George Addo, a normal British app developer, was having a good six months - his app took off, he married his girlfriend Sarah, and he was on the verge of becoming a father. And then a major pandemic hit, Sarah ended up in the hospital... and then suddenly George woke up and it was July 1st again, but he remembered everything that had happened. Unable to cope with his memories of the pandemic hitting and almost losing Sarah, George had a terrible six months... and then suddenly he woke up and it was July 1st again.
George learns that the the world has, in fact, ended hundreds of times, and a mysterious organization called the Lazarus Project has been resetting time in order to prevent these catastrophes. A rare mutation has allowed George to remember the world before the resets, and thus the Lazarus Project recruits him.
This series contains examples of:
- Action Girl:
- Archie is the most prominent female Lazarus operative who works in the field. She's quite good with a gun. Before joining Lazarus, she'd been with MI-5.
- Janet previously had been with Lazarus as well, and is still skilled in combat while less active, caring for her daughter after leaving.
- The Alcoholic: Shiv copes with the stresses of his job by drinking. A lot.
- Alliterative Name: The Dane's real name is Erick Ericksen.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: George manages to force Lazarus to turn back time and prevent Sarah's death, but loses her anyway, as it turns out that she'd already been having doubts about their relationship and George's new cautiousness just makes her feel stifled. Archie tells him this sort of thing happens frequently with time loops; just because you've both been in the same situation before doesn't mean you'll both react the same way when it repeats.
- Black Comedy:
- In the third episode, Archie and Jim repeatedly try and fail to stop a war from breaking out in Eastern Europe. After several failures, they get increasingly casual about the aftermath, knowing that Wes is going to reset them.
- In the fifth episode, George is operating without any backup from Lazarus in order to pose as a member of the Lost Glory so that he can retrieve the Big Boy, and quickly realizes how far over his head he is. A particularly funny moment is him trying to explain how a black man has become a contact for a white supremacist group.
- The first-season finale has a doozy, after George accidentally plows into Sarah with his car - "For fuck's sake, Sarah, for once in your life, look both ways."
- Later, George yells at his neighbor for repeatedly knocking on his door every time he accidentally shoots Shiv... then discovers that the neighbor is a paramedic. On the next reset, he pulls the neighbor into the apartment to save Shiv's life, while the neighbor moans that he is sure that he asked about what the neighbors were like when he rented the apartment.
- Boom, Headshot!:
- Archie once got killed because a bullet ricocheted off of a fire extinguisher and got her in the head.
- In the third episode, Rebrov shoots Wes' assistant Faye in the head.
- Chekhov's Skill: George's past as an app developer for phones comes in handy when he needs to clone Shiv's phone.
- Child Prodigy: Shiv was mistaken for a prodigy when he was a toddler because his first year was reset but he remembered how to walk and talk. Flashbacks show that he continued to retain any skills he picked up during reset years, and thus was very intellectually advanced for a teenager, but this wasn't always clear to his parents, because he was also traumatized by memories of events that got undone by Lazarus.
- Cool Plane: In season 2, the group has a private jet fitted with equipment that makes it a fully-fledged time machine.
- Desperately Seeking A Purpose In Life: Before being recruited by MI-5, Archie was a bored and absurdly overqualified Cambridge graduate with degrees in politics, psychology, and sociology who had no idea what to do with her life.
- Did You Actually Believe...?: In the first season finale, Archie is stunned to find a Chinese agent remembers her previous visits and the time loops. It turns out the Chinese have known about the Project for years to develop their own serum. She openly scoffs at Archie's surprise with, "you thought you were the only ones?"
- Disk-One Final Boss: Robin is built up as the Big Bad of season 2, but during the 2012 parts of the season he doesn't really do much besides quickly get killed by Wes, twice.
- Dulcinea Effect: Much of George's actions in the first season are driven by a severe case of this, as he remembers Sarah as a sweet and kind woman who was his destined soulmate, whereas in reality, she was rather shallow and self-absorbed, and the only reason she dated him in the first place was because she got stood up at a party and didn't want to go home empty-handed. When George succeeds in preventing her death, she dumps him after a few weeks, only to come crawling back a few months later because she got engaged to another man she was unsure about and now wants an excuse to break it off.
