The Apothecary Diaries, episode 21

Rating: B+

Though The Apothecary Diaries has been set up almost from the beginning to ship Maomao with Jinshi (and Jinshi is clearly starting to see her romantically even if Maomao is still repulsed), romance is not a major element in the series. It is not entirely devoid of romance, but those elements are located in the story’s fringes. One of those fringes is the recurring military officer Lihaku and how head-over-heels he is for Pairin, one of the three princesses of Verdigris House and a courtesan Maomao looks up to as a big sister.

Actually, calling it a romance at this point might be a stretch, as there’s little clear indication that this is anything more than a one-sided obsession on Lihaku’s part. However, Pairin does pointedly tell Maomao in a letter that she’s waiting for a prince to sweep her off her feet, and Lihaku clearly has both the kind of build she most prefers and the stamina to keep up with such an insatiable woman in bed. Lihaku is also a promising officer, fully in love with Pairin despite knowing exactly what her occupation is, and earnest in a straightforward, puppy dog-like way. All of that makes him credible as a favorable match, and Maomao – who, as Jinshi implies, wouldn’t hesitate to drive him off if he wasn’t fit for her “bis sis” – is clearly of the same mind. He even gets the Jinshi seal of approval (even if he doesn’t know it) by sticking to his convictions. Meimei ominously mentioned a few episodes back that a courtesan getting everything she wants in a buy-out is a rarity, so seeing Pairin leave Verdigris with Lihaku might be a scenario worth rooting for. However, given the Next Episode preview, that seems more like a long-term maneuver than one which will play out in the short term.

The humor for the episode comes mostly from the well-established bag of tricks: Maomao dispassionately doing and saying things that would be racy for anyone else and carelessly wording things in ways that can easily be misinterpreted. (Really, Jinshi should have learned by now to expect this kind of behavior from her, but it is still entertaining to see him regularly thrown off by her antics and thought processes.) The brief mystery aspect comes from a short opening scenario involving the eunuch doctor and problems with his family’s paper-making business; I had thought they might skip this bit, since it doesn’t seem connected to any bigger scenario. It does, at least, explain how someone from a wealthy background like the doctor ended up as a eunuch, and raise a slight possible mystery as to how the doctor was unable to meet the elder sister who preceded him to the Rear Palace. Very possible that this is a throwaway detail, but the series has been known to recycle seemingly-innocuous details before. . .

In all, this felt like the simplest and quickest episode in this half. Still some nice detail work (Lihaku was, I believe. looking up at the same kind of tree in one shot as the branch in Pairin’s hand in the scene where she’s reading Maomao’s letter) and looked great on technical merits, so it can hardly be called weak, and it does make for a more relaxing story than the more dramatic events of recent episodes.