‘When the Stars Gossip’ Episode 11 Recap – How Are There Still Five Episodes of This Show Left?

By Jonathon Wilson - February 8, 2025
When the Stars Gossip Key Art
When the Stars Gossip Key Art | Image via Netflix
By Jonathon Wilson - February 8, 2025

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

1.5

Summary

When the Stars Gossip is hopelessly treading water in Episode 11, lingering over tired plot points and offering no surprises.

Remarkably, as of Episode 11, there are still five episodes of When the Stars Gossip remaining. What on earth are they going to be about? This show – uncharacteristically for a Netflix K-Drama, I suppose – has completely run out of road narratively speaking, and everything that’s happening now is just going through the motions in the most turgid manner possible.

As I’ve pointed out multiple times over the last few weeks, the relationship between Ryong and Eve is the only interesting aspect of the show and has nonetheless been criminally mishandled throughout. I rightly predicted that the return to Earth would exacerbate all the problems and, lo and behold, things got as bad as they have been. I’m not sure whether this episode is worse, per se, or just more of the same but less interesting. It’s honestly hard to say.

But the drama at this point revolves around a question we already know the answer to. There’s no mystery in whether Ryong and Eve like each other romantically since we already know they do and the circumstances in which Eve pretended to be disinterested were deeply inauthentic. We don’t care about Go-eun’s role in all this because we’ve had very little to do with her, and divorced from the space station setting, nobody else has anything to do at all. Unless you care about the lottery ticket subplot, which nobody does.

Episode 11 of When the Stars Gossip opens by reiterating these underpinning ideas as though they’re new and we should suddenly care. Eve thinks about Ryong, Ryong thinks about Eve, though gets grief from his moms about his love life. He’s still worried about his phone being turned up during the pending investigation into the station, and of course, his fraternizing with Eve while aboard is also going to be under some degree of scrutiny.

This is a pretty ham-fisted way of making Ryong and Eve really interrogate what happened between them, with the “drama” of them not currently being on the best of terms. Eve deliberately sees a different doctor other than him – she might be pregnant – and they’re clearly not on the same page when it comes to a report requested by Tae-hui that demands a thread-to-needle accounting of everything that happened aboard.

It’s just a little forced for me. You can see the pieces all being shuffled into position; Eve showing Dong-a the door, Kang-su making the moves on Go-eun to take advantage of her break-up, the demands of the report, and everyone already suspecting what was going on between Ryong and Eve. It all conspires to create a lurching pace through really obvious and uninteresting developments.

Towards the end of Episode 11, When the Stars Gossip tries to up the ante, again in obvious ways. Dong-a gets drunk and confronts Ryong, who is up-front about his feelings but heroically protects Eve by claiming his feelings were his own and weren’t reciprocated. But this all feels pointless to me. The writing’s on the wall, and as we see in the final scenes, the truth’s going to be all over the place before long anyway.

In those scenes, Ryong and Eve meet up to get their stories for the report aligned, and Eve confesses her own feelings. They act on them… just as Go-eun arrives. No surprises here, folks.


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