Summary
When the Stars Gossips visibly sags in Episode 4, with the mismatched tonal choices and lack of clear focus becoming tiresome.
A question that occurred to me midway through When the Stars Gossip Episode 4 – what, exactly are we supposed to be latching onto here? It’s a worthwhile question. In a show’s earliest stages, you give it a moment to get its ducks in a row, and the hope is that in time a clear dramatic – or at least thematic – throughline will begin to emerge for the audience. This, I think, is what’s lacking in this novel K-Drama, which has a strange premise and plays in unusual waters but isn’t really cohering into much of anything.
Perhaps there’s a reason why sci-fi and slapstick seem so mismatched. The previous episode excelled by introducing some welcome danger, but this is a show that can sometimes – okay, often – feel too silly for any danger to take. It’s not quite a romance, either. Love triangles work when all three interested parties have an equally viable chance, but despite Eve and Ryong’s obvious chemistry, I can’t see where Go-eun fits into it all.
I did mention obliquely in the previous recap that some scenes feel aimless and the tone is often mismatched, and this remains true in Episode 4, but in a way that felt, at least to me, more obvious. And more of a hindrance.
The episode does start with some background though, which is nice, even if it undermines the so-called drama of Eve’s predicament that capped off the prior installment. Being an astronaut runs in the family, and so too does dying on spacewalks, which is probably not the best trait to inherit. With Eve stuck outside expiring, her only hope is Seung-jun, who has suited up to go and get her, and improbably Ryong, who has become a kind of executor for her ad hoc will.
Before Seung-jun can save the day, though, Ryong heads out there himself. There’s no better way to impress a lady than to save her from certain death, after all. It should come as no surprise that he’s successful, but it’s probably equally unsurprising at this point that he almost dies in the effort thanks to skipping the proper procedures. Very him.
There’s a more terrestrial side of things in When the Stars Gossip Episode 4 that finds Jae-ryong buzzing with the potential of the fertilization and Min-jeong standing up to him about his manipulation. Jae-ryong is very archetypal in the sense that he’s a rich and powerful guy who can’t quite fathom why anyone wouldn’t want to be rich and powerful – and, by extension, why they’d ever desire anything more than money and power if they were given those things. The overly familiar nature of these scenes isn’t especially engaging; we’ve seen characters like this before, and the space stuff is more engaging, thanks less to the mortal peril and more to the fact that it just seems a lot more effort and detail have been expended in bringing that stuff to life.
Things aren’t going especially well up there, though, at least not for Ryong. Go-eun has made a public statement about their engagement which has put him on blast a little bit, making his courtship of Eve more difficult, and to that end Eve isn’t wildly interested in his advances now thanks to his reckless efforts to save her almost killing the pair of them. Of course, she’s probably nudging him away because she’s beginning to recognize her own burgeoning feelings, but it certainly takes the wind out of the sails of the so-called hero.
Remember, too, that Ryong is largely on-board for superficial reasons, and isn’t supposed to be endangering his life with proper astronaut business. He’s a space tourist, and there’s company liability to consider. Oh, and while he was busy saving the day, the eggs were fertilized. The combo of detrimental developments sends him reeling both emotionally and, funnily enough, physically, since he moves to the other side of the ship.
What’s the best thing in these circumstances? I’ll be the first to suggest that it’s probably not getting drunk on contraband alcohol, but this is nonetheless what Ryong does when Santi reveals a stashed bottle. While it’s nice to know that some of the crew do have Ryong’s back, perhaps this isn’t the best way of showing it, since Ryong immediately uses his Dutch courage to confront Eve about her rebuffing him and confess that he’s into her. Oops.
