Spring 2022 First Impressions – Estab Life: Great Escape

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Far in the future, Tokyo has been divided up into several isolated areas called “clusters” in which citizens spend their entire lives without the right to leave. Additionally, the denizens of these clusters are often people with particular shared genetic modifications. For those folks who may wish to leave their cluster, they have few options but to call upon hired “extractors” who help facilitate the ability of these unhappy people to start new lives elsewhere.

Equa is one such extractor, who with her team leads dangerous missions to bring their clients to freedom. Their next client happens to be their philosophy teacher, who struggles with the isolating permanency of being a teacher whose heart isn’t in the job. As soon as he signs on the dotted line, the team springs into action, deftly dodging police droids and breaking into security systems in order to send their former educator to his new life in the Akihabara cluster. When they receive some happy photos from him at his new job, the dirty work feels worth it. But after this latest caper, it seems as though the authorities might be taking a keener interest in the extractors’ work.

Impressions: In my anime-viewing life, I feel like there’s almost nothing more frustrating than checking out something new that clearly has some interesting, ambitious ideas but doesn’t quite make good on utilizing them. I find speculative fiction on the evolution and eventual (inevitable?) decline of human society to be fascinating. Some of my favorite recent fiction, from Yokohama Station SF, to Girls’ Last Tour, to Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow, tries to predict what the world may be like after the human population implodes or the planet’s environment becomes hostile to life. Despite how melancholy (or even horrific, in some cases) these scenarios might be, I find some solace in the idea that we may end up just running our course like many other species on the planet.

Estab Life sees humanity as it is after a population decline. Rather than encourage people through various means to propagate the species to a maintenance level, however, in this case the response seems to be to isolate and control the lives of the people who exist as some means of managing the issue. That bit of logic was the first hurdle I encountered with this episode – the health of a species relies on genetic variety as opposed to genetic bottlenecking, so unless there’s some kind of method in place to ensure a basic level of genetic health then there might be some issues sooner rather than later with inherited diseases and such within each cluster.

The other major issue is that I’m unconvinced by the major shifts in tone throughout the episode. I’m not sure how many readers out there may have caught Princess Principal a few years ago, but I thought that series did a decent job of combining the characters’ day-to-day activities and their nighttime adventures in a way that was fun and basically made tonal sense. Estab Life feels as though it’s attempting to pull some of the same nonsense, making the primary extractor characters students to help throw the authorities off their trail. But when paired with the extreme danger of their extraction activities, their mundane school-life business never feels genuine to me, yet it’s too substantial to simply be a “front” for their night job. It simply feels unbalanced.

I appreciate creativity and I like some things that this series is trying to do; I’d love to know more about the different demi-human genetic modifications (in this episode we get a wolf furry and a slime) for example. But this series feels very much like “let’s put cute teenage anime girls in ridiculous danger” and not a whole lot else.

Pros: I like that the show’s premise acknowledges how stifling it can be to have one’s entire life laid out with no real options or regard to individuality. The teacher’s dilemma really boils down to not enjoying teaching but being forced into doing it for the remainder of his working life. While I don’t really buy into the saying that “if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life” because it assumes a lot of things about why people work (for many, working simply provides the means to survive within a capitalist society rather than serves some form of personal identity, and that’s fine), I also think teaching in particular requires a lot of emotional investment from the people doing the job, and not having the passion for it would be especially soul-sucking.

Cons: There are definitely a wealth of questionable aspects of this premiere, but the one that really stuck with me was the fact that the characters go on their dangerous after-dark missions wearing some of the most flashy clothing I’ve seen lately, with their faces fully uncovered, guns a-blazing. I have to believe that such an authoritarian society would have cameras literally everywhere, so you’d think these girls’ mugs would be plastered all over the nightly news by now. But apparently goofy costumes and nothing else are more than enough to completely obscure their identities. Sure, this can be explained by “it’s anime,” but that’s an excuse that most definitely isn’t a free pass.

Content Warnings: Violence, including some body horror when the slime character gets attacked.

Would I Watch More? – Like I said, I appreciate some things that this story seems to be attempting to talk about, but it feels as though it’s bitten off more than it can chew