- The Eeyore: Shiv was born with Ripple-Proof Memory, and thus remembers the countless times the world has ended since his birth. He is consequently an extremely gloomy person.
- Even Evil Has Standards: In the third episode, Rebrov's "Big Boy" ends up in the hands of the Lost Glory, a far-right libertarian group. Rebrov has nothing but contempt for them and considers them idiots, but he needed the Big Boy to go somewhere for his plans and they were the nearest terror group.
- Go Mad from the Revelation:
- Subverted. The first time George's life resets, he has no idea what happened and consequently spends the next six months suffering such severe paranoia about the coming pandemic that he loses everything and Sarah leaves him. He is thus extremely relieved when he meets Archie and she tells him about the Lazarus Project. When time resets again, he calmly goes to the address she gave him, and his third go-round is thus much, much calmer.
- In a flashback to 2014, Shiv tells a newly-recruited Archie that most people aren't genetically designed to tolerate the massive rush of memories that comes when they take the Lazarus drug. He warns Archie that it's probably going to be exceptionally hard on her, as the world has been reset fifteen times in the 23 years since she was born.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Occurs frequently with this series, as the Lazarus Project keeps resetting the world in order to save it. The first-season finale takes it to extremes, with everyone forced to re-live the same three weeks after a new singularity messes with the one that powers Lazarus.
- I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Shiv blames himself for everything that happened with Dennis and Janet, because he shot the wrong man during the year that their son was conceived, and thus it was his mistake that caused their son to be erased.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite Shiv's normally unpleasant demeanor, he reaches out to George after the latter loses Sarah, and a flashback shows he was the one who elected to check up on Dennis and Janet after Wes erased their son from existence.
- Life Saving Misfortune: In one erased timeline, Shiv's aunt, uncle, and cousin were killed in an arson on their shop that was apparently committed by the National Front. When the year reset, Shiv went back to try and stop the arson, only to learn that the fire was actually started by his cousin Dinesh in a failed attempt to collect insurance money. While Shiv managed to prevent the blaze, as a consequence, Dinesh was arrested by the police.
- The Lost Lenore: In the summer of 2018, Archie and partner Jim were trying over and over (and over and over...) to stop an Eastern Bloc Prime Minister from starting World War III while carrying on an affair. Jim reveals that there was one timeline where the man's security chief died in a freak accident and allowed a coup to take place...but it was after Archie was killed. Jim set time back to save her at the risk of the world. He ends up sacrificing himself to blow up a restaurant containing the security chief and, despite her heartbreak, Archie can't convince Wes to reset time to save him.
- Love Makes You Evil: George, Dennis and Janet turned on Lazarus to save their loved ones from dying. In the latter case, they were forced to experience first losing their son, then also their daughter (who was conceived after the first reset not just once but what looks like at least a dozen times). Even if they've now graduated to murder, terrorism (or in Dennis's case, seeking global destruction), you can't help but feel some sympathy for them after that.
- Maddened Into Misanthropy: Dennis and Janet were radicalized against the Lazarus Project after Wes erased their son from existence, and then after Janet had to give birth to their second child over and over again because Archie and Jim's 2018 mission kept going wrong. Dennis in particular has become a complete nihilist, convinced that the world wants to die and that Lazarus is preventing it from doing so.
- Mama Bear/Papa Wolf: In flashbacks, Dennis and Janet are shown to have been extremely cautious parents their son, as one might expect considering that he was premature and they both work at Lazarus, and thus know exactly how fragile the world is. In the present, Janet is very protective of her daughter, as one might expect, given how many time she had to give birth to her.
- Meet Cute: The second episode features several versions of the night that George met Sarah at a party. In one timeline, they met during an argument about music. In another, they met after George had a bad reaction to marijuana and puked in her drink. In the "actual" timeline, George met her while waiting for the bus after his friend Laurence accidentally started a fire and everyone was forced to flee the party.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Dennis and Janet chose to betray Lazarus after Wes coldly chose to reset the world two weeks after the birth of their child, all based on a gut feeling that World War III was about to break out. Adding insult to injury, Dennis and Janet eventually had a daughter... in 2018, the year that Archie and Jim kept trying and failing to prevent a nuclear war from breaking out.
