Short Synopsis: Idris’ past
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Well, that’s a very strange place to start talking about people’s past. This episode really should have been shown much earlier in the series, and I can see really no reason to postpone it so long. This is supposed to be the start of the finale, the background should be done by now.

Still, it was a very welcome episode of course, that fully detailed Idris’ obsession with power, and where his ambitions come from: his dead father. I’m also surprised that Ajman only has been sitting on the throne for five years now. That just proves the point that the previous episode tried to make: Tytania is so caught up in inner struggles: everyone wants to be the one with the absolute power over such a large empire, and Idris as well. Jouslain is the only one who so far has managed to think beyond that.

And really, the mysteries around Lydia only continue to grow. The only thing she did in this episode was look sad because Balami (cursed Katakana that made me think that his name was spelled as BaRUami) would be away for a longer while due to Jouslain’s mission to clean up the mess that Zalish left.

Short Synopsis: Now it’s Jouslain’s turn to go after Fan Hyulick (or however he wants us to spell his name).
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
While at first I thought that this was a relatively uneventful episode, but near the end, this series got a totally new dimension because of it. Tytania really has been a cat and mouse game with Zalish and Idris and their henchmen on one side and Fan Hyulick on the other. Jouslain? He’s just an observer. He doesn’t care at all about catching Hyulick, he only wants Tytania to thrive and takes the appropriate actions for it. He actually realizes that it’s not going to work to just kill off Hulick and get it over with. Eventually the empire will fall apart and Fan really is the perfect way to stabilize the empire by giving it a common enemy to fight at.

All his actions before probably were all done in order to get rid of the inner conflicts of the Tytania government, and something is telling me that his goal is to get rid of Zalish and Idris, in order to create a stable and unified Tytania, rather than one that’s ruled by a bunch of different people with all different ideas and ideals. that also explains why he hasn’t done anything against Ariabart: he has him on a leash right now. The guy is very weak and easy to manipulate, and for a Duke he hardly has any ideas or initiatives of his own.

Overall, the only real flaw of Tytania lies within the Fan Hyulick-storyline, in the way that the creators like to use Deus ex Machina in order to keep his plans smooth. Fortunately though, this flaw doesn’t get in the way of what makes this series good: the politics. It really has been awesome to see a series that’s fully dedicated to politics, and hardly anything else.

But seriously… there are only five episodes left… and still Lydia hasn’t done anything important.

Short Synopsis: The series skips ahead to the death of the emperor.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I’ve received some comments about how my summaries of this series (and others as well) are always rather ‘inaccurate’ and sometimes even don’t make any sense. I appreciate these comments, because there are enough times when I get a bit too lazy in trying to understand raws. It’s especially bad with this series, since there are no subs whatsoever and more people than usual are going to use these summaries of mine to find out what happened. This series also doesn’t make the job of understanding it any easier due to the large amount of feudal Japanese inserted, not to mention the large amounts of unintroduced flashbacks, dreams and time skips, but I’m going to try to deliver summaries that are at least a bit more accurate than what they used to be.

In any case, the main event in this episode was the death of the emperor, which leaves Lady Fujitsubou and many others as a widow. This means that a lot of things are going to change now. Genji’s kid is probably going to have to take up the throne as soon ass he grows up, and the incident also allowed Genji and Fujitsubou to talk to each other again for a bit (even if it was just during the funeral, and they indeed continue to avoid each other for many years afterwards).

But yeah, especially Fujitsubou has it tough. I really don’t know about the royal system at that time, so this paragraph consists just out of a bunch of guesses that seem the most likely to me (please DO correct me if this is wrong), but it seems that she is mostly caught up with what to do with her son: if she stays quiet, she’s going to be the king’s mother, keep her influence and status, but she will be putting a fake emperor on the throne (which must have been a huge shame at the time). If she does confess, then she’ll immediately lose her status and her child will probably have a really hard time growing up in the least.

In the end of the episode, we see how she cuts off all her hair, and becomes a female monk after saying her goodbye to Genji. In this way, she possibly creates a scandal on herself, but her son will be allowed to stay out of everything and just continue his lifestyle while she can repent for the sin she committed.

With two episodes left, Murasaki now really has to come to the foreground, and she will probably be the one that Genji turns to within his sorrow. I really wonder what kind of climax the creators have prepared for this series. How far are we into the original novels anyway? Has it been consistently one volume per episode, or has the pacing increased over the past few episodes?