’s backstory. I don’t know that I could say we know goddamned anything about any of these characters really. The damn corgi had more development and a greater amount of agency in his show than the entire cast of this story.
