"It's worse than that, she's dead Jim!"

Here goes Peter Hyams again, naming yet another character after their actions in the story..

We have already had Montone (who is just black and white) and Shepherd (who rules over the "sheep"of Io)

And now, we have a lady who apparently must be gong through some kind of spiritual rebirth - a character named nothing less than Doctor Lazarus - who at least to me seems to be borrowing from a character most famously played by DeForest Kelly....

She obviously is not physically dead, so it can only be a spiritual rebirth, right?

But how profound is the rebirth and what represents the "death" state she was in before…

Well it can only be here when she is first introduced, tired, haggard and obviously just not giving much of a damn, in the traditional western this would not have been a female role at all, but these are modern times here in io, so there she is, surrounded by a ton of machinery and a lot of random arbitrary assistants just pushing buttons for no obvious reason, just not caring

Until along comes o'neil who not only profanes her sanctum with his odious presence (which I suppose was shocking enough) but basically yells at her could not care less flip attitude and promises to kick her ass, unless she pulls her thumb out

Is that it? 

Well there appears to be no other real explanation for Lazarus change of heart as the story progress

So to sum up all she needed was a rough Scotsman to yell at her and (almost, though if this was a western with John Wayne it would have been a real slap) figuratively slap her face into realising she is part of the awfulness to be revealed

Oh speaking of awfulness here's the roughshod couldn't care less pencils from me, maybe I need someone to yell at me here?