The editorial team at Anime Hack published a column on October 15, 2026 that revisits the most important cases Maomao encountered in the first two seasons of The Apothecary Diaries and lays out what the anime has established about Jinshi's real status at court. It notes that the third season began airing on October 2 and says it contains no spoilers for season 3.
Seasons 1 and 2 are another matter: the column names culprits and motives, so the recap below carries those spoilers.
The first case is the attempted poisoning of Lishu at the garden party in episode 6. The culprit was Fengming, head lady-in-waiting to the consort Ah-Duo, and her motive, revealed in episode 10, was to hide her own responsibility for the death of Ah-Duo's infant son. Fengming's family kept bees, and she had fed the baby honey believing it was nourishing, but honey is a fatal poison for infants. Lishu had hovered between life and death after eating honey as a baby, and Fengming feared she would tell Ah-Duo about it.
On Jinshi, the column recaps that the character who first appears as a beautiful eunuch was revealed, as of season 2, to be the current emperor's younger brother. It then goes back to the other possibility raised in episode 10, when Maomao suspected that Ah-Duo had swapped her own child for the empress's. Maomao did not pursue the idea and dismissed it as absurd speculation. The column adds that Ah-Duo and Jinshi look very much alike, and that Ah-Duo once stood in for him, in episode 40.
Another section covers the assassination attempt in episode 19, when a ritual implement fell during a rite and came close to hitting Jinshi before Maomao saved him at the last moment. Suirei, the court lady deeply involved in the incident, faked her own death with a drug that makes a person appear dead, then fled. The column ties that attempt to a run of earlier incidents: a warehouse fire, the theft of the ritual implement, a high official's death from excessive salt intake, a food-poisoning case among bureaucrats, and the strange will left by a metal engraver who supplied the court.
For season 2, the column points to a trait connected with the first emperor's mother (王母の目), discussed in episode 31. The emperor brings Maomao to a shrine built so that only someone who cannot tell red from green can take the correct route through it, a design the column explains as a way of rooting that bloodline in the imperial family. The final section covers the Shi clan's plot across episodes 43 to 48, naming Shenmei as the clan's effective highest authority and tracing Suirei's parentage back to the previous emperor's line.