Reel Tastes & Travels – a light dose of entertainment to wake you up

Welcome back to The Apothecary Diaries. Full disclosure – I haven’t finished Season 1 yet so I may miss out on a few details. If so, I will try and come back and update it as I get done with Season 1 in parallel.

This is a fairly quiet start to the season beginning with a quick check-in with all the main characters. The Verdigris House granny is seeing dollar signs as she delivers another order of ‘special books’ to Maomao for the rear palace. If I recall correctly, this is a follow up to a sort of sex-ed course that Maomao conducted for the senior concubines on the Emperor’s behest. Among the concubines, Lihua is doing well, Lishu is still harbouring a girlish crush on Jinshi, the newest Concubine Luluan has gotten additional attendants assigned by Lord Shishu, and Gyokuyou is as playful as ever and remains Jinshi and Maomao’s biggest shipper. And Gyokuyou’s daughter, Lingli, remains cute as a button.

It appears Gyokuyou is pregnant again though this is a closely guarded secret given how critical children are to advancement in the rear palace. A pregnancy is like an open invitation to plotting by other less scrupulous concubines. As a precautionary measure, Maomao has moved her experiments to the palace doctor’s office. She had even arranged the delivery of the books there to avoid the critical eye of Gyokuyou’s head lady-in-waiting. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and men…Jinshi interrupts the delivery of the books and is intrigued by their quality (even if his interest in them is amusingly misconstrued by Gaoshun and Maomao). Inspired, he suggests to the Emperor to get a novel printed by the same bookmaker and gifted to the concubines. This is part of his earlier mentioned plans to improve the literacy rates among the palace women. And it appears to be successful as Maomao’s friend, Xiaolan, later tells her about a popular novel doing the rounds of the palace. The literate maids are reading it out to the others and this eventually motivates Xiaolan to learn how to read from Maomao so that she doesn’t have to rely on others when she wants to read the book.

The other subplot sees Gyokuyou ask Maomao to teach Princess Lingli about flowers and herbs when she takes her for walks as it might be useful for her in the future when she gets married. Long-term planning indeed! And again, it shows how Gyokuyou is quite wily despite her cheerful and playful exterior. It is on one of these walks that they come across the second Maomao of the title – a kitten whom Lingli is immediately enamored with. Maomao catches the kitten with the help of another (new?) maid and takes it back. However, it sets her thinking on how the kitten made into the palace as the rules for pets are quite strict. The Emperor decrees that they can keep the kitten and charges Maomao with looking after it.

Stray Musings

• Love that Maomao unthinkingly starts using the names of medicines and roots to teach Xiaolan and doesn’t even realize till Xiaolan asks if these are common words
• Gaoshun’s blush whenever Jinshi is interacting with Maomao!
• Gaoshun and the doctor are cat lovers! There’s a fun conversation where Maomao describes how cat lovers feel about cats and how incomprehensible it is to her and Jinshi reflects on the parallels with his interactions with Maomao:
  • The charm is in the mystery of not knowing what makes them so captivating – ☑
  
  
  • Can’t stop watching the cat and feel like reaching out and petting them – ☑
  
  
  • The cat is usually indifferent and only warms up when food is given – ☑