English Dub Review: Estab Life: Great Escape “You Can’t Run from the Leader Business”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When Equa comes down with a cold, the rest of the extractors set off to meet a new client without her. Will the leaderless team be able to work together long enough to get the job done?

Our Take:

We’ve finally reached the end of the painfully average show’s first half. What better way to celebrate that occasion than with another assignment for the extractors to accomplish? Considering that almost all of the episodes feature the characters extracting clients, this is not a huge surprise. However, it appears that the team might have to complete their latest extraction without their secret weapon.

This episode has the extractors helping their next client, Hachiro, as he seeks to escape the Akihabara Cluster. Unfortunately, Equa comes down with a cold and has to rest, resulting in the team taking on the job without her. But they eventually get caught in some mishaps that force them to fight their way out of the cluster. Without Equa’s precognitive ability, their assignment got more complicated than their previous ones.

“You Can’t Run from the Leader Business” shows how essential Equa is to the team. She’s not only the leader and an inspiration to help those in need, but her ability to see the future helps the members out of dangerous predicaments quickly. More importantly, her perkiness and self-confidence help make the clients feel at ease when attempting to start a new life at a different cluster. So her absence puts the team at a significant disadvantage, with Feles and the others putting too much stress on Hachiro and struggling to escape the cluster without setting off the alarms.

It’s easy to see that this formula is still on the verge of running its course without adding anything unique or exciting. However, the absence of the team’s reliable leader and Hachiro’s decision to stay in his given cluster help provide some interest in the show’s episodic narrative. Except for “You Can’t Run from Democracy, ” the first few episodes have the extractors successfully transfer their clients to their chosen destinations, but not without a mishap or two. It’s not until episode five that the show changes things up by having a client stay behind. So it’s nice to see Estab Life continuing that trend with Hachiro remaining in Akihabara for the time being.

The extractors failing to open the gates without triggering the alarms and Alga intentionally mistranslating texts got a couple of chuckles from me. Although, the latter showcases that the team’s robotic member may be getting close to being annoyingly problematic, character-wise. Those elements and its plot are enough to make this episode a bit more tolerable than the team’s performance without their leader. It may not help the show gain some traction regarding its concept, but what I got is good enough for me to keep watching.