The Apothecary Diaries S1E1-3 (continued)

The second and third episodes of The Apothecary Diaries are one of the more frustrating viewing experiences I've had. Not because of their stories, but because of how they were told. Or, really, how they weren't told. Episode three especially.

I might be extending undue credit to the original work, but I still am really, really getting the impression that the blame for this rests with the adaptation. It feels like the series is spending way too much time on the wrong things, while relating important plot points in blink-or-you'll-miss-it dialogue summaries or even leaving them on the cutting room floor entirely.

The teaser for episode two, "Chilly Apothecary," suggests that Maomao will be investigating the attempted poisoning of a group of imperial soldiers. The first few minutes of the episode suggest that this investigation will occur against a backdrop of Maomao easing into her new position as Gyokuyo's lady-in-waiting and getting a baptism by fire in the intricacies of rear palace politics now that she's someone people pay attention to. I get that balancing the A and B plots might be difficult, if you're limited to a single, 22 minute episode. But that's not enough for me to forgive Maomao solving the poisoning case in a single conversation, without so much as looking at the crime scene, interviewing a witness, or even inspecting the evidence.

Like, the episode actually has her drawing (correct) conclusions based on evidence that she doesn't have access to. An omission made even more galling by this little gem in the subsequent episode:

It sure would have been nice if we could have seen you follow that advise last time, Maomao. :/

The more slice-of-life-y stuff that takes up the bulk of this episode is fine, for the most part. If they'd just made a clean job of this by cutting out the mystery of the poisoned soldiers entirely and just having this be a low-stakes breather episode about Maomao getting used to her new position, I'd have enjoyed it much more.

Episode three, "The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit," is much worse about this. Unlike "Chilly Apothecary," it actually does spend most of its screentime addressing the mystery set up in the teaser. Only for said mystery to once again be solved by Maomao staring directly at her naval without doing any actual investigating, citing evidence that she never looked at in order to back up her claims, and then the episode ending by hanging itself on the emotional impact of a romance that we were only told about in the last two minutes.

Like I said, I could be mistaking the cause of these issues. Maybe the original novel(s) were also this much of a mess. But the way that it flows, it seems much more like they had to condense a lot of material into each episode, and they just made all the worst decisions on what to keep and what to cut.

Still, while the decision to spend so much time on it at the expense of other things might have been misjudged, the palace politics material is at least interesting. Mostly.

Unsurprisingly, the chief eunuch Jinshi is the character who gets the most exploration in these establishing chapters. He continues to show the same sort of sleuthing skills as Maomao's own in "Chilly Apothecary," and is perhaps arguably the real protagonist of the episode.

One detail we learn early on is that Jinshi's sex appeal is not incidental to him having this position.

Part of this is the relatively innocent "knows who to smile and bat his lashes at in order to get promotion opportunities" thing directed at his superiors. A more insidious aspect of it, and one that emphasizes just how deranged the underlying logic of palace society really is, is that Jinshi has actually been instructed by his own masters to be flirtatious toward the concubines. Lead them on, see if any of them go for it, and then have them demoted in the pecking order or perhaps even punished more harshly if they show even a hint of sexual interest in any person besides the Emperor.

Even though the person they're showing interest in is a literal eunuch who is incapable of threatening the line of succession.

Even though there are nearly a thousand concubines in the rear palace, and many of them will probably never actually be visited by the Emperor in their lives.

I don't think the Emperor actually cares. I don't think that anyone actually cares. But enough important people think that they should care, or are afraid that the general public cares, that they police it zealously regardless. It's not clear how Jinshi himself feels about this assignment of his. He enjoys politicking and social combat and pitting his wits and charm against those of various and sundry, and he doesn't seem to much care who his opponents are or what they're fighting for. Whether Jenshi has any greater secret ambitions of his own under all this remains to be seen.

We do get some humanizing moments, though. For instance, Jinshi and the audience both learn that Maomao's apparent attraction to him in the pilot was purely academic rather than visceral. When he tries to play his game with her, he's shocked and impressed with the speed of her rebuff.

