Lazarus

Simbiat

Getting Cowboy Bebop and Ergo Proxy from this one. Jazzy music in some places and some electronic one in others help with association.  Maybe a bit of Great Pretender, in a sense that the setup to get Axel felt close to a con. Looked very good, great dynamics, action was solid. My big complain, and reason for caution is that the chase sequence was like half an episode. Don't get me wrong, it was great, exciting, but it had too much focus, completely forgetting about anything else. I doubt this show is an anime version of Mirror's Edge to spend this much time on it, and if the purpose was to show how good Axel is at parkour... It was just too much, especially considering that we learnt about other characters roughly the same amount with way less screentime.

But the setup overall, the atmosphere - that's all good. There is clear danger, clear goal, a time limit and hints of potential collision between "greater good" and "personal good".

Simbiat

Second episode was... Different. It worse in a sense, that it felt slower, potentially much slower than it should have been, yet that slowness was not helping build atmosphere, as it probably could (and possibly should not have). It was better in a sense that it still felt more balanced, since we did not get the chasing sequence for half the episode. We also had more Eleina, and some dialogues suggests that she is a badass.

But I am mostly posting this, because I forgot one important thing in my reaction to 1st episode: drugs do not mutate. Existing organism does not mutate in the first place, since mutation is technically happening during creation of the organism (or a organic cell to be more generic), but drugs are not even organisms. Even if that was the case, the way drugs are tested, they would have caught the mutation 3 years in, because testing takes a decade on average. I know we need to just accept it for the "suspension of disbelief", but I think it's important to nitpick this thing.

Another concern I have is... Why a small group? Would it not make more sense to get as many people involved in the search as possible? I also do not see much of a point in a competition here, but I know that it's just me.