The Apothecary Diaries episode 12

Rating: B+

The situation at the heart of this episode is one quite familiar to any fan of romances with class-based complications. The higher-ranked man wants to be respectful of the lower-ranked woman’s wishes by not forcing her into a situation she may not want (and which he has reasonable evidence to that end, based on her past comments and reactions). The woman, meanwhile, does want the same thing (albeit in this case for entirely different reasons) but does not want to overstep her status by asking for too much. Because neither is on the same page when they speak to each other in what each hopes is leading comments, the result that neither wants happens.

The difference here, of course, is that this isn’t romance (or is it?) and it’s not a relationship between the two at stake. Jinshi wants Maomao to stay in the Rear Palace because he’s fascinated by her, though how much of that is Gaoshun’s “favorite toy” references and how much is genuinely something more is debatable at this point. What’s definitely true is that, despite being surrounded by all the beauty of the Rear Palace, she is the one he’s become most drawn to. Maomao, for her part, doesn’t seem to have any romantic interest; she was actually starting to like working in the Rear Palace, and financial reasons also make her dismissal from the Rear Palace very inconvenient timing. Besides, it’s also a convenient way to keep Verdigris House’s old woman from turning her into a courtesan.

The situation only arises at all because Maomao actually has a very tenuous connection to Fenming (the family she was sold off to – who in turn sold her off to the Rear Palace – had business with Fenming’s family), and that’s technically enough for her to be caught up in a mass layoff as every hint of connection to Fenming is extricated in the wake of her confession and execution. Whether seizing a family’s assets because of the wrongdoing of one, or punishing those who are only member of families who has business relationships with the offending party’s family, is fair is another story, but it does highlight how critical it was that Fenming confessed and took the full blame; by doing so, she made certain that the blame tree went no higher than her, thus keeping Ah-Duo out of it.

In the end, that leaves Maomao back at Verdigris and serving as an underling to her “big sisters” at a high-end soiree, one where a depressed Jinshi also, perhaps not-coincidentally, happens to be present. (There’s a real sense that Gaoshun manipulated this scenario into being.) But that does allow both parties to come (relatively) clean and set up the circumstances at the end of the episode, where Jinshi arrives at Verdigris to buy out her contract and entice her with a rare herb, thus setting a path forward for the series after the tumultuous dismissal.

Aside from the main storyline, the episode also had a lot of neat little touches, whether it be Maomao being asked to look in on an apparently-ill courtesan, the way the three princesses of Verdigris all seem to delight in Jinshi taking an interest in Maomao, or that the series actually dared to put an elderly woman in the kind of bath scene normally prone to fan service. Maomao’s reflections on where she’s been and where she’s going were also a nice touch, and I loved the comic scene where Gyokuyou tells Jinshi he’ll regret letting Maomao get away. Another neat touch was the vase of flowers used while Maomao mentions about the difficulty explaining Jinshi to her big sisters:

The series has frequently used flowers symbolically; we see them prominently in the opener, each high consort was associated with one, and many meaningful moments involved flowers to some degree. In all of that, Maomao has previously been associated with a small yellow flower, and here we have one amidst three other much larger collections of blossoms. Almost certainly these are meant to represent the three princess of Verdigris.

The one concern with this episode is that the animation takes more shortcuts than normal, making the whole episode seem a bit less active. Otherwise this is a satisfying transition point to the second half of the season, which will probably start in two weeks. (The series is supposed to run for two cours consecutively, but many other continuing series are taking off the last week of December.)