He should have tried tilting his petals toward her and growing some nice girthy stamens. Too late though.

The humanizing part comes when Jinshi, after probing some more and determining that Maomao's rejection was genuine and not a performance of her own, becomes more comfortable with her rather than less. Sure, he's lost a potential route to wrapping her around his finger and getting more influence within the coterie of one of the emperor's most favored consorts, and that's frustrating. Sure, he does perhaps get to amuse himself with the challenge of finding a different tactic, and that's engaging. But underlying all that is that he finally has someone other than his fellow eunuchs who doesn't have any kind of sexual feelings about him at all, and that's such a welcome breath of fresh air.

For all that Jinshi has weaponized his beauty and skill at flirtation to get ahead in life, it's come with a cost. A cost that's pointed out to the audience when a visiting military officer tries to slip Jinshi some potent aphrodisiacs in some gifted dumplings. Jinshi smells a rat, and offers the dumplings to Maomao. When she sniffs out the drugs and gets outraged, he giggles impishly and congratulates her for passing his little test, he just cooked up these dumplings for her to see how good at this stuff she really was. As soon as he's alone, Jinshi then throws them away and locks the door to his office.

Even the audience isn't in on the exact sequence of events until we see him doing this and the story comes together.

Jinshi vs. Colonel Sexpest comes joined at the hip with another new element introduced in "Chilly Apothecary." After being invited to Lady Gyokuyo's coterie, Maomao finds out that she's not going to be her only lady-in-waiting. And also that her new job, while it comes with creature comforts, leisure time, and the odd interesting detectivework assignment, has a highly unpleasant catch.

The other ladies-in-waiting are falling over themselves with sympathy for Maomao. Especially after how many assassination attempts Gyokuyo just had to survive during her recent pregnancy before it turned out to be a politically nonthreatening girl. Sure, Gyokuyo is probably going to be relatively untargeted while she's still tending to her newborn, but as soon as she's ready for another attempt at heir-production it's going to start right back up again.

Maomao's own reaction, as are her reactions to most things, is rather different from the average person's.

Her turning into an actual catgirl rather than just being named like one is a recurring thing during chibi/sd sequences.

Poisons! She gets to look for poisons! And for a minute there she was afraid she was going to still be bored to tears! She's very good at finding poison, and her immune system is also hardened against many of them thanks to a series of childhood incidents that she did not regret at the time and still doesn't now.

The fact that she gets to eat awesome food while doing this is just another perk. Maomao might not have much interest in sex (at least, as far as we've seen) but food is a simple pleasure that she does indeed enjoy.

Also, related to the intersection between those two things, the incident with Jinshi's dumplings inspires Gyokuyo to ask Maomao if she can make aphrodesiacs as well as detecting them. Cue some lighthearted shenanigans involving Maomao cooking up some special pastries for Gyokuyo to share with the emperor the next time he visits her, and the other ladies-in-waiting heedlessly nibbling at them. It's a nice little breather from the heavier stuff surrounding it.

Although I still wish it would have spent any or all of that screentime on showing Maomao solve the actual case of the episode instead. Seriously, they should have either done that, or gotten rid of the damned case altogether.

Maomao's integration into Lady Gyokuya's household-within-a-household continues into "The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit." For instance, there's an ongoing thread through these episodes about Maomao gradually coming to trust Gyokuya enough to tell her how she ended up working here. When she learns that...okay, I still do not understand how this indentured servitude system is supposed to work given the context, but Gyokuya exploits the rules in a way that will force the slavers into debt to the Rear Palace, and then pays Maomao out of her own pocket. So, that's nice of her. Or, well. "Nice." There are pragmatic reasons to want to keep the drugs-and-poisons expert who shares your apartment happy with you, heh.

