Summary
When the Stars Gossip was always going to have a lacklustre ending, but even I didn’t predict Episode 16 would be quite this bad.
Look, it was virtually a given that When the Stars Gossip was going to have a lackluster ending given how increasingly bad it has become over the last few episodes. But Episode 16 is catastrophically bad in a way that even I couldn’t have predicted, a way that makes the dire penultimate episode seem well-intentioned by comparison. It’s all a mess from top to bottom.
Just what is the intention here? Are we trying to pull the heartstrings, as with Eve’s death? That feels like a cheap way to go, especially given how late the pregnancy reveal was and how little had been made of potential complications throughout. I can’t say I ever really predicted one of the leads dying, but I can’t say I care too much either way.
But there’s nothing else here. Like, at all. No lessons are learned, no loose ends are tied up, and no plot holes are papered over. Virtually all of the subplots are abandoned, and almost all of the supporting characters are left by the wayside, their fates merely implied. This isn’t deliberate ambiguity, either; it’s a nest of go-nowhere stories that had already run out of steam ages ago not even being given the privilege of a proper resolution.
The reality is that Episode 16 cements When the Stars Gossip as one of the worst K-Dramas of not just this year – it’s still early, but I don’t see it being beaten – but perhaps even of all time, an utter waste of potential and time that has been quite remarkable in its ability to consistently get worse and worse.
As suggested by the events of the previous episode, virtually everything here revolves around Eve’s pregnancy, which she reveals from space along with her intention to remain up there to give birth – an incredibly risky endeavor that nobody is adequately prepared for since a pregnant woman was somehow allowed to undertake a space mission without her being pregnant ever actually being detected.
The contrivance deployed to get Ryong up there despite his career and reputation being in tatters is that Eve requires an OB-GYN with experience working on complex procedures in space, and Ryong’s the only one. To be honest, I don’t even mind this that much, since he has to be involved in the finale somehow, but you can’t be too sympathetic to the difficulties of getting him in position when he and Eve are only separated because of bad writing in the first place.
When the Stars Gossip Key Art | Image via Netflix
The idea of giving birth in space is where the finale starts to fall apart, though. Once you get a sense of all the varied side effects of a prolonged stay it becomes obvious that a happy ending is going to be impossible without a lot of hand waving, and it’s equally obvious that When the Stars Gossip is determined to go through with the idea anyway, so the audience ends up being stuck in this weird spot where you can see all the signposts leading us down this very obvious path but you know in the back of your mind that the path makes no real sense.
Something has to give, and it does. Eve gives birth successfully and then dies, and then the show tries to have its cake and eat it, cutting to a year later when Ryong and the baby, Byeol, are both still in space, relatively okay, and due to return to Earth. It’s so far-fetched as to be off-puttingly difficult to even take seriously.
The idea here is that Ryong has spent so long in space – the astronauts have rotated out, but he has remained there the whole time being a quintessentially good father, which is pretty dumb when you think about it – that he’s going to have irreversible physical complications back on Earth. But Byeol is apparently fine.
You can tell When the Stars Gossip has given up because it tries to cram all its resolutions into a montage so we don’t ask too many questions. Sure, there’s an implication that Ryong did have some complications – we see him as a much older guy, wheelchair-bound and glassy-eyed, but the implication is still that Byeol is fine, so one outcome invalidates the other. The sappy stuff also circumvents the fact that Ryong’s prison sentence was never addressed, rendering everything to do with that completely pointless.
The show’s trying to make a point about the generations and cycles of life, of things continuing as nature intended, like with the fruit flies and the mice, but it’s so aggressively dumb that I’m being charitable by grafting these themes on after the fact. The reality is that the whole thing is terrible, sloppy, and dramatically inert, even by the low standards When the Stars Gossip has consistently set for itself. Thank goodness this is over.
