The Second Season of The Lazarus Project opens with the world stuck in a three-week loop caused by another secret agency playing with time. Coming clean to the group about everything he did last season, George (Paapa Essiedu) finds himself on the outs and having to work on his own to get back in. The Project does, however, find another recruit in Sarah (Charly Clive) who we will see follow a similar path to George in training and also dealing with the various other possibilities of her past which all got overwritten (many involving a relationship with a man she never even met in the current set of events).
Each restart beings just after George shoots Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam) needing to save his life every time. As with the First Season, George will play a key role in the series, struggling to prove himself again and making key discoveries (only some of which he shares with his coworkers including one suggesting a key member of the Lazarus Project has something to hide). It also seems he’s a target for events he hasn’t yet caused by a group of ruthless killers who have caused the current situation.
The three-week window is limiting, but it’s all the group have to work with to search out the six scientists who built their own time machine and send Janet (Vinette Robinson) and her daughter (Priya-Rose Brookwell) back to 2012. Working on his own, George is able to track down one scientist who is already dead which earns him enough to buy his way back into the program (although not enough to earn the trust back of the others). They finally find one scientist killed just after the reset but they can’t reach him in time before he’s killed. Needing the help of someone closer to him on that date, George reaches out to Dennis (Tom Burke) who successfully saves Dr. Samson (Sam Troughton) who is the key to both learning about the other agency and building the Lazarus Project their own time machine.
The second episode fills in more about this other group, introducing the scientists (now dead) in flashbacks and the sequences of Janet being forced to be shot into the past (after her daughter was sent before her). We also the trouble of the program, rushed into human trials before they were ready, and its culling at the end leading to the remaining scientists to scatter only to be hunt down one by one. Samson takes the group back to the (now abandoned) facility to obtain necessary materials for the Lazarus Project’s own time machine and as a setting to provide more context to both past and current events. And George begins his own investigation into Dr. Gray (Zoe Telford) who seems to be a key figure in events with ties to all the important people including Wes (Caroline Quentin).