- The Mole: George becomes Rebrov's secret agent inside Lazarus to save his girlfriend, but pins his crimes on Shiv.
- Not So Above It All: In the second episode, the normally-dour and responsible Shiv offers to help George break into Karl's house and beat him up for what he did to Sarah. When George decides not to go through with it, Shiv agrees to drive him around so they can blow off some steam.
- People's Republic of Tyranny: In the second episode, Archie and her then-partner Jim helped the National Democratic Party, a far-right fascist group, take over a small country in 2018 because the previous government was prepared to start a nuclear war to try and hold on to power.
- The Plague: The first time the world resets on George, it's because the Lazarus Project failed to stay ahead of a pandemic.
- Ret-Gone: In the second episode, Archie and George discuss the consequences of every time reset, with Archie mentioning that four babies are born every second, and thus every time Lazarus resets time, they are undoing millions of births. She mentions that one of the other Lazarus agents, Janet, was about to give birth just after one of the resets, but instead was two weeks early and thus lost the baby during the reset, only to get pregnant all over again. A later episode reveals that Janet was, in fact, pregnant with Rebrov's son, and the erasure of his unborn son is what drove him and Janet to betray Lazarus.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: In the third episode, Lazarus investigates Lost Glory, a libertarian militia group that acquired Rebrov's bomb.
- Ripple-Proof Memory: The Lazarus Project has developed the means to enable its agents to remember the world after they reset time, but George and Shiv have acquired this ability organically. It turns out that Janet also has this power. As does her daughter.
- The first-season finale reveals that there is at least one person outside of England with the ability to remember time loops - Zhang Rui, an operative from China's version of Lazarus.
- Ruritania: In the third episode, Archie and Jim try repeatedly to stop World War III from breaking out Ruthenia, a small former Soviet republic whose leader has gotten overly paranoid.
- Screaming Birth: In a flashback in the third episode, Janet is shown repeatedly giving birth to Rebrov's child. Much screaming is involved.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Lazarus Project works to prevent world-ending catastrophes from occurring by resetting time back to July 1st every time the world ends.
- Spotting the Thread: George has a knack for noticing patterns in events and making educated guesses at how they'll play out. In the timeline at the start of the show, he wins a loan by predicting that a major corporation will tank within a year when its founder dies. In every timeline afterwards, this actually happens.
- Straw Nihilist: This is fundamentally Rebrov's philosophy; after a particularly traumatic series of loops where he and his lover lost their newborn son (subsequently replaced with a daughter) to prevent a nuclear war, Rebrov became fixated on the idea that they aren’t meant to save the world, as the planet essentially “wants” to die and the Lazarus Project are delaying the inevitable.
- Time Travel: The Lazarus Project accomplishes its goals by resetting the world back to the July 1st of whatever year the world ended, and using the information they gleaned before resetting to prevent whatever ended the world. For instance, Wes claims that the reason there was a Covid-19 vaccine only 9 months into the 2020 pandemic was because they reset the world in 2020 but retained the knowledge about the virus they'd gleaned before then to create the vaccine more quickly.
- Token Evil Teammate: Redbrov on season 2's Time Travel mission. While he wants to do right by Janet and Becky he still has no loyalty to Wes or the Lazarus Project and proves it by shooting every member of his team and himself because he didn't want to wait for the next time jump.
- Tragic Time Traveler: Big Bad Dennis Rebrov was once an agent of the titular project until one time loop caused his infant son to be erased from existence. This led him and his wife Jane to not only go against the project, but try and find a way to destroy it.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: In the second episode, in order to prevent World War III from breaking out in a backwater country in 2018, Archie and her then-partner Jim arranged for the country to undergo a violent uprising that put a far-right fascist government in power.
- We Have Reserves: A variation: George is able to justify shooting and killing Shiv because if his plan works, Lazarus will be forced to reset the year and thus Shiv will not have died.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The key push of Season 1 is George so devastated when Sarah dies in a car crash that he deliberately tries to set off World War III so the Project has no choice but to reset the timeline and give him a chance to save his beloved's life.
