Summary
The penultimate episode provides a few answers but ultimately ends up raising more questions ahead of the finale.
This recap of the 2023 Netflix K-Drama Celebrity Season 1 Episode 11, “#but_she’s_dead”, contains spoilers.
Things aren’t going well for A-ri.
As we saw at the end of Episode 10, she has just discovered that her best friend Jeong-sun was among the hate accounts who have been tormenting A-ri online. And she doesn’t even know yet that Jun-kyung has just been T-boned in his car and is potentially dead.
Celebrity Season 1 Episode 11 Recap
Jeong-sun’s excuses for her behavior make sense, to be fair. She was jealous, which is understandable, and we’ve seen how she has been treated by both A-ri’s mother and A-ri herself.
You can feel the stakes raising in real-time here in “#but_she’s_dead”. With the Jeong-sun revelation and then the news about Jun-kyung, A-ri sees few solutions to her problems, and we see flashforward snippets of her driving her car into a river — an apparent suicide.
Who dies in “#but_she’s_dead”?
This is why there’s so much chaos around A-ri’s present-day live stream. She’s supposed to be dead. Taegang buried the case when she first took it to Detective Jang, as we saw, and he’s still frantically trying to destroy evidence in the present day, so there’s culpability on all sides.
To make matters worse, Mr. Park is suddenly found dead in the Ari.& warehouse. He committed suicide and left A-ri a note apologizing to her for it, but obviously, the internet just assumes he killed himself because of the pressure A-ri was putting on him.
A-ri’s decline is the gain of the Gabin Society, who all take great pleasure in Min-hye’s sold-out relaunch, but Si-hyeon remains troubled. Unable to square away Tae-jeon’s complicity, she files for divorce. He counters that her politician father is corrupt and that he’ll reveal all the evidence of his wrongdoing if she divorces him, but she figures it’s time to put herself first.
It’s Si-hyeon who also talks A-ri down from the ledge, literally and metaphorically, when she’s debating suicide. Their conversation revolves around culpability and choices. Yes, A-ri is responsible for the choices she made. But everyone else is also responsible for the choices they made, and she can’t assume the guilt of their decisions.
Celebrity Season 1 Episode 11 Ending Explained
By the end of the episode, the show’s two timelines seem to have intertwined, and there’s a great deal of panic everywhere.
The police begin arresting people related to Tae-jeon. And, at the same time, A-ri’s location is discovered by the cyber crimes unit. She’s bouncing the stream around a VPN, but she’s based in Seoul.
This news seems to reach multiple parties at once. The police set out to find her at the same time as Tae-jeon’s goons and, we see, Jun-kyung, who has a well-placed source informing him of the live stream’s location.
While the police and Tae-jeon’s goons run into each other, Jun-kyung gets there first. What he discovers is that it isn’t A-ri carrying out the live stream after all, but Jeong-sun, using deep fake technology.
The penultimate episode ends with A-ri seemingly committing suicide.
You can stream the K-Drama Celebrity Season 1 Episode 11, “#but_she’s_dead”, exclusively on Netflix.
