Rating: A-
Although the circumstances comprising this episode were set up at the end of last episode, this one is largely a self-contained “mystery of the week” style caper, akin to what the series engaged in through much of the first half of the first season. For not the first time, a death is involved, but also for not the first time, the mystery isn’t about how the death happened or (mostly not) who was responsible. Instead, the mystery is more about who actually died and how it was covered up.
Gather more than 2,000 people into a contained, competitive environment and conflicts are likely to arise, and the Rear Palace – where not only a woman’s entire future but also the prosperity of her family may be at stake – is certainly no different. As we see here, the scheming isn’t just limited to high-ranking concubines, either. What, exactly, is going on here can be hard to follow on a single viewing, but the gist of it is that Jin, a concubine who (as I understand it) ranks just a step below Gyokuyou, Lishu, and Lihua, was a disagreeable sort who wasn’t getting any attention from the Emperor. (Most likely this was because she was a diagreeable sort.) Two years ago, she was likely responsible for poisoning concubine Son, who survived but with bad side effects, but no one could prove it. A year ago, she got into an altercation with Tao, a lower-ranked concubine who looked like her and had a marriage arranged at the end of her term (and whom she was probably bullying). An altercation broke out that accidentally resulted in Jin’s death, so her ladies-in-waiting had Jin’s body buried in secret and pressed Tao into being a stand-in for her, with the story that she had also been poisoned and her wrapped in bandages as a cover. With time for Tao’s marriage approaching, the ladies-in-waiting got desperate and poisoned Tao to match their cover story and passed her death off as Jin’s. Or at least that’s Maomao’s understanding of what happened.
That things could escalate to such an extreme is hardly a stretch when one considers the matter with Fengming in season 1 and how harsh and thorough the consequences were there. The whole situation reminds us that Maomao’s comments in episode 1 about keeping her head down and just blending in weren’t without good reason.
The framing device for the whole affair is mushrooms. They are both the instrument of chaos and the key to sorting out the mystery. The featured mushroom here (shown below) is poison fire coral, an actual mushroom that is among the most poisonous fungi in the world. Direct contact can cause inflammation, death is possible from ingesting it, and it can be found widely in Asia:
Other types of mushrooms, meanwhile, proved key to finding where the real Jin’s body was buried. The writing here condenses Maomao’s investigation quite a bit, as the payoff here is more important than the methods for getting to it in this case, but comments about the smell last episode proved, as expected, to not be idle details.
Manipulating Maomao into digging into this matter (heh!) isn’t the only thing afoot this episode, either. Jinshi’s grand plan isn’t just about distributing novels as a roundabout way to encourage more servant girls to get educated; he’s looking to use that as a stepping stone for drawing more of the girls into formal education. Whether he came up with that idea on his own or was influenced by his interactions with Maomao is irrelevant; the end result will be a more formalized version of what Maomao was doing with Xiaolin. That Jinshi and Gaoshun were alarmed when Maomao seemed pleased by it is one of the episode’s funniest moments.
While there are other humorous moments slickly mixed into the very serious content, my favorite isn’t that one but instead Maomao contemplating Jinshi’s motives while in line to pay respects at what was supposedly Jin’s funeral. The way Maomao just nonchalantly approved when she suspected that Jinshi may have been looking at her as a possible poisoner culprit, and thus set her on this task partly as a test, is as much a classic Maomao moment as her catty reactions.
But the adventures with the north side of the palace grounds aren’t done yet! If I am interpreting the Next Episode segment correctly, we’ll be back there again next episode.
USA Anime 