REVERSE ENGINEERING

TIME TRAVEL THRILLER THE LAZARUS PROJECT TAKES ON THE END OF THE WORLD. THE CLOCK IS TICKING... BACKWARDS

- NICK SETCHFIELD

FORWARD MOTION. That’s the essence of any good thriller, right? A tale that rattles from A to B, propulsive, relentless, linear. So what happens when you add a quantum wrinkle to the mix? A time bending twist where your characters have the power to hit rewind – and erase? How much harder can a drama squeeze your nerve endings when the past as well as the future is up for grabs?

Sky’s new eight-parter The Lazarus Project is out to answer that. “It’s an action thriller with a time travel component but with this big, moral, philosophical heart to it,” says creator and writer Joe Barton. “It’s really the story of an everyman who overnight discovers that the world is much more complex and dangerous and exciting than he thought.”

Paapa Essiedu is George, the man plunged into this four-dimensional head trip. “He’s just a normal guy, an app developer,” Barton tells SFX. “He has this nice, easy life and it gets interrupted by this growing series of events. The world gets worse and worse and scarier and scarier and his partner gets sick.

“Just as it seems things are getting unbelievably grim he wakes up, six months earlier, on the day that we first meet him. He lives the next six months again but this time thinking he’s gone slightly insane. And everything’s slightly worse. All the things he did right the first time he messes up.