English Dub Review: The Apothecary Diaries “Reducing Two to One”;“The Eunuch and the Courtesan”

Overview:

Maomao confronts Fengming about the dark secret she’s been hiding from her noble Lady Ah-Duo.

Discovering that Maomao’s kidnappers were connected to Fengming’s family, Jinshi is faced with a choice between keeping Maomao in the rear palace where he can be near her or releasing her from her service.

Our Take:

There’s a lot of machinations and political maneuvering going on and I must admit that some of it goes a bit over my head. Fengming did some bad things but most of them by accident and well-intentioned. But as they say “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and that seems to be the case here as well. Fengming is the perfect example of how trying to cover up one lie can snowball until you can’t keep it secret anymore.

While the first episode was interesting, the fallout from it led to the second episode and that was where things were finally starting to get romantic. Jinshi likes to be around Maomao and when it seems like he will have to let her go because of what happened with Fengming he thinks about abusing his power to make her stay. But luckily, he’s a better guy than that but unluckily, he and Maomao are never on the same page. Unbeknownst to him Maomao wanted to stay in the rear palace but he thought she hated it there so he let her go. This was remedied pretty quickly though and I hope we start to get some romantic progress now.