This episode takes places entirely within the palace for the prince’s birthday celebrations. Elise and her family are there, alongside members of various other noble families. Of course, during the celebration, Elise doesn’t appear to have anyone to hang out with, but while she’s feeling somewhat out of place, she recalls a friend that she remembers being at the palace. Of course, while she’s thinking about this, she remembers feuds within the country, and comes across a lady from the House of Child that appears to be around her age.
Elise chooses to apologize to Lady Child, and it appears like she’s accepted Elise’s apology. The crown prince comes out early, and looks over at Elise, thus consequently looking over at Lady Child. She appears to begin fainting, with Elise catching her and checking her temperature, to realize that Lady Child has a fever. Lady Child insists that she is fine, however, and that attending the birthday celebrations is the duty of a noble. Despite this, however, Lady Child still ends up dancing with someone, even though she really shouldn’t have.
Later on in the episode, the crown prince notices some men looking over at Elise, and when those men ask Elise to dance (where I was saying things along the lines of “Just say no!”, even after the fact that Elise felt that she shouldn’t refuse to dance without a proper reason), the crown prince comes up and asks Elise to dance. Since Elise had practiced to follow the prince’s lead in her first life, she was able to keep up with him this time. Elise ends up having to catch Lady Child again, and the crown prince chooses to lead Elise and Lady Child to a lounge, where Elise stays to take care of Lady Child.
Elise does take care of Lady Child to the point where it appears she’s back to normal, with a duchess coming to let them know that the emperor’s celebratory address was coming up. As she was walking away, however, Elise noticed that the duchess appeared to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Elise and Lady Child walk out, where they get permission to call each other by their first names (and where we learn Lady Child’s first name of Juliane, thank goodness I don’t have to write Lady Child anymore). The emperor gives his address, and for the announcement, he reveals that Elise isn’t of age yet, and that the official announcement would wait until she was.
I normally tend to leave my opinions for the end of me covering what happened in the episode, but I’m willing to break that trend here to give a little bit of my opinion. The entire rest of this episode could’ve potentially been AVOIDED if the emperor had said “the official announcement will wait until that lady is of age” and just left it without revealing Elise as the person being the one who would be engaged to the prince. While I understand that this decision was likely made to up the drama, to me it just felt like it didn’t make sense to reveal Elise as the lady at the end if she was kept anonymous beforehand. I blame the emperor’s adviser for this. But on the other hand, this is a universe that has more modern medical tools during not-so-modern times, so I won’t let this gripe from this episode stop me from enjoying the series.
Juliane is shocked, and she is about to faint again (jeez, will she ever catch a break?), when she is caught by someone who she identifies as Mikhail, who wants his presence to stay a secret. After a bit of time, Elise and the emperor have a conversation where Elise points out that what the emperor did could’ve been seen to her as having broken the wager. While the emperor himself doesn’t consider the wager broken, he does ask if Elise wants to end the wager, and points out that he wants to.
…wow. Outside of the one bit of opinion I wrote earlier, where do I even begin? You probably read that previous sentence and thought “oh no, Sara thought this episode was a dumpster fire!”, but I highly beg to differ. The drama was high in this episode, and everything about the episode seemed extremely well done. Other than the one gripe that I pointed out earlier, the episode was really well-done story-wise. It seems like next week’s episode will be a bit heavier on the drama, but it’ll be interesting to see how everything plays out.
Additional posts about Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp:
Sara Talks Anime 
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