Shadows House S1E11: "The Dark Drink"

This review was commissioned by @ArisKatsaris


The final three episodes of the season basically complete the genre shift that was already starting in the debut arc. They also come with more exposition and worldbuilding, this time much more elegantly delivered than the loredump about morphs in episode 10.

We also get even more recontextualization for the early episodes, as Kate tells us (through Emilico) more about what she was really doing during and before those first few eps. Basically, "Shadows House" had an in media res beginning, but it wasn't apparent to us because of Emilico's amnesiac POV.


"The Dark Drink" consists largely of a dialogue between Kate and Emilico, as the former tries to snap her back out of the trance that drinking the Lord Grandfather's milky fluid put her in, and then comes clean to her about things once she's succeeded. The first few scenes, though, are just Kate being terrified and miserable about Emilico's state, and they're some of the best scenes of "Shadows House" thus far.

Kate spent the entire first half of the season terrified of Emilico. She didn't yet know exactly how much control the Lord Grandfather has and doesn't have over the "living dolls" at that point. Any sign of irregularity in front of Emilico could, to the best of Kate's knowledge, have resulted in Emilico reporting her, and Kate's own true nature being revealed. She had to snap at Emilico when she pried too close, while still playing the role of a slightly-moodier-than-average juvenile shadow just acting on its own weird quirks. Simultaneously browbeat Emilico, and walk on eggshells around her.

Meanwhile, for that entire time, she was surreptitiously trying to help free Emilico's mind. That was the reason why she gave her a name so different from her own, in breaking from typical Shadows culture. At the time, Kate claimed that she was naming Emilico after a character from a book she'd been reading. While the episode isn't explicit about it, it's strongly implied that Kate managed to learn Emilico's true, human name from before she was taken to the manor and mindwiped, and returned it (or something similar to it) to her. In a million small, plausibly deniable ways, Kate was trying to get Emilico off of the Shadows House script, mentally and emotionally stimulating her in exactly the ways living dolls aren't meant to be. She really had been planning to tell all after the debut (assuming they didn't die in it), now confident that Emilico was both independent-minded and trustworthy.

However, being given a second cup of the liquid that is absolutely not the Lord Grandfather's man juice, Emilico has been reset to how she was when she and Kate first met. Reduced to repeating built-in mantras about serving the Shadows Family, not fretting about unimportant things, and doing as he mistress wills. Which means Kate has to go back to being at least somewhat afraid of her.

Well, she's not going to go through this whole damned process again. Kate is now personally invested in Emilico as a friend in need of help, and a lone emotional support in a frightening and hostile world. She can't bear to see her in zombiemode for that long again. She tries consulting the orientation manuals for both newborn Shadows and for new living dolls, but of course there's nothing in there that could be used against the clan.

Anything sensitive or vulnerability-inducing is reserved for older teens, who have completed their debuts, fused with their "faces," and undergone more thorough indoctrination.

Kate's reprieve comes, appropriately, in the form of her own trust and appreciation for Emilico. Emilico asked questions. She might have a silly-stupid demeanour, but Kate knows how sharp and attentive to detail her mind actually is under the ditzy facade. So, she starts searching Emilico's own servant quarter space, looking for personal projects that Emilico might have been doing on her own and cleverly keeping secret from her mistress. Sure enough, she finds the diary entitled "trivial things" that Emilico started keeping a while back, allegedly to get intrusive thoughts out of her head. In it, Kate finds Emilico's thoughts regarding her communal work cleaning up the kitchen and common rooms with the other dolls. Including quite a few "trivial things" that she had on her mind after the incident with the scorch-phantom monster that almost ate Rosemary.

After they got Rosemary free from the parasite (in light of what we now know, scorches and phantoms have got to be a kind of deformed pseudo-morph that try to regenerate themselves from discarded but still living morph biomatter), they'd had to treat her for "soot sickness." A process that involved intense, prolonged hydration.

Obviously, the Lord Grandfather's man juice isn't exactly the same thing as what the scorches choke their victims with. However, both of them are mind-controlling effects carried by types of morph-soot. So, what purges the human body of one of them will probably also purge it of the other.

This next sequence is absolutely painful, in the best possible way.

Kate orders Emilico to drink water. She obeys.

She orders her to drink more water. She obeys.

When Emilico says she can't drink anymore, Kate orders her to drink more water anyway. She complies. To the point of vomiting. Once she's emptied her stomach, Kate orders her to drink more water. Which she does. Until she vomits a second time.

Emilico is begging to be allowed to stop, insomuch as her current state allows her to. Kate, meanwhile, is in as much emotional pain as Emilico is in physical pain as she orders her to keep drinking and purging. When they finally stop, it's not because Emilico can't do it anymore, but rather because Kate can't bear to make her.

The worst part is that it might not have even been necessary. Emilico being pushed to the point where she's begging to be allowed to stop, and Kate then relenting and tearfully comforting and apologizing to her, seems to be what finally breaks through. The water-purging may have still played a contributing role, but subsequent scenes suggest that it was only a minor one.

There was no way that Kate could have known that it wasn't necessary. Her course of action was rational and well-considered, given what she knew. But still. Learning this even in retrospect has to make it that much worse. Once again, she's been forced to play the role of a cruel slavemaster like her enemies, and this time she chose that solution to the problem without it having been a necessary one.

...

I think that might be an important bit of characterization for Kate, actually. However much outside knowledge she was given, however much her indoctrination has been derailed, she's still had a lot of formative experience in the Shadows House. Reacting to it and outwitting it, if nothing else. That still plays a major role in who she is, how she sees the world, and what possibilities her mind is able to conceive. She is going to need further deprogramming even if the Lord Grandfather is destroyed and she gets adopted by a loving human family.

