Rating: A+
Barring a stunning collapse in the next couple of weeks, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is not going to be beat for best series of the season (and maybe the year), but with this episode The Apothecary Diaries makes its strongest bid for the #2 spot. In culminating multiple recent plot threads, it delivers a masterpiece of deductions, tragedy, loss, and regret, mostly driven by a need to maintain appearances. In the process it brings a lot of seemingly-disparate details together, albeit sometimes in uncomfortable ways, and strongly implies critical long-hidden truths.
Key amongst those details is Lishu’s bad experience with honey when she was young, which is the surprising pivot point on which most of what happens here swings. Feeding honey to a baby under one year old (especially one under 6 months old) can cause infant botulism – not exactly poisoning, but that’s the way medicine at the level of sophistication for this setting would understand it. This is likely what happened to Lishu, rather than a food allergy. Such an affliction isn’t necessarily fatal but could, indeed, make a baby dangerously sick. Since honey is an expensive commodity in this setting, cases where babies might be fed it would probably be few and far between even among the wealthy, so that not being common knowledge is completely understandable. (Honestly, I wasn’t aware of this myself until I read up about it in the wake of watching this episode.) From this little lack of knowledge, a tragedy which unfolded over 17 years and ultimately cost at least three lives, may have involved the crippling of another, and the disruption of one mutually-beneficial relationship was spun. “Ignorance is a sin,” indeed.
Maomao has shown before a reluctance to be accusatory in cases where women could be put in deadly trouble, but she has also shown that she will act decisively when lives are (or have been) on the line, and this time she also has a highly personal reason to get involved. Her confrontation with Fengming reveals a woman devastated by one awful mistake and her efforts to cover that up, both for her own sake and for that of the woman she idolized to the point that she resolved to serve no other. It clarifies that Lishu was nervous around Garnet Pavilion not because of the honey but because Fengming was actively trying to push her away, lest Ah-Duo get any inkling that the honey was what killed her baby 17 years ago. (And Lishu was still coming around anyway because she had formerly had a practically daughter/mother connection to Ah-Duo.) Fenming tried to have Lishu poisoned not to preserve Ah-Duo’s position in the Rear Palace – she was already on the way out anyway – but to eliminate that potential loose end, and the servant girl died in a genuine suicide to deflect any suspicion of the poisoning falling on her mistress. That the servant girl tried to climb out despite doing it out of devotion weighs like a stone block on the whole scenario and speaks to the extreme irony in play here: the utter devotion of Ah-Duo’s servants ultimately cost lives for purposes that Ah-Duo would never have tolerated had she known about them, while the lack of devotion of Lishu’s servants may have saved hers.
But while Maomao’s intense confrontation of Fengming is the episode’s dramatic peak, all of the other follow-up scenes play crucial roles in rounding out this part of the story. Despite Fenming’s attempts to keep Ah-Duo from knowing about any of what was transpiring, the latter’s words while drinking with Maomao atop the wall suggests that she has a pretty good sense of what transpired, if not exactly what the real underlying reason for it all was. The drunk and morose behavior of Jinshi shows a different side of him and suggests that his connection to Ah-Duo is more than just professional, and Maomao’s lament that suggesting to Fenming how to turn herself in in such a way that she still protects/shields Ah-Duo is the best she can do as “a girl with no power” also hits hard. And given the way things play out, does any viewer think that her speculation at the end, as Ah-Duo is leaving, is just an “idiotic delusion”? But if that’s the case, then which baby was it that got poisoned? Still feels like something’s missing there, and the mystery about the chemically-treated boards possibly used as signals still hasn’t been resolved.
Regardless, this episode also shines on the production front, featuring some of the series’ finest animation and scene framing to date, especially in shots like the vista of stars during the scenes atop the wall. The musical score, which has always hit the mark, is also at its best throughout.
This is The Apothecary Diaries at its most somber, but the episode shows that it doesn’t have to rely on its humor aspect to achieve its full impact.
USA Anime 