WTSG, The Worst K-drama I’ve Seen

K-dramas are known for doing what Hollywood shows cannot: telling a complete story using endearing characters. The South Korean writers just know how to weave together a plot and create characters that you are drawn to. The production team casts superior actors and somehow, they create amazing chemistry with each other. Even in shows where the story sometimes falls flat (it happens), the character development is still stellar, and the cast keeps you watching until the end. When The Stars Gossip had none of this.

As mentioned above, WTSG boasted an amazing lineup of acting talent, so I believe expectations were high, especially for the male and female leads. Gong Ryong (played by Lee Min-ho) was initially paired with Choi Go-eun (Han Ji-eun), but he eventually developed romantic feelings for Commander Eve Kim (Gong Hyo-jin). Considering there were two romantic interests for him, it was supremely disappointing that he had no chemistry with either girl. Go-eun and Eve also didn’t do a convincing job of appearing to love Ryong either, not at the level we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in dramas. As for the supporting characters, there were a few different groups, including those on the space station, those at the KSA, those at MZ Electronics, and Ryong’s family and friends. The space station consisted of what should have been the most endearing unit of people; after all, these humans were alone in the isolation of space. There was the cute botanist Mina Lee (Lee Cho-hee), the handsome space scientist Lee Seung-joon (Heo Nam-jun), the asshole experimentation expert Kang Kang-su (Oh Jung-se), and the international astronaut Santiago Gonzalez Garcia (Alex Hafner). All of these characters had the makings of being great supporting cast, but realistically none of them had any depth. While Mina Lee and Kang Kang-su had some degree of backstory, we walked away from the show knowing almost nothing about the other two despite them playing such big roles. On the ground in operations, there were a few supporting characters, but the two who stood out the most were Kang Tae-hee (Lee El) and Park Dong-ah (Kim Joo-hun). Tae-hee now served as space center Vice President and Dong-ah as mission support, but both were former astronauts with surely many past adventures. Both characters had very ambitious personalities and were often quite influential to the story, but again, they were mostly seen as rude and underhanded. There was no real insight into their past origins nor their driving force for becoming the way they did. With regards to MZ, while I heavily discussed Chairman Choi (played by Kim Eung-soo) in my introduction, there also was no background into what caused him to become the way he was, why Go-eun hated him, or why his daughter-in-law Na Min-jung (Baek Eun-hye) was so desperate to have a child with her late husband’s sperm. And finally on the home front, while the beginning of the show explained why Ryong had to be raised by three strange women, only one of his adoptive mother’s (Jung Na-mi, played by Jung Young-joo) was given a past story.

I know, it’s a lot of information, but the reason I laid it out this way is because there is a key reason why most of these characters failed to impress: NO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. It sounds simple, but WTSG might actually be the first K-drama I’ve seen where the writers couldn’t have been bothered to care about fleshing out the characters! Many K-dramas infamously provide lengthy histories for the main cast and supporting characters, to the point where there is a cliché about all K-drama couples having miraculously met each other as children, which we get to see through flash backs. For whatever reason, WTSG solely focused on two things: showing off space travel and spending egregious amounts of time tackling the topic of reproduction. It honestly felt like characters only existed for the sake of selling the importance of fertility solutions, which is a far departure from how K-dramas usually convince you the characters are actual people you know and care for. There was no real understanding of what moved the characters to want the things they wanted or why they became the way they did. Why was Ryong so desperate to fertilize the embryos in space at the risk of prison time when he didn’t even love Go-eun anymore? Why was Kang Kang-su so desperate to marry Go-eun? Why was Go-eun so desperate to love Ryong after knowing he cheated on her? Why did Dong-ah have sex with Tae-hee when he was so in love with Eve? Why were Mina, Seung-joon, and Santi so desperate for money when they made an astronaut’s salary? Why did Eve suddenly want to risk lives to give birth in space when she was adamantly against it before?

There are so many questions and so little answers because at no point were there any critical flashbacks, background dialogues, or real bonding experiences between the characters. The relationships were all surface-level, and while the male and female leads did spend some time together building their relationship, it all happened quickly and without proper timelines established. Conversations felt random and lacking a lot of emotion. Many K-dramas spend the final episode wrapping up story points for every single character introduced, but we didn’t even receive that justice in this show. So, what was the point then?

I observed a few comments under different Reddit threads where people expressed that they enjoyed the show and that the rest of us didn’t understand that it was simply fiction. I wholeheartedly disagree with this! I don’t feel that at any point the writers meant for a single part of the show to come off as being fictional. Obviously, the storyline itself was not based on anything real, but us as the audience were definitely expected to believe that everything that took place was extremely plausible in the year 2025.

WTSG covered off a few different subject areas. The first one was space travel, essentially the shock factor of the show. On one hand, the production team did an amazing job of showing the audience what space travel is like. The scenes filmed in zero gravity looked very convincing, and the space station seemed as real as can be. There was plenty of space equipment, gear, