One thing we know with The Apothecary Diaries is that the tone of an episode doesn’t necessarily correlate with its seriousness. This was a pretty low-key week on the whole. But the focus shifted squarely back to the underlying plot – the secrets of the Imperial family and who knows what. My gut is telling me it was a stealth nexus ep – a major turning point in the story. But you wouldn’t think so by how leisurely it moved and how calmly everyone behaved.
We even get a little comic relief to start (a common trend). Maomao basically cons Hongiang into exiling her to a storage shed, where she’s free to cut loose and be a menace. This is all tied in to another brief Shisui appearance. She’s an odd one – she pops into the story intermittently and seemingly extraneous things happen. I have to think she’s going to have some part to play in the main plot eventually, but as of yet there are no hints as to what that might be. She’s just a genki girl who loves bugs as much as Xiaomao loves mushrooms and lizard tails (and really, Xiaomao is seriously throwing stones from her glass house on that score).
The main driver of events here is Anshi, the Empress Dowager. And the big question is, how much has Anshi been driving them all along? Is she dark matter, impacting how things have been moving despite being unseen? We haven’t been told much about the Empress Dowager but she doesn’t seem to fit the cliche of troublemaking shrew. She was quite the liberal – banning slavery and eunuchs – and that seems to have rubbed off on her son. And she founded the clinic. Her husband the former emperor, however, is another matter. His reputation – especially regarding the age of his wives and concubines – is somewhat checkered.
Anshi has obviously got wind of Maomao’s reputation. Her visit to Gyokuyou and her grandchild is a pretext for her to get some alone time with Xiaomao and make a request. To wit: “Did I put a curse on the former emperor?”. Maomao is not one to believe in such things of course, but a serious request from a figure of this stature certainly isn’t something she can ignore. And it will give her a distraction from the thoughts she knows are dangerous and seems to be having an increasing difficult time suppressing…
Anshi has also arranged a party in the Emperor’s residence, which is going to prove interesting given that two concubines are pregnant and it’s theoretically a secret. Xiaomao reckons that Loulan is the likeliest flashpoint at that event, and she’s probably right about that. We haven’t heard much from her lately and she’s always had the whiff of trouble accompanying her, so Loulan is overdue to make an impact on the story. But that’s a less immediate concern than the Dowager’s request, which is likely connected to the larger issues at play with the plot.
The main evidence for Anshi’s concern seems to be that after the former emperor’s body was kept in the mausoleum for a year, it hadn’t decayed. That and the fact that she wished he’d “go away” every night, or so she says. The non-decaying body is a common enough trope in mysteries, and with Maomao’s knowledge of biology she’ll already have multiple theories about what might be behind it. Obviously Anshi didn’t curse the former emperor – Kusuriya no Hitorigoto isn’t that sort of story, and Maomao is a rationalist if ever one existed. But something happened, and it’s likely relevant to more than just the Empress Dowager’s guilty conscience.
Vance
March 1, 2025 at 2:43 pmI’ve noticed that in close-ups, Shisui has orange highlights in her eyes, much like Loulan does. I’m not sure whether she’s directly involved with Loulan or whether it’s just misdirection, but surely she will be connected to the main plot somehow.
And Maomao doubting whether the Emperor’s brother is really the Imperial brother is a callback to in Season 1 when she suspected a baby swap with Ah-Duo’s son surviving being the reason Luomen was let go from the rear palace. And if Maomao’s hunch is correct, Jinshi is the Emperor’s first-born son, and that could explain why the Emperor was so playful in Episode 31 and why his eyes were deep in thought at the end of Episode 30, and that’s ’cause he was beginning to consider Maomao a suitable partner for Jinshi, making it the trip to the Shrine of Choosing sort of a family outing of sorts.
Maybe I’m overthinking things now, but Anshi herself might be testing Maomao’s fitness to be Jinshi’s partner as well with this case.
Rasu
March 2, 2025 at 11:58 pmI always thought it was obvious who Shisui truly is. I mean, the make-up is thick but since the beghining Xiao Lan said she popped out of nowhere.
Nellie
March 1, 2025 at 4:43 pmThe implication is that Anshi herself was extremely young when she had the current emperor and that the former emperor was an unsubtle paedophile doesn’t seem to mesh with the fact that the current emperor and Jinshi had a considerable age difference. This would be be accounted for if Jinshi was actually the current emperor’s firstborn (and Ah-Duo’s biological son), but it doesn’t account for the birth of current emperor’s actual younger brother- now deceased. Anshi wouldn’t have been a prepubescent girl when she had her second son.
And yeah, someone pointed out to me the physical similarites between Loulan and Shisui after watching this episode. If that’s going where I think it’s going…
Vance
March 1, 2025 at 5:53 pmThe anime has not in any way indicated that the current Emperor’s younger brother is deceased… Are you sure you’re not a novel reader?
Nellie
March 1, 2025 at 5:57 pmNope. I was running off Maomao’s theory in S1. We know there were two babies born around the same time, and one died.
If Jinshi’s the son of the current emperor and Ah-Duo (which I’m strongly inclined to believe), it would stand to reason that the current emperor’s younger brother is dead.
Perhaps I should have worded that better.
Guardian Enzo
March 1, 2025 at 6:29 pmHow old is Loulan supposed to be? Shisui looks 15-16 to me. If Loulan is her mama then the stuff about the previous emperor being a lolicon would look pretty accurate. Or would it have been the current emperor? I don’t know if Loulan was even around when Shisui was born. Maybe she had her before she became a concubine in the first place and brought her with under the cover of being a serving girl…
Panino Manino
March 1, 2025 at 9:24 pmMan, you’re really having difficulty with the names here.
Panino Manino
March 1, 2025 at 7:51 pmI’m reading the LN and two days ago I stalled because I catch up with the anime and was trying to decide if I wait for the episodes to read more or not. This episode made me decide to just continua reading without remorse because beyond the next episode preview that seems to indicate the anime will add details for, presumably, future chapters, the anime is changing important details.
When I read this Case in the LN I ended a bit confused, because it seemed Maomao had solved the request by the end, but watching the episode today there’s a detail that changes everything!
Like in the previous case with the sick servant and Lihua’s chief lady-in-waiting, there’s one small detail that the anime inverted! Instead of the the Empress Dowager saying that SHE Cursed the Emperor, in the LN she says she WAS CURSED by the Emperor.
For a moment I thought maybe it could be a translation error, but no… it’s the anime that is changing things, right?
In the previous case made no difference, but in this case this detail change makes the Case makes so much more sense!
Also, rant…
I realized that the fundamental “problem” of the series is that the author decided to make this Maomao’s “Diaries”. All chapters are from Maomao’s point of view. What Maomao don’t see or knows the reader also don’t, but there are things the author wants to show and communicate and the only way to do so is by inserting Maomao on the situation by any means necessary. IMO makes no sense for Maomao to be on this Case, it’s absurdo that she was invited to that situation and that no one else had “solved” and handled it yet. It’s so simple, they only needed to investigate, just enter that room, look around and think a bit, but if anyone did then Maomao wouldn’t know and see, and the reader wouldn’t know and see, so author has to force Maomao to be there, and participate, and force all characters to just stand and listen to Maomao explain.
Because there’s also no mysteries in this series, no information that the reader needs to figure out by himself, because author wants to spell everything.