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Pierce Conran

This article contains major spoilers.
1/5 stars
Lead cast: Lee Min-ho, Gong Hyo-jin, Oh Jung-se, Han Ji-eun
Latest Nielsen rating: 2.55 per cent
One of the elements that viewers tend to like about modern Korean dramas is that, despite being the product of a society that remains staunchly patriarchal, these stories often portray strong women who excel in a variety of impressive fields.
Romance inevitably rears its head to briefly scupper their professional lives, but they are still held up as career women who bristle at unfair social norms as they aspire to add personal happiness to career success.


Enter Eve Kim, played by Gong Hyo-jin (When the Camellia Blooms), the lead female protagonist in sci-fi romcom melodrama When the Stars Gossip. Eve is a highly accomplished astronaut who, at the outset of the series, has assumed command of a space station.
For much of the show she is a staunch and unsmiling professional who puts the mission and the safety of her colleagues above all else. This image is lamentably upended by the time we reach the end of this exasperating journey.
Lee Min-ho (Pachinko), as obstetrician-gynaecologist Gong Ryong, is a space tourist who ostensibly comes aboard the station to perform some fertility research.
He is actually there on the orders of his fiancée’s father, a corporate chairman seeking to continue the family line by performing IVF on his widowed daughter-in-law with his dead son’s sperm, which for unfathomable reasons can only take place in zero gravity.

Ryong takes a shine to Eve and, after initially spurning his cautious advances, she does fall for his charms and into his arms. When they are the only passengers left on the ship following an accident, they make love and Eve unwittingly sows the seeds of her own demise.
Most of the second half of the series takes place back on Earth, with Ryong and Eve contending with their feelings for each other while also navigating break-ups with the partners they cheated on.
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the cast is embroiled in a tedious and drawn-out side plot involving a winning lottery ticket found aboard the space station.
Ryong’s illegal activities in space are eventually revealed and the fertilised egg he brought with him is destroyed moments before the IVF procedure on the chairman’s daughter-in-law is set to begin.

It is Eve who destroys the egg, a decision she makes in part to protect Ryong. Her action triggers a woefully histrionic display as several people bitterly mourn the eradication of an embryo.
When the Stars Gossip had many glaring problems before this moment, but remarkably, this is the point where things get even worse.
This mawkishly emotional scene concerning the embryo’s fate feels like a statement on the sanctity of life, but, aggressive though it already is, it is only the beginning.
Eve goes back to space and, while there, discovers that she is pregnant with Ryong’s child, a result of their tryst on her last trip to the space station. Some hospital tests on Earth suggested this was a possibility, but Eve is seemingly taken completely by surprise.
Astronauts cannot be pregnant in space – it is simply too dangerous. So how exactly could this have been missed in a preflight check?
Eve fears that returning to Earth would harm her embryo; even Ryong, who is sent back up to help her, is unable to convince her. Yet staying in space does not solve the problem, as giving birth in zero gravity would also be extremely dangerous for both mother and child.
Eve’s judgment and professionalism disappear as she stubbornly and idiotically sacrifices herself for a 12-week-old embryo, in the process becoming a space-bound anti-abortion martyr.

The emotional justification for this is that she was abandoned as a child and she does not want to do that to her own child – even though she recently did meet and warm to her guilt-stricken mother Jung Na-mi (Jung Young-joo), who happens to be one of Ryong’s three adoptive mothers.
Eve stays in the station until she gives birth. Miraculously, the child survives. Unsurprisingly, Eve dies.
Ryong, who was disgraced on Earth for his actions, slapped with a 140 billion won (US$98 million) fine he could never hope to pay and had his medical licence revoked, remains in space until they can figure out a way to introduce the child to Earth’s gravity.
The series ends with Ryong on a spacewalk scattering Eve’s ashes. The chord tethering him to the station fantastically turns into an umbilical cord connected to a glowing space baby, an image which cues a montage about the miracle of life.
Ludicrous as this is, the scene, mercifully, has a silver lining – this is the end of When the Stars Gossip. Now we can go back to Earth and forget this ever happened.
When the Stars Gossip is streaming on Netflix.


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Finale of When the Stars Gossip takes show from bad to worse, as its formerly professional female lead makes a series of bad decisions


Finale of When the Stars Gossip takes show from bad to worse, as its formerly professional female lead makes a series of bad decisions.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Finale of When the Stars Gossip takes show from bad to worse, as its formerly professional female lead makes a series of bad decisions

Finale of When the Stars Gossip takes show from bad to worse, as its formerly professional female lead makes a series of bad decisions