Shadow's House S1E6: "The Garden Labyrinth"

This review was commissioned by @Bernkastel.


It's been a while since I watched any Shadows House, and this series has a bizarre enough premise and complicated enough plot that I needed to reread quite a bit to get myself caught back up.

So, where we left off last time, the human(?) and shadow(?) child duo Emilico and Kate were summoned to a debut ritual alongside four other pairs. Said debut ritual will determine which of them graduate into the ranks of the adult "Shadows Family," and which will be...um...probably eaten by the Lord Grandfather or something. We still don't know anything about the broader world. Just that a bunch of (kidnapped and memory-wiped?) children have been assigned as roommate-cum-butler-cum-living-accessories for shadowy lookalikes of themselves within a sprawling mansion complex ruled by the evil god-patriarch of shadowkind.

The debut ceremony so far has been overseen by an eerily puppet-like human named Edward, who I suspect is being remotely controlled by the Lord Grandfather or another senior Shadows entity. A suspicion that only gained more evidence in its support when - due to difficulties in coordinating her scatterbrained human slave with her during the ballroom dancing portion of their exam - used a previously unseen ability to remotely guide Emilico's movements using particles of her shadow/soot stuff. So, the idea that Edward the judge has the same thing going on seems highly plausible.

Anyway, the debutants are:

Kate and Emilico: our protagonist duo. Kate is about as good as it gets for an almost literally parasitic slave owner. Emilico is...smart, but has ADHD that makes it hard for her to coordinate well. Kate has soot-manipulation powers that she thinks need to be kept secret from the other shadows.

Patrick and Ricky: the saboteurs. Seem to be trying to improve their odds of passing muster at the debut by sabotaging everyone else wherever and however they can. Ricky seems like he's constantly about to crack under the pressure of doing this. Patrick...well, it's harder to tell with the shadows, but the two seem to be on the same page in tactics if not in how they feel about said tactics.

John and Shaun: seem legit. John so far seems to share Kate's title of "about as good as it's possible to be for a slaveowner." Even lets Shaun come up with the ideas much of the time, though they'd be in trouble if the powers that be learned about this. Shaun himself is a friendly, helpful sort overall.

Louise and Lou: Louise is probably the most typical of the debutant shadows, being prissy, spoiled, and treating Lou as a favored pet or valuable piece of property. Lou for her own part is sort of the quietly competent type.

Shirley and Rum: the mandatory woobie of the cast, Rum is suffering from some combination of mental illnesses that make survival in these bizarre conditions almost impossible for her, even with the help of most of her fellow slaves. Shirley, meanwhile, hasn't even said a word yet, and seems to be dependent on Rum for almost any direction at all.

So far, they were told to just sit around and interact with each other, in the presence and absence of a banquet table, and then suddenly Edward started playing the piano which they took as a hint that they're expected to waltz (some of them doing far better at this than others). At the end of the previous episode, Edward abruptly got up from his piano and told the debutants that it's time for the next phase. And, for this part, he'll be separating the shadows and their slaves into different rooms.


We open on the five humans - or "living dolls" as they've been taught to think of themselves as - sitting around a coffee table over an array of desserts. They've been told to eat. They have no idea where their masters are, or on what the five of them are currently being judged on besides maybe table manners. There's actually an interesting exchange connected to that, when Ricky - in his ongoing neurotic compulsion to lash out at and undermine his fellow slaves at every opportunity - acts snide about how messily Emilico is holding her teacup and how she's likely to be marked down for it. Emilico replies by saying that Kate thinks she's perfect just the way she is, and that changing the way she holds her cup would be ignoring her mistress' preferences, which she's forbidden to do. It's an answer that definitely throws Ricky for a loop as he tries to decide if he's been outthought or if Emilico is just talking nonsense. Heh.

Anyway, they start finding these weird little charms hidden in the desserts. Apparently, these things are a New Years tradition, but I don't think it's New Years right now.

Putting the charms together just spells out a tautological sentence, but Emilico realizes that - pushed together in a different configuration - they fit inside a set of weird notches in the door that Edward took their masters out through. So, taking that as a clue of what they're supposed to do next, they unlock the door and emerge onto the palace grounds where Edward is awaiting them.

We get a little inner monologue of Edward's, before they open the door and find him. And it's one that comes with a few fairly major surprises.

He's not being puppeted. Or maybe he is, and these are the inner thoughts of the adult Shadow controlling him that we're hearing, but I don't think so. He seems to have a very precarious position in the hierarchy of the Shadows House, and his stiff, zombielike demeanor is just him doing everything he can to hide the stress and nerves. The piano playing he did earlier, apparently, wasn't to prompt them to dance or to test their reactions at all; it's something he did for himself, to calm his own nerves, and he was surprised when they started dancing to it.

This may mean that he won't be judging them on their performances, or it may mean that he'll be panicking and trying to judge them even harder on it than he would have had it been planned.

Additionally, he has a secret directive from someone within the Shadows ruling clique to make sure that Kate-Emilico fail their debut. Presumably, this has something to do with the soot-manipulating powers that Kate has, which she thinks might cause the Lord Grandfather to fear her as a potential rival or something if he found out about. Unfortunately for him, his piano playing gave Kate and Emilico a chance to improve their performance, and now they aren't in last place anymore. He needs to fail SOMEBODY, or he'll be seen as a poor judge. He needs to fail Kate specifically, as per his secret directive. He needs a REASON to make Kate be the one who fails, or the rest of the ruling circle will get suspicious. So, he's got to figure something out fast.

It seems like he's being watched. And like a senior Shadows his judging his judgements. Which calls the entire point of him into question. Hmm.

