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

Overview (Spoilers Below):
Martes becomes concerned for Equa’s struggling cafe and sets out to breathe new life into the business by overhauling its menu. Meanwhile, Alga searches the building for secret funds to upgrade his armaments and stumbles upon a mysterious safe.

Our Take:
Running a cafe can be stressful, especially when balancing it with your extraction duties. This is usually due to unexpected rush hours or even the loss of its traditional appeal. For the latter, the only way to regain the cafe’s appeal is to revamp its menu.
This week’s episode focuses more on Equa’s full-time job at Cafe Vostok outside of her other duty with the team. With business running a bit sluggish, Martes decides to give the cafe’s menu a new makeover. Meanwhile, Alga, Ulula, and the girls discover a safe in the basement and attempt to open it before Equa finds out. They eventually succeeded, but what they found in the safe caused them to rethink their strategy.
This is the second episode that explores its characters outside of their extraction assignments, following its fourth episode, “You Can’t Run from Democracy”. These episodes help prevent the show from getting extremely repetitive, even though they don’t offer anything unique to their plots. “You Can’t Run from Bonds” is another example of this rule, with the girls figuring out new ideas for the menu while Alga tries to find some loose change to keep the business running.
It resembles any other episode centering on a struggling business and the multiple attempts to accomplish a simple task, like opening a safe. The only difference between this and the other ones with similar plots is that this one is as bland as a slow day at work regarding its narrative and comedy. Fortunately, it features a couple of character-driven moments that prevent itself from losing more customers. The main one is Equa’s desire to keep her cafe the same to share with everyone in a video she recorded on the thumb drive. While not as essential as Equa having precognition or her being surprised at her client staying in their cluster, it’s a sweet moment that showcases more of Equa’s kind-hearted personality.
The episode also failed to stick the landing with its humor. It consists of Alga and Ulula discovering sexy magazines during their search and the girls stalling Equa with requests while Alga swiftly incorporates different combinations at lightning speed. The former did get a couple of chuckles from me. Unfortunately, the latter seemed to annoy me a bit because Feles and Martes should’ve known that Equa could see into the future, making their distraction feel pointless.
Overall, “You Can’t Run from Bonds” is another storyline in its episodic season that lacks any excitement in its formula to keep this business booming. I can admit that the ending involving Equa’s video was delightful. Sadly, it isn’t enough for me to look past its bland execution. I hate to say this, but can we go back to seeing them extract more clients, please?