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This season finale proved one thing: George doesn’t get the concept of being a secret agent.
While Lazarus was facing a threat to its very existence on The Lazarus Project Season 1 Episode 8, George was shooting and killing Shiv over and over and over and over again.
George had the opportunity to correct past errors each time reset. But he was so damned slow to do so.
Not only that, but he was also displaying his brand of squirelliness, which he thought passed as secretiveness to friends and acquaintances alike.
No detective met him outside his apartment to arrest him, as happened on The Lazarus Project Season 1 Episode 7, so that was progress.
But suffering the fallout from George’s inability to fix his past was Shiv.
When this series began, Shiv came off as a real doom-and-gloom kind of guy. His origin story on The Lazarus Project Season 1 Episode 4 explained why he understood that no one should mess with time.
Let’s give the more likable Shiv the benefit of the doubt and assume he went after George to prevent him from making the same mistake he did back in his youth.
Shiv’s error was eschewing any backup. George was more cunning than your average rookie Lazarus agent. As a result, Shiv spent half of the season dead in a car trunk.
Shiv was resurrected thanks to George’s frantic effort to cause a time reset to bring Sarah back to life on The Lazarus Project Season 1 Episode 6. But his situation hasn’t been great.
George managed to convince his fellow Lazarus agents Shiv was Rebrov’s mole inside the organization, causing Shiv to go on the run.
Shiv did an admirable job of staying off the grid for months. But after he failed to rescue the captive Janet, he sent up a flare, allowing himself to be seen on camera to bring in the Lazarus cavalry.
So what possessed Shiv to break into George’s apartment on Checkpoint Day of all times?
Shiv could never make that clear in the few seconds he had each reset before being gunned down again. We’ll have to wait until next season to get a full explanation.
That left George having to solve the mystery of why Shiv returned. But he was too scattered to focus solely on that one problem.
First, Wes made him aware of a development threatening all life on Earth. Someone had created a copy of the time singularity Lazarus uses in its mission. It wasn’t a very good duplicate, as the black hole collapsed on itself, causing time resets every three weeks.
Wes and George agreed that the missing Janet was the only person smart enough to create a singularity. (If she’s that intelligent, why did Lazarus leave her drifting in the wind all these years?)
Since Janet was considered a captive of the Chinese, it wasn’t a giant leap to determine who was behind the knockoff singularity.
Archie alone went to Shanghai to search for Janet. Why didn’t she take George? Perhaps she had a hunch about her trainee, who disappeared for unexplained periods.
Archie suffered a couple of missteps. But having regular time resets had to be helpful for her investigation.
She soon bonded with Zhang, leader of the Chinese kidnap squad, who was discontented with leaders who kept her in the dark about operations. From Zhang, Archie learned the Chinese had lesser copies of many of the tools that Lazarus used in its mission.
More importantly, Zhang spilled to Archie that George was the rogue agent, not Shiv and that her team had followed George to Janet. That explains why Janet suddenly disappeared on The Lazarus Project Season 1 Episode 3.
Archie confronted George, and he came clean about Shiv dying every Checkpoint Day. She inspired him to devise some method to save Shiv rather than just dumping his body in the river each time.
So George opened his eyes to those around him who might help with this case.
He talked with Sarah’s doctor about Shiv’s gunshot wound. He found a scientist able to make out Janet’s message, “It will be worth the wait,” on Shiv’s bloody note. He determined his nosy neighbor was a paramedic.
The downside of this approach was these people he barely knew had to get suspicious about the questions he was asking.
George’s strategy kinda sorta worked, as his neighbor Reggie kept Shiv alive long enough for him to croak out the message, “It’s up to Rebrov.”
Also, Sarah came back into George’s life in various ways.
He blew her off after the timeline when she told him she was getting married. But she kept seeking him out, seeing him loading Shiv’s body into his trunk. One time, he told her everything. Another. he accidentally ran her down.
She didn’t believe him when he again told her his story. But he left her a vial of time serum, and she got it after injecting herself.
It was a great twist ending when Rebrov strode back into Lazarus’s headquarters to reveal what he knew about Janet’s message.
He had received that same message via text 12 years earlier when he first asked out Janet.
Someone had figured out how to crack through Checkpoint, hiding Janet in the past. That opens up a new avenue for the series, which should be intriguing.
What did you think of the season finale?
Who cracked the secret of Checkpoint?
Are you excited about this new direction for the series?
Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.