On that subject, the fact that Kate appears to have a secret human host body already is something that we'll need to confront sooner or later. Is there a suppressed consciousness still in there that can be saved? Can she be saved without killing Kate, now that they're so thoroughly integrated? Like I said, if Kate really does hate what the Shadows are doing like she claims, she's going to have to cross this bridge eventually.

...

The first sign of Emilico shaking it off comes when she tells Kate that she isn't crying from the repeated induced vomiting cycles. She's crying because she just remembered the last thing she had been thinking about before she drank the sootjizz. That Rum and Shirley didn't make it through the debut, and that Rum has - as far as anyone knows - already been liquidated.

Granted, now that we've seen what Kate just managed, it's possible that Rum might be saveable. Whatever it is they do to turn "faces" into the "veiled doll" servitors, it's probably another soot-induced condition. Which means that they might be able to restore the veiled dolls too through these same methods, though it'll probably take a lot more work.

The next debutant to un-sootify their face is, unsurprisingly, John. He still has that big crush on Kate, and he'd already proven himself inclined to side with her over the powers that be during the debut. He also, we learn, has been just as distraught over Sean's reversion to factory settings as Kate was over Emilico's. And, we also learn why he's so much more empathetic and independent-minded than a young Shadow is supposed to be. It turns out he IS another infiltrator like Kate, but not by anyone's design.

In that early episode, when Emilico fell out the window and Kate broke the rules to run outside and help her, John happened to be watching. Being early in his own development, he still had a lot of morph instincts guiding him. Observe, and mimic.

Kate's behavior, and her relationship with Emilico, was a disruptive element in John's development. Because it was so different from everything else he was being shown, he sort of latched onto it. This is why he's kinder and more human than the other young shadows, and this is why he fell in love with Kate. The product of a partial morph-fixation being filtered through humanlike emotions.

She turned him without knowing it or meaning to. Perhaps this is an outcome that whoever installed Kate was hoping for. Perhaps it's just a lucky unforeseen development.

Once she informs him of what's going on with his own companion, John tries to deal with Shaun with words alone first. When that doesn't work, he discovers another method. Not pleasant, but significantly less unpleasant than the one Kate used.

Being forced to fight his own master. Ordered to fight his own master. To injure his own master, if possible. While said master repeats treasonous things about the Shadows Family, and attacks him all the harder when he tells him he's not supposed to say that.

John and Shaun are, predictably, an even match physically. It requires them to fight themselves to exhaustion, but eventually the concentrated mass of contradictions being literally punched into Shaun all at once are enough to break his own brainwashing.

Water might have helped, perhaps. Regardless, cognitive therapy with a bit of fight-or-flight stimulation alongside it seems to do the trick just fine.

Anyway. Now that Emilico is herself (well, "herself." She's back to the way she was at the end of the debut arc, I mean) again, Kate can tell her everything. We're not told all of it ourselves just yet. For instance, Kate either doesn't know or we just aren't relayed the story behind why she knows all these things, has all this experience, and (seemingly) already has a human body. However, she confirms that the Shadows Family rules over a decently-sized chunk of land, inhabited by multiple peasant villages who have no idea what they are and who provide them with children for "adoption" every now and again. The whole face/servant/maid thing isn't told to them at all. As far as these humans know, some of their children are taken in by the Shadowses, and then a few years later they see teenaged versions of those same children among the Shadows.

If they never want to talk to their old families again after that, well, that's understandable. They have bigger and better things to do now.

There's a train system running from the Shadows House to the villages of their fiefdom. Both the train engines and the factories that the village industries run on are powered by coal provided by the Shadows. Said coal is either produced entirely by the Lord Grandfather, or it's normal coal that he laces with his soot after it's been mined. In any case, the ambient air pollution that the humans are constantly breathing in doesn't have full-on brainwashing effects, but it makes them suggestible, docile, and incurious.

I imagine that the farmers and woodsmen who live further away from the trains and factories are probably unaffected. Which in turn means that the Shadows probably don't impose on them so much as to ask for their children.

Anyway, this all fits pretty well with my earlier inferences. The Shadows are powerful, but brittle. They need to keep their subjects drugged juuust enough to not ask questions without it being obvious to outside visitors or rurals that there's something wrong with them. Likewise, their need to pretend to be just an eccentric human dynasty suggests that they're not confident they could repel an invasion by outside humans, so they try to avoid attention.

As the screenshots above suggest, Kate's narration comes along with our first proper glimpse of outside. Very much welcome, at this point!

Emilico's reaction to learning the truth is both adorable, and proof that she's back to the way she was before.

Hah.

Unfortunately, the relief and catharsis of Emilico's (and Shaun's) restoration is short lived. By the next day, Emilico has vanished. Kate doubts she'd have run away without saying anything to her, and - sure enough - she soon learns through the grapevine that Edward recently disguised himself as a Veiled Doll and pushed a cart with a suspiciously human-shaped object on it into the adult wing last night.

Of course. Edward WAS trying to think of another way to deal with suspected infiltrator Kate, last time we saw him. And he WAS granted responsibility for the children's wing as a reward for his successful debut program, so he'd have been able to manage this easily enough. Grabbing Emilico is less likely to ruffle the other Shadows' feathers than grabbing Kate herself, especially if he thinks he can get her to talk in just a short time.


The final arc of the season is a rescue. However, after reviewing the next couple episodes, I came to learn that this entire subplot rearing its head now with Edward capturing Emilico is anime-only, and therefore sits in an awkward spot with regards to continuity. In retrospect, this makes a lot more sense of how...well, you'll see in the next couple of posts.