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So here’s the deal: remember Project: Twilight? That charming little gore-fest with vampire gene splicing, Soho grime, and Evelyn crying herself to sleep? Well, Project: Lazarus is the remix, the sequel, the spiritual cousin who shows up at the funeral wearing your dead dad’s clothes and says, “He wanted me to have them.” It’s a story told in two halves—two Doctors, two tones, and one increasingly exhausted reviewer trying to stitch it all together without sobbing into a wine glass.
Part One: The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn, still marinating in guilt from the last bloodbath, track down Cassie, who’s now full vampire and mid-existential breakdown. She claims Nimrod’s hunting her. Spoiler: he is. Because of course he is. Enter the Huldra, a vaguely Scandinavian space-creature with misty forest vibes and exactly one personality trait: “help me.” They all get snatched up by the Forge, aka UNIT’s morally bankrupt Victorian stepbrother, who’s now running full tilt into Frankenstein territory. Regeneration experiments, hybrid armies, genetic horrors—classic science-without-conscience nonsense. And guess what? Cassie’s been brainwashed. She’s working for them. She doesn’t remember her son. Evelyn’s heart breaks. Again.
Cassie eventually snaps out of it (because Evelyn cries at her hard enough) and blows up the facility in a fit of self-sacrificing redemption, because women in this universe are apparently not allowed to survive two audio dramas without a tragic death scene. The Sixth Doctor’s final monologue is raw and furious and ruined. End of Act One.
Smash cut to Act Two: the Seventh Doctor shows up, alone and suspicious. He’s followed an SOS from the Huldra (again? a clone? a time loop? who knows) and discovers—surprise!—Nimrod is still kicking around like the world’s most persistent toxoplasmosis. But the kicker? The Sixth Doctor is there. Working for the Forge. Performing medical horror. Smiling weirdly. Except… he’s not the Doctor. He’s a clone. Grown from harvested regeneration research. Which is apparently a thing now.
What follows is basically a lower-budget Face/Off but with more existential dread and less Travolta. Clone-Six starts asking questions about identity and purpose, and within about fifteen minutes he turns on Nimrod, destroys the lab (again), and dies poetically. The Seventh Doctor barely emotes. He doesn’t have to. He just watches the moral universe collapse under the weight of its own continuity.
The whole “two Doctors, two timelines” idea is conceptually juicy, but in practice it’s more like eating two half-cooked meals back to back. They echo each other, sure—but not in a way that builds anything new. It’s mostly the same plot twice, with the same villain, and less and less of Cassie each time. Evelyn weeps. Nimrod monologues. I sip my drink and wonder why every good woman in this series dies screaming.
Final Verdict:
Project: Lazarus is high-concept, heavy-bleeding continuity horror with a clone twist and two excellent Doctors clawing their way through a narrative that doesn’t quite earn its emotional punch. Still, there’s poetry in the wreckage.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 weaponised Time Lord spleens