The concubines seem to have more access to personal funds than other details of these episodes suggested (some background information in "Matter of the Spirit" makes them seem like outright prisoners). I suppose it depends on one's status within the harem. Which in turn hinges both on the emperor's favor, and on the background of the girl in question. Some of them are princesses from relatively powerful neighbouring kingdoms, some are from powerful families within the empire, and some are from minor city states on the periphery hoping to get noticed or whatever. The degree to which the mother and her family are able to influence any heir she produces is unclear, given the tight control that the emperor seems to have over the entire Rear Palace operation.

The exact status of concubines and family is also relevant to (and remains ambiguous throughout) the mystery case of this last episode. One concubine - a princess from a minor kingdom who made a mistake while playing music for the emperor and hasn't been touched by him since - has started having bizarre sleepwalking episodes.

It turns out that this woman has been self-sabotaging, first deliberately screwing up her performance, and then pretending to sleepwalk and do other unnerving things, in order to be dismissed from the harem. And um...apparently she had a teenaged sweetheart who's in the imperial army now, and somehow (it's implied that a sympathetic Jinshi played a part in this, but not exactly how. Good to know he does have a heart at least!) they arranged things so that the emperor would give her to him as a gift in order to make some use out of the evidently damaged concubine.

These women are political dignitaries of a kind - many of them literal princesses - but they can also be given away to military officers without political consequences? I really don't get this.

Anyway, the issues with this plot are twofold. First, once again, Maomao ends up figuring it out without ever looking at evidence that could have led her to that conclusion (or, if she does look at such evidence, she does so offscreen without any acknowledgement of it). Second, we only find out the truth in like, the last minute of a half of the episode. And the framing suggests that we're supposed to be invested in the success of this star-crossed romance, even though we never even got to know the girl at all.

We do get a brief conversation between Maomao and the military guy, when the latter disguises himself as a palace eunuch and sneaks in to see his beloved before her passing off to him is made official. But it's just not nearly enough.

The episode ends with Maomao and Lady Gyokuyo talking about what just happened, as the reunited lovers walk out of the palace with the emperor and his thugs being none the wiser. A conversation in which Gyokuyo not-so-vaguely implies that she might have a similar story herself, for all that she (at least apparently) loves the baby daughter that the emperor has given her. Asking Maomao if she thinks it's wrong for Gyokuyo to envy the girl who managed to escape. Maomao, herself a kinda-sorta slave, is supportive. Whatever happiness either of them finds at the rear palace - whether it be Maomao with her new access to the doctor's medicine cabinets, or Gyokuyo with her baby - are just grasping at whatever silver linings they can in a terrible situation.


It's a great setup, full of interesting characters. Maomao being basically immune to social norms makes her a perfect person to bounce off of a regimented, ostentatious, overly polite and ceremonial setting like this.

One character who I haven't talked about is the Emperor himself. While we do catch some glimpses of him here and there, we never hear him speak, and everything we know about him is either secondhand from the concubines or implicit from his policies. Part of this is just a product of us mostly following Maomao's POV. She's just one out of several attendants to one of his many hundreds of concubines, so she'd never realistically interact with him. But part of it is also that the emperor as a person is unimportant, and humanizing him would only confuse matters. He is the grinding, wasteful, ridiculously baroque machine that all the characters are caught in. A machine scratching itself apart from the inside with every motion, costing itself more and more effort with each subsequent action. The emperor is just an empty suit hanging off of the front of it and making it look like it still has a purpose.

I just hope the show learns to use its time better in the following episodes. Like, "The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit" spent more time on Maomao watching the concubine dancing hauntingly while faking her sleepwalking or listening to the servants blather about there being a "ghost" haunting the walls (it's just a sleepwalking lady, and I don't know why *they* wouldn't know that) than it does on any story progression, mystery-solving, or character development. "Chilly Alchemist" at least had a lot of different things it was dividing its attention among, but "Spirit" didn't have that excuse. Still, the atmosphere is excellent, the characters are excellent, and the mysteries and detectivework could be really engaging if they got more focus.