Overview (Spoilers Below): A routine job brings the extractors to Shirokane Cluster, where a spoiled rich girl and her overworked old butler appear to be the only remaining residents. Can they help their client escape to a new life in good conscience if his departure will leave a child without a caretaker?
Our Take: This week’s episode has the extractors taking on another extraction job. No surprise there. Their latest assignment leads Equa and the others to the Shirokane cluster, where they find their next client Fernand. Fernand’s a butler who serves a bratty rich girl named Cendrillon in her mansion. Because of Cendrillon’s obnoxious behavior, Fernand seeks to leave the cluster to pursue a new career. I don’t blame the guy. If someone’s being a demanding ass to me despite my hard work, I will leave them behind in a heartbeat. But, of course, the extractors’ job gets way worse when a termination process begins to erase everything in the cluster as soon as Fernand leaves. They return to get Cendrillon out, but they soon discover that she’s the cluster’s moderator who ordered the termination due to the cluster’s inability to be sustained. One of the biggest peeves I have from watching shows and movies is bratty children. While I have no disrespect towards the people portraying them, I find these characters highly annoying with their irritating spoiled personalities making me want to punch them in the face. I know it sounds harsh since they’re kids, but you can’t deny that you feel the same way towards these spoiled brats. So this episode has already got me concerned about Cendrillon right before I even watch it. Unsurprisingly, “You Can’t Run from Destiny” delivers what I was worried about regarding Cendrillon’s personality. At least in the first half. When she revealed her true identity to the extractors, the episode slowly became more tolerable for me. It does follow the same extraction formula as before, but thankfully, it didn’t serve as the episode’s primary focus. Instead, it has the extractors hosting a birthday party for Cendrillon to celebrate her rebirth in the cluster’s final moments. This episode finally delivered something the other ones failed to accomplish: provide emotion into its inevitability. The emotional stakes in the episode were far from memorable due to Cendrillon’s bratty personality being a nuisance. However, I admire the writers’ intentions of giving viewers something to care about. The final scene with Cendrillon thanking the extractors for being her first true friends before disappearing was one of the moments I’ll remember for the rest of the season. If this show keeps delivering something like “You Can’t Run from Destiny”, it might have a chance to finish this lackluster season on a solid note.