The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Episode 46

Loulan may not have made her peace, but she's certainly made her bed, and that's something Maomao doesn't quite know how to deal with. I mentioned a few episodes ago that Maomao and her family were the people not wearing masks in this show, but perhaps for Maomao, the more accurate statement is that she's unaware of the mask she's wearing. I'm not talking about her freckles or attempts to downplay her appearance; it's more a fundamental question of who she is as a person. Maomao has always seen herself as stoic, the kind of person who does what needs to be done without any real emotional involvement. But faced with Shisui/Loulan's actions, she suddenly finds that she does care – and a lot. The erstwhile consort has been nothing but a friend to Maomao, and she's certainly more of an innocent in the Shi clan than either of her parents. And now she's willing to sacrifice herself to bring them down.

It's hard, I realize, to think of her as “an innocent” when she poisoned a bunch of children, although she intended to spare them suffering when the army arrived. Even Lihaku remarks that these kids would have been killed either way, because there's no hope for the Shi clan now. The only person who might be able to make it out of this is Suirei because she has imperial blood, but even that might not protect her. But unlike Shishou or Shenmei, Loulan and Suirei are victims. Shenmei acted consciously, Shishou's inaction in the face of his wife's behavior made him complicit, but the daughters did their best with the circumstances of their birth. In that light, Loulan poisoning the children can be read as a kindness she wishes someone had performed for her and her sister. Even if, as Lihaku notes, the children can't be buried with their mothers, at least they don't have to witness them slipping away into depravity.

Evil rarely wears the face we might expect in this show. The late emperor was a beautiful monster, his mother an enabler, and that's the case with Shenmei and Shishou as well, with the genders flipped. Was Shenmei broken by her time in the palace? Maybe, but she didn't get the help or support she needed at home, either. Instead, she reveled in inflicting pain on as many people as possible while Shishou ignored it or was willfully ignorant of it. Shisui and Suirei's kidnapping of Maomao may have looked like a mistake at first, and a costly one, but it may not have been – in Shisui's mind, taking Jinshi's favorite court lady could easily have been the final piece of her plan to bring her family down. She doesn't want harm to come to Maomao, but she's also not above using her.

While things do get dark again later in the light novel series, this, for my money, is the grimmest The Apothecary Diaries gets. It's a major turning point for both Maomao and Jinshi, too: Maomao is forced to recognize that she's not as emotionless as she likes to think, and Jinshi has to put off his mask and be his true self to do what's important to him. Those are the sort of things you can't backtrack on, and both of them will have seen things they can't unsee. Even if Loulan has been hinting at giving the children the resurrection potion (still a possibility until they're cremated or buried), the sight of those wrapped bodies being carried from the room is the sort of thing that haunts nightmares for years to come.

Will it all have been worth it in the end? Shenmei needs to go, that's for sure, but blaming Shishou, Suirei, and Loulan feels like punishing her victims. Wherever you trace this disaster back to, it almost doesn't matter when you consider the number of people who won't come out of it whole, or at all.

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