Episode 42 – The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

But Little Red, she knew these woods
Each tree and every stone
Doesn’t matter either way
When there’s a wolf inside your home

You can hear the growling
So you throw the dog a bone
You’ll catch more bees with honey, dear
But what does mother know?
—Lydia the Bard, “Feed Us Your Girls”

The late emperor is inescapable. He’s dead, and has been for some time, but his ghost and the ghosts of his crimes remain in the rear palace. They’ve saturated the walls of the buildings and, more importantly, the hearts and minds of his victims. Women like Shenlü have been forced to remain at the scene of the crimes against them, unable to escape, stuck among the ghosts and shadows of their pasts. The wolf was inside their home. His growls still echo in their ears.

It was easy to write Shenlü’s actions against Gyokuyou and Lihua off as anger or bitterness; both emotions are more than deserved. Shenlü was striking out at the royal line as best she could, hoping to find solace or salvation in taking them down. But when she sees Jinshi’s face this week, with his kind and gentle smile, it becomes impossible to see her as anything but a survivor of horrific assault. Yes, we knew before what had happened to her, but her panic and fear make it all real. Suddenly, she’s a little girl again, facing her own personal wolf. She’s too young to say no, too young to understand what’s happening to her. There’s no kind woodsman to cut her out, either; she’s been living in the wolf’s belly all this time, and when someone comes to her about it, all she can see is another wolf.

It’s not surprising that everything comes back to the late emperor’s court. Even the dead court lady who used to tell the ghost stories is a part of it, and that carries over to Shisui, Suirei, and Loulan. That makes Loulan’s escape from the rear palace stand out, because she’s managed what Shenlü and the other little girls couldn’t: she got away. It wasn’t easy, obviously; as Jinshi notes, it required a huge amount of ladies-in-waiting, clothing, and makeup. It needed careful planning and an escape route. And she would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling boy and his pesky cat. But even with Jinshi having found out what happened – and he must have looked like a wolf himself to the false Loulan – the fact of the matter is still that Loulan’s no longer in the rear palace. She did it. She got away.

If nothing else, Loulan’s flight may be a perfect excuse for Jinshi to leave court himself. As the overseer of the rear palace, it’s his job to keep the women in line and accounted for, so arguably, it would be his duty to retrieve an escaped consort. There’s no way he’d get permission to follow one random apothecary, but Loulan’s an entirely different story. And it might be in everyone’s best interest to get Jinshi out of there for a bit because he’s having more and more difficulty in maintaining his “Jinshi” persona. He may not want to be Ka Zuigetsu, but he certainly wants to act like him in this moment.

Going after Maomao would also allow him to put uncomfortable revelations on the back burner. Shenlü’s panic attack and suicide attempt force him to understand that he really is related to the late emperor; as a child, he believed court gossip that he was the child of Anshi and a lover. (He had no real reason to think his brother was his father, remember.) But Shenlü saying that he looks just like the late emperor is something he can’t write off, not with the reaction she had. That’s got to be uncomfortable, to say the least; it’s confirmation that he’s blood-related to a pedophile and rapist. At the very least, it makes his position as crown prince more solid, at the worst it could make him worry about whether or not he’ll turn out like his grandfather, even though nothing has indicated that that’s the case.

Is Loulan in the village where Maomao has been taken? The lantern plants seem to indicate that. That town is the only piece of the puzzle we’re missing right now, and Maomao is well-positioned to figure it out. Lakan is almost certainly on his way there, Lahan has revealed that he may know something about what’s going on, and Jinshi is champing at the bit to start running. Maybe the ghosts of the past can be, if not exorcised, acknowledged so that the girls can move on.

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