Rating: B+
To this point the series has studiously eschewed mystical explanations for anything, always going with the approach of the level-headed Maomao finding the practical explanation for events that may seem supernatural to the uninformed. You’d expected that to continue to be the case with a night where Yinghua drags Maomao to a night of ghost storytelling for ladies-in-waiting. Surprisingly, though, that only partly proves to be true this time around.
That a ghost story would be provided which Maomao can offer a perfectly plausible explanation for does, indeed, happen. It’s not at all uncommon in the real world for supernatural attributions to be applied to restrictions made for practical reasons, such as a forest being forbidden because the locals aren’t sure which foods in the forest are and aren’t poisonous, and sometime important historical details can be buried in tales like these. As Yinghua points out herself, such tales aren’t scary at all once you understand how they could really happened. On the other hand, the tale about the monk saving his own life by chanting sutras sounds like a more classic ghost story, the kind you could probably find some version of just about anywhere in the world. It doesn’t seem to have or need any deeper exploration.
The biggest mystery – and the one which might be the series’ one concession to the genuinely supernatural – involves not one of the stories (at least not precisely), but the circumstances under which the gathering takes place. The possibility that someone “in the know” was up to deadly mischief here can’t be entirely ruled out, as the host’s story sounds too much like some of the circumstances explored in the Empress Dowager’s recollections in the previous episode. However, no mortal motivation for trying to effectively suffocate all the attendees makes any sense here, especially since the attendees seem to come from diverse groups. That Maomao actively avoids contemplating the matter further also suggests that she has no ready explanation here, either. Like with Jinshi’s identity, she seems perfectly content to let this one slide, but for entirely difference reasons.
While the ghost story gathering is the main event, there are a couple of other details here with potential long-term consequences. For the first time since Maomao joined Jade Pavilion, it has new personnel, in the form of a trio of similar-looking sisters from the same village as Yinghua. 34 episodes in does seem like the right time for a cast expansion, and the way at least one of the sisters looks at Maomao (who, admittedly, would be an utterly perplexing person to an outsider) suggests that they may play some bigger role later on. The other is Maomao’s seemingly-innocuous observation about Shisui. These kind of details have a habit of coming up again later on in this series, so I did some checking, and she has the same eye color and hair shade as Loulan, the new Pure Consort. Not out of question that could be a coincidence, and Shisui’s normal personality certainly seems at odds with the disposition of Loulan’s Pavilion, but being this completely two-faced would hardly be out of line for the setting. Also, Shisui didn’t first appear until after Loulan did and her affiliation has not even been hinted at to this point. This definitely bears watching as the story progresses.
So what’s Jinshi so concerned about at the end of the episode? We’ll find out next time in what should be a return to the more plot-driven side of the overall story. And the matter with the frog seen in the OP is approaching!
USA Anime 