The Apothecary Diaries #12 — Collective Punishment

You could just skip over the horrific violence instead of explicitly bringing it up, you know.

This show's off for at least a week for the holidays. Also, Zom100's last three episodes are airing as a special on Christmas day. I'll get to it eventually, but for obvious reasons, it won't be with my usual alacrity. Season preview should be up Tuesday. It is a season full of what looks like aggressively mediocre action shows, which is somehow better than usual.

Impressions:

And I dunno, after the break, I might be done with this show. The first half of the episode was really offputting for a number of reasons. Mainly, Jinshi being conflicted about how to deal with Maomao. It was meant to show how much she means to him, but in the context of brutal collective punishment of every person who ever had any interaction with or connection to the one lady? It just makes him come off as a sociopath. He's completely fine throwing a hundred people in jail for no reason, but the second it might affect someone he cares about? Well, we have to pull some strings and make special allowances for that. You could just… you know, not mention it at all, or come up with some other contrivance for why Maomao is caught in the fallout. You're the writer. Find a way that doesn't involve a protagonist casually and happily breaking Geneva conventions. Historical accuracy is not an excuse.

Which is then followed by everybody hemming and hawing over their true feelings like kindergarteners, which lasts all of maybe two minutes and is just an excuse to get Maomao all dolled up again before it's right back to the status quo. I can't even care about the relationship between them at this point because for the last probably six episodes, there's been nothing but an obligatory two minutes each episode of him gazing at her dreamily. You can hardly even call it an interaction, let alone anything to build something substantial off of. Yeah, I know these 12 episodes have covered a whopping single book, and that probably explains the pacing issues, but that doesn't alleviate them.

Next Episode:

…