Well, anyway. This next challenge is very different. More typically YA fantasy challenge than the more traditional "debut" stuff that preceded it. The five debutant shadows have been placed in different spots within a ridiculously large topiary maze, and their living dolls need to go in and recover them. Visible injury to a living doll will mark them down. So will soiling or ruining a shadow's clothing.

The former makes some sense to me. The most important duty of the human slaves is to serve as their masters' literal "faces," emoting and making expressions on behalf of their faceless owners as the latter preen and politic at each other. Letting a slave's face get hurt, even temporarily, literally defaces their master. I'm less sure about the "masters' clothes must stay clean" part, unless it has to do with the way the shadows seem to give off soot when they experience negative emotions. IE, if a debutant gets stressed out enough for it to show on their clothes, they lose points? Maybe it's that.

Anyway, before sending them into the maze, Edward points them to a cart full of weird objects, tools, and knick-knacks with no obvious connecting theme and tells them that they can each choose one item to bring into the labyrinth with them.

Fitting the general character of the test (and the Shadows culture as a whole, really) they are called to pick their items in order of their placement in the performance so far. So, this is potentially a death spiral, mitigated by the possibility for early winners to squander their advantage by showing bad judgement in their choice of items.

Quietly competent Lou and her confident mistress Louise are in first. Lou takes a pair of garden shears. Next, tied for second, are cool guy Shaun and lashing-out nervous wreck Ricky, who fight over who goes first before choosing a magnifying glass and a hazmat suit respectively.

Rum is scared of the dark, so she takes a lamp, in case there's darkness anywhere in this maze. Emilico, thinking outside the box, ignores the remaining items placed on the cart and instead chooses the cart itself.

Either brilliant or incredibly stupid. I'm really not sure which. She may have a plan in mind, or she might just be trying to see if she can outsmart the test by doing the unexpected and hoping it works out.

They're each given a handwritten map of the maze (albeit a rather vague and confusing one) along with their item of choice (with the locations of the masters marked, but not named). This task is a timed one, using a weird upside-down hourglass full of levitating soot that Edward flips after putting them all at different maze entrances. A complication that makes the answer to the puzzle less obvious than it would have otherwise been. And...honestly, it makes it worse. Much worse.

...

Presumably, each item on the cart *is* useful for getting past some obstacle or another, somewhere in the labyrinth. Even if not every slave needs to confront each of these obstacles (on account of their masters being hidden in different places), none of them know ahead of time which obstacles they *will* run into. So, the optimal strategy would normally be for the slaves to find each other first, then pool their resources and systematically retrieve each master as a group.

It being timed, and them knowing that they're competing against each other for points, makes this all uglier than it appears at face. See, the optimal strategy IS still to group up and pool resources. It's just that it's now accompanied by "and then betray each other and try to hobble or lose one another as soon as you've got your own master with you to try and beat them back to the exits."

It's not cooperation OR competition that this confluence of factories incentivizes. It's specifically betrayal. Skill at executing it. Skill at preventing others from getting away with it before you can. Politics and manipulation.

The strange thing, though, is that this is testing the slaves for those qualities, not the masters. Seems the opposite of what you'd want. Then again, thinking about this a little more, the betrayal would come after the master in question has been recovered. So...encouraging the slaves to work together to serve the Shadows' interests, while encouraging the masters to be cynical jackasses once they're able to assert control over the situation? That might be it.

...

Anyway. It doesn't take long for pairs of slaves to start finding each other. Or for the purposes of some of the items to become clear. For instance, the maps they've been given have a bunch of tiny details written on them that are hard to make out without the magnifying glass. Some regions of the labyrinth are, indeed, dark enough for the lamp to be useful. As for the shears, well, Ricky apparently is a total idiot to have not understood their purpose lol:

The hazmat suit, I'm assuming, will be useful for getting the masters through some kind of dirty environment without soiling their clothes. And the cart, of course, makes all the other stuff easier to carry, along with potentially being able to carry a person over a clothes-soiling obstacle of some kind. By the end of the episode, Ricky and Lou have found each other and are resentfully cooperating while Ricky looks for places to stick a knife, Emilico and Rum have met up and are getting along much better as you'd expect, and Shaun remains so far alone.

There's a twist, though. We briefly cut to the masters, who have each been imprisoned in some kind of small, undignified container awaiting rescue. Again, strange inversion of how I'd expect the shadows and humans to be treated by the Family, respectively; I'm sure there will be a catch. But anyway, the real twist is that Shaun's master John uses his own soot powers to explode his way free of containment and start proactively looking for Shaun.

Looks like Kate is not the only one to have those powers. And, unlike her, John doesn't seem to think that he needs to keep his hidden. Pity about his clothes though lol, that's got to dock him and Shaun some points.

While wandering free, John happens into Kate, who is bound in a considerably harder-to-escape container. Presumably due to the judge's secret agenda making him put her in the hardest spot to reach.

Since they've got a private moment together now, though, John decides to use this opportunity to make Kate a proposal. His proposal is, well...a proposal. Marriage.

It's anyone's guess how much these two young shadows have interacted with each other offscreen, and thus what sort of buildup this might have had between them. That said, Kate's stunned, confused reaction to this suggests that she's as blindsided by his proposal as we are. She politely turns him down for now.

Yeah, no idea where that thread is going any more than I know where it came from. But, with our perspective being pretty closely bound to Emilico and her fellow "living dolls" until now, it's pretty clear that the audience is meant to feel like a fish out of water when suddenly thrust into unfiltered shadow-on-shadow politics.


Interesting potential all around. The last set of Shadows House episodes I reviewed really did end in an odd spot, because this second episode of the Debut Arc is making it clear that this is a plot that has a lot of pieces to set up before the payoff, and the previous one only just barely started setting them up. Fortunately, @Bernkastel commissioned two more episodes after this one.

I'm looking forward to them.