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.