The Apothecary Diaries, in a few respects, drew me in by both being very similar but very different from a historical fiction mystery series I was really into when I was younger – the Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters – which worked really well to hook me, with the characters and the mysteries keeping me hooked.

Like Brother Cadfael, Mao Mao is a person whose knowledge of solving crimes, and her background in science has come from her knowledge of medicine. Like Cadfael, Mao Mao has a tremendous amount of worldly knowledge that she’s obtained firsthand. Unlike Cadfael – who is a soldier who fought in the Crusades and had (little did he know) a child before returning to England and taking holy orders, Mao Mao is a teenage girl who was raised in (basically) a brothel, and experiencing what humanity is capable of through that way, and instead of voluntarily taking holy orders, she’s kidnapped and sold into service in the harem of the Emperor – not as an Imperial Consort (her family doesn’t have the political clout for that), but rather as a lowly servant.

Mao Mao’s knowledge as an Apothecary and her unwritten duty of care leads to her identifying some makeup as being responsible for sickening two of the consorts, and ultimately causing the death of one of their children, leading to her trying to covertly intervene – getting caught, and ending up serving as an under-the-radar second apothecary, and in turn getting her (against her better wishes) caught in the midst of court politics.

The mysteries in this series, for most of the first half, tend to fall more into the territory of House M.D. mysteries – Mao Mao is faced with a medical condition that she has to find the root cause of. Only in the second half does the political machinations kick into high gear, and Mao Mao now has to deal with murders. The plotting for both of these halves is generally very well done, though if you’re gonna solve some of them in advance, you do need to have some medical knowledge up front (like what the symptoms of lead poisoning are) otherwise you’re out of luck.

What is especially solid, though, is the character writing, and with it the animation of those characters. While last season we were spoiled for elf reaction faces between Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren, even Delicious in Dungeon ended up a close second behind the reaction faces in Apothecary Diaries. Not just Mao Mao either, but her eventual patron, Jinshi, gets some tremendous reaction faces as well (admittedly many of them serving as companions to Mao Mao’s own reactions).

Also, Apothecary Diaries is a series I’ve also been able to show successfully with my parents without anything that gave them particular issues – whether gross sexuality, excessive violence, or being particularly grimdark, which I think might make it an overall winner.

Apothecary Diaries is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

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