English Dub Review: No Longer Allowed in Another World “This Hole Stinks of Immortality”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sensei and the gang enter a town with a giant tree and a group of otherworlders trying to sell its trees as narcotics, while another otherworlder tries to stop them, and Sensei meets a nice dancer lady.

OUR TAKE

I guess we’re back to self-contained one shot stories as this one feels less like something closer to the second episode with the princess. Basically every recurring character who isn’t Sensei gets sidelined and the majority of the plot hinges on how Sensei acts and what that says about him and the world around him. However, since we’ve already met a few other otherworlders by now, we can kinda expand on that by showing a few more, in this case a few that are running a drug trade out of fantasy leaves, and one that is…actually a genuinely good dude? Played by J Michael Tatum in the dub? Like wow dude, I haven’t heard from you in a bit, thought you disappeared there. But yeah, it’s actually kinda nice to know that there are some actual decent people who got sent here besides Sensei. I mean statistically that had to be the case, I suppose, not all of them could just be horrible and murderous or that would be kinda incredibly cynical, but it’s good to just confirm that real quick. It’s also at least a little neat to see that some would also resort to just running a drug trade with fantasy stuff like leaves off a giant magic tree, since that would also be something humans would do. So, even if this ends up feeling a bit like filler overall, it does contribute to the worldbuilding.

But it’s not just the humans involved that have moral grayness and ambiguity, but the regular fantasy folks who live there as well. For one, it’s revealed that even once the humans are kicked out, the monster people want to continue the trade, much to the horror of J Michael Tatum. But there’s also a dancer that the village seems to hate who Sensei befriends and is eventually revealed to be the spirit of the giant tree, so once she leaves, the leaves all wither away. I guess this is some sort of parable about…doubting the character of people you may be perceived as sex workers? Like I don’t think it’s EXACTLY that but it’s clear that there were some misconceptions coming in from all angles here. Also crazy that we only have a handful of episodes left for this, so I wonder what they’ll spend the remaining runtime on. We’ve already gone through every main character’s backstory so maybe killing another one of those seven bad otherworlders is on the menu?