The Apothecary Diaries

Episode 22

Maomao appears to be onto Lakan. She feels at least a little indebted to him for standing up for her when she was rushing to prevent Jinshi's death, but most of her is busy trying to figure out what his game is. When Jinshi comes to her mildly frantic about the blue roses, she knows pretty quickly who has made the request, much like she's well aware of who in the palace would have had the free time to be dying roses blue, but most of what appears to be driving her is a desire to put Lakan off-balance. We can assume that this stems from the attitude towards him she learned at Verdigris House, where he's very much persona non grata and regarded with deep suspicion. This episode shows that the treatment probably comes from his being neurodivergent in a time and place that doesn't respect or understand that rather than him being the creepy evil guy people see him as.

The most important reveal this week is that Lakan has prosopagnosia or face blindness. That means that he for the most part can't recognize individual faces or easily interpret facial expressions, and it can be (although isn't always) a comorbidity with ASD, and can also be caused by brain damage or conditions like encephalitis although it can also be present from birth. Lakan copes by seeing people's heads as either stones or chess pieces, and with the latter, he changes the classification of the piece when someone is promoted. It works well for his job, although it's not a perfect system; we can see that he classifies Jinshi as a “bishop,” which in Chinese chess restricts him to only one side of the board with only seven possible positions. (So sayeth the internet; if anyone can further explain the symbolism, please chime in in the forums! I'm not a chess player of any form of the game.) If we look at the palace as being two sides of the chessboard, with the inner on one side and the outer on the other, that suggests that Lakan isn't aware of Jinshi's real status – or that he recognizes that Jinshi is currently hampered by his role as a “eunuch.” How much of Lakan's worldview Maomao understands is still up in the air. We can make an educated guess that she's at least partially aware since she introduces nail painting to the court specifically because she knows that the flash of bright color will be enough to distract her biological father.

Whatever your feelings about Lakan, it is nice to see that we're being shown that there's more to him than someone neurodivergent being solely painted as evil. Most people don't understand him, it's true, but this week shows that people's assumptions about him aren't necessarily true. It's worth pointing out that the emperor has been shown to have trouble recognizing Loulan when she changes her outfit's nationality or her hairstyle, so it's clear that Lakan isn't the only person to have these issues; it's just that there are more pronounced and perhaps influenced by something else in the way his brain is wired. Although it's probably worth considering that Loulan is deliberately trying to be off-putting – she wouldn't be the first concubine to do so, and both her attitude and her father's this week are almost deliberately combative, albeit in an understated way. Lakan feels much less dangerous than Loulan and her dad: the former is odd and obnoxious, but the latter two come across as calculating. They're like tomato hornworms to Lakan's plain old rose-eating caterpillar. Xiaolan shows how easy it is to pluck and toss a regular caterpillar but if you've ever seen a tomato hornworm, it's a lot harder to make yourself willing to touch it, even if it means it'll grow into a far more upsetting five-spotted hawkmoth if left alone.

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