Summary
When the Stars Gossip tries to justify its continued existence in Episode 13 with a weird, unnecessary twist.
I’m not exactly a soothsayer, but as soon as When the Stars Gossip returned to Earth, I just knew it had nowhere else to really go. Episode 13 proves that rather capably by mostly just idling in place, reiterating tired character arcs and relationship dynamics, and just biding time until we can finally end things with what will no doubt be a rote resolution we could have predicted half a season ago.
On some level you can kind of tell that the writers of this show know it isn’t very interesting, so there are attempts made to complicate it that feel so wildly out of left field that it’s difficult not to laugh out loud, let alone take them seriously. In a good love story, the leads and their love are usually enough; a bit of conflict along the way doesn’t hurt, but there isn’t any need to introduce late-game plot elements out of nowhere just to liven things up.
This is why the plot about Eve’s parentage doesn’t work. Who cares? This wasn’t introduced until late on anyway and tying it to Ryong seems pretty improbable (and, in my view, actively alarming. They’re not biologically related but the dynamic has to be pretty confusing.) But this is my point. What else is there for any of these people to do? Now we’re not in space, there’s no need for virtually any of the characters who were up there, so When the Stars Gossip finds itself in the weird position of having spent half a season introducing and developing (sort of, anyway) a whole cast of characters who no longer have anything to be doing.
And what are the stakes, really? The entire plot hinges on whether Ryong and Eve end up together. Sure, there might be a little bit of drama around the idea of Ryong’s potentially pending disgrace if the fertilization mission is exposed through his phone, but at the risk of repeating myself, who cares?
In the meantime, we’re expected to care about mice. One of them is pregnant, which Eve delightedly confirms, and Seung-jun believes that since they conceived in space they should also give birth in space, which is a wild idea. Returning to the station hovers on the outskirts of When the Stars Gossip Episode 13 like a weird ticking clock, especially since we know Ryong’s phone is up there and could get him into a world of trouble, but the mice are intended to function as a kind of ongoing dramatic throughline, proof of a miraculous conception and how things can work out in even the most eccentric of circumstances.
Unsurprisingly, the pregnant mouse dies. How’s that for a metaphor?
Anyway, speaking of people getting into a world of trouble, Kang-su ends up being fired and put before a disciplinary committee after what happened at the end of the previous episode. He’s prohibited from ever visiting the station, even as a civilian, and needless to say he doesn’t take it well. I even felt a little sorry for him when he thought the jubilant mouse pregnancy celebration was about him being dismissed. But it didn’t last.
All that’s left is Eve discovering and then confirming that her birth mother is Na-mi, one of Ryong’s mothers. Remind me again, where has this come from? Episode 13 is super heavy-handed about it too, with an opening reiterating the trauma of Eve’s abandonment, which is later gone over in dialogue from Na-mi’s guilt-ridden perspective. There is simply no need for this kind of development this late in the game. It smacks of a show having no idea what to do with itself. Still, by this point, we knew that already.
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