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

Overview (Spoilers Below):
A grenade blows Martes clean in two, leaving the extractors’ resident slime both physically and mentally divided. Reuniting the warring factions of her personality will be a challenge, even if they don’t kill each other first.

Our Take:
Well, I didn’t think this show could get any weirder, but here we are. We’re three episodes in, and we have already reached a new level of bizarreness. So far, we have talking penguins and an anthropomorphic wolf who only speaks dog. Now, we have tiny versions of Marteses inside one big Martes. This could’ve been part of Martes’s slime ability, but as usual, the series doesn’t give a crap about emphasizing its characters.
Think of this episode as an anime version of Pixar’s “Inside Out”, with the small Marteses controlling her actions and feelings inside a meeting boardroom. Additionally, we have one faction separating from another due to the grenade that blows Martes in half, leaving the rogue faction of Martes with the Extractors. While both factions have different ideas, they all share something in common: their love for Equa, which helped them reunite to save her from falling to her death.
“Inside Out” is an incredible animated classic that boasts emotional depth, fantastic animation, and creative storytelling. In “You Can’t Run from Democracy”, the writers attempted to do the same with Martes and her crew of tiny, personality-driven versions of herself. But unfortunately, it lacks the charm, style, creativity, and energy to provide a sense of wackiness in Martes’s slimy personality and bland narrative.
If there’s one thing that made it watchable for me, it’s that this episode steers away from the extraction formula in favor of a character-driven storyline. The execution was unsurprisingly flawed due to the show’s lack of character exploration. Still, I appreciate the show’s team for providing something fresh instead of showcasing an entire season full of aimless extraction missions. That alone makes “You Can’t Run from Democracy” a tiny improvement over the last three episodes. Although, that’s not saying much based on how the series plays out so far.