The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Episode 27

Jinshi sure has Maomao's number – he knows that the best way to get her to figure out whether something rotten is going on in the rear palace is to tempt her with possibly poisonous plants. Of course, knowing her that well means that he in no way should have been surprised by her figuring him out or wanting to keep corpse-sprouting fungi for her own use, but even in a story as well-written as this, you can't have everything. And in all fairness, Jinshi doesn't seem to have been entirely sure what, if anything, Maomao would find in the northern part of the rear palace – all he knew for sure was that a concubine died and that he doesn't trust the circumstances.

He has a good reason for that – this particular concubine, Jin, wasn't known for being a nice person, and she fell ill with reported food poisoning right around the time someone seemed to be attempting to end Gyokuyou's pregnancy. It doesn't take a huge leap of logic to wonder if Jin was behind both herself and either messed up or deliberately poisoned herself to throw investigators off…or to align herself with the more powerful consort. Jin has only now died, which also seems suspicious, since much of what happened to her doesn't track with food poisoning, something Maomao immediately notices. Like one of her ladies-in-waiting, the corpse is covered with a blotchy rash and is missing hanks of hair, neither aligned with the sort of poisoning Jinshi seems to want Maomao to look for. They might come from touching something poisonous, including some varieties of mushroom, but not necessarily from ingesting them, and almost definitely not from ingesting them two years ago.

This sets the stage for a bigger mystery, because while Maomao does figure out what happened to Jin, as well as recently missing lower concubine Tao, the question of the inflammation and hair loss remains largely unanswered at the end of this episode. Yes, the garish, finger-shaped mushrooms she finds and takes uncharacteristic care around could explain both (and possibly do), but not when or why the women would have come into contact with them. We should also, perhaps, wonder about the fact that the northern quarter of the rear palace, described by Maomao as a “garden of women,” has been allowed to go to seed. We knew that from Shisui, who goes bug hunting there, but not why. Since skeletons don't smell like corpses, it also raises the question of whether there's more than one body that Maomao found there, which might help explain the proliferation of mushrooms and insects. Since Jinshi is planning to start a school for the illiterate maids in the rear palace in one of the abandoned buildings there, we'll likely find out; in the novels, at least, loose ends are rarely left hanging forever.

I love that Jinshi and the emperor are actively working to improve the women's lives in the rear palace. The distribution of novels seems to have been done with the express purpose of them being passed along down the social ladder, and seeing Xiaolan teaching other laundry maids to write is delightful; as Maomao said, this means that she and the other women now have vastly improved chances of a good life once their term of service in the palace is up. At the same time, Maomao's right when she thinks that Jinshi's privileged upbringing has made him blind to some of the issues of educating the lower-class ladies. Jin's story dovetails with this particularly nicely as it shows the petty nature of some of the women in the rear palace, and I daresay this isn't the last time it will surface in this season. It's less a question of “never the twain shall meet” and more one of learning that not everyone is the same, even if they share living space – and sometimes, that's enough to cause a deadly problem.

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