English Dub Review: The Apothecary Diaries “Taibon”

Overview:

Maomao is accused of attempting to escape and is tossed into an ancient method of torture and execution.

Our Take(Spoilers):

From what I can find, “Taibon” is a torture method involving leaving someone trapped with snakes, which makes sense because that’s exactly what happens to Maomao in response to her “escape” attempt. If only they knew that Maomao was the worst person, and you could do that too, because she loves snakes and creepy crawlies. She turns the snakes into a meal, and the guard decides to let her go, and she runs into Shisui.

This is when the episode takes a pretty dark turn. Shisui led Maomao to a room where there were a bunch of kids who seemed to be sleeping. Unfortunately, they weren’t sleeping; Shisui had poisoned them, including Kyou-u. She saw this as a kindness because they would have eventually died in far worse ways, according to her. As you can imagine, Maomao was appalled at what she had done.

Shisui had become one of the more interesting characters this season, but this will be hard to come back from. I’m sure she felt like she was doing it for the right reasons, but killing kids is a pretty awful thing to do. I only hope that the next couple of episodes give a little bit more explanation of why she felt the need to do this.