Summary
When the Stars Gossip makes some perplexing character decisions in Episode 10, with the return to earth highlighting how badly handled most of its relationships have been.
As expected, Episode 10 of When the Stars Gossip brings the action back down to earth but makes some extremely questionable decisions when we get there. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, little about this show’s core subplots has really worked, often because of quite simple, avoidable problems, but a few take wildly illogical turns here that just make things worse and feel unearned.
In the case of Eve, predictability is the killer. It was clear from Dong-a’s heroic rescue that he was being teed up as a love rival for Ryong, even though the cheating thing is pretty cut and dry. Too little time has elapsed since that was first raised and what we’re now supposed to just blithely accept is sincere regret. None of this lands.
For Ryong and Go-eun, it’s weirder. Her limited screen time and the obvious familial crosscurrents raise too many red flags, so nothing about the relationship was convincing before and certainly isn’t now. We’re supposed to think Ryong has committed some kind of grievous infraction by cheating, to consider him in much the same way we do Dong-a, but I’m not getting that, personally.
At least the lottery ticket is back.
A lot of the early-going of When the Stars Gossip Episode 10 is about setting up these conflicts, despite the fact that, as described above, they’re really difficult to buy into. Dong-a laying his adoration for on thick Eve in front of the press, threatening Ryong to stay away in private, Go-eun going on about their marriage. It’s all a little too transparent.
Not buying Go-eun “confronting” Ryong, either, despite her having a point. He’s right that she shouldn’t waste her time with him, but the earnest emotional contour this scene should have – with Go-eun’s visible upset in its aftermath – isn’t there. Kang-su’s fury when he overhears what happened on the station, which he later attacks Ryong about, feels overblown in context, and Eve’s adamance that he deserved it, reflecting her own guilty conscience, feels contrived.
What this amounts to, essentially, is a cliffhanger in which Eve suggests that she and Ryong should just carry on as though nothing ever happened between them for the sake of all the people they inadvertently hurt through their actions, which is an understandable viewpoint, or at least would be in a different show where Ryong’s relationship with Go-eun was ever serious – or at least shown to the audience as being serious – and Dong-a hadn’t started the game of infidelity Top Trumps.
Amidst all this, I haven’t even mentioned anything to do with the fertilized eggs, the lottery ticket, or what promises to be a lingering issue of Ryong’s phone with its typed-up confession of what he was up to with the eggs still having a chance of being retrieved by the space station’s pending investigation. Why would I? For one thing, these subplots will clearly be developed further in the remaining episodes, but for another, they’re clearly not the underlying point.
But if the point is the relationships, which I suspect it is, then When the Stars Gossip has long since lost the plot.
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