This week’s episode of “The Lazarus Project” was just simply boring to me. The only exception was the introduction that featured Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam).

In this opening sequence, we see Shiv’s development as a child and as a young teen. He becomes precociously verbal and has the onset of early motor-skills when still in the crib. I liked the part where he makes a list of the factors affecting and attending his experience of time loops.

Once he realizes that he can make money if there is a jump, he starts betting successfully on known racehorse winners from the time prior to the jump. At first he wants to help his uncle whose store is in financial trouble. But then he buys things for himself.

At one point, the uncle’s store burns down with the loss of all inside. Then, after a jump, he confronts his cousin preparing the store for ignition with gasoline. He thus prevents the fire. The next thing he knows, a younger Wes (Caroline Quentin) is recruiting him for Lazarus.

From there, the episode bogs down into familiar territory. This begins with Shiv’s car pursuit and capture of Rebrov (Tom Burke) after Rebrov’s murders at Lazarus. It all leads to what we already know: Rebrov and Janet (Vinette Robinson) elude Lazarus. We also don’t learn anything significantly new along the way.

Then we have a moral one-upmanship scene between George (Paapa Essiedu) and Archie (Anjli Mohindra). He wants to know if Lazarus tortures people (which he already knows since he has seen Rebrov). She reveals that she has punched Rebrov in the eye to try to get him to reveal valuable information.

All of this is ironic since George plans to annihilate the world to bring back Sarah (Charly Clive). My guess is that the screenwriters want to show how George is using the excuse of Lazarus’s situational ethics to justify turning on them. They fail in this effort because George in his monomania is completely uninteresting as a character.

Then of course George is the only one who can decipher pictures of wavy lines and crosses to find out where Big Boy the nuclear device is located. Off he goes to Romania. I found it ludicrous that he could smuggle a nuclear detonator through airport security but there you go.

Before he leaves for Eastern Europe, George calls in sick and Shiv answers. Shiv is suspicious and asks an underling to check George’s, and then Sarah’s, financial statements. The underling is loath to do this without a warrant, but then this is Lazarus, so poorly run that everyone breaks the rules on a regular basis.

Shiv heads to Romania. We then are treated to a boring attempt to catch up to George. The actual chase between the two adds nothing to the plot. The visual effects are nothing to write home about. The only thing that you could say about this scene is that we got to see a lot of dull views of household and street life in some obscure Romanian village.

I will give the ending credit for being a nice twist. But can we just move on and have George detonate his device without boring us in the meantime with every detail in between? Or if he isn’t going to detonate the device, please get to the point.

The thought occurred to me that maybe, by making George so monotonous, flat, selfish, and evil, his character could be resurrected a la Lazarus in the Bible. This should be easy to accomplish if this is the writers’ goal since George would just have to show one positive emotion to be improved as a character.

Is the real point of “The Lazarus Project” not about ideas or science fiction, but just the drama of those involved in this inept organization? If so, then you have to have characters that you empathize with in a deep way for them to matter.

I feel that so far the character development has been uneven. We got a good look at Janet last week. I feel that we saw more of Archie in the episode before that. A brief glimpse was offered of Shiv’s past this week.

These haphazard efforts at character development are undermined by an overemphasis on brief character interactions and action sequences in which the characters are involved. The underlying premise, the Lazarus Project, is just being used as a setting or device to connect them, which may explain the poor attention to detail given it by the writers.

I hope that next week this George drama is finally resolved so we can move on to more interesting topics.

When George wakes up one day and finds himself reliving a day from months ago, he thinks he’s lost his mind. All of his recent milestones have been undone, including his success at work and his marriage to the love of his life Sarah. Worst of all, he seems to be the only one who has noticed what’s happened.

That is, until he meets Archie, who recruits George for the Lazarus Project — a secret organisation that has harnessed the ability to turn back time every time the world is at threat of extinction. Like George, those who work at Lazarus are the few people on earth with the ability to remember the events that are undone when time goes back. Alongside colleagues like Archie, standoffish Shiv and their steely leader Wes, George works to prevent global catastrophe — including trying to track down the formidable Rebrov, a wanted criminal intent on detonating a nuclear warhead and destroying the world.

Then a freak accident harms someone close to George. Lazarus won’t let him turn back time to undo it — unless there is the threat of global extinction. Now George must choose to stay loyal or go rogue, as he is faced with the question: if you had the power to rewrite your past, what would you sacrifice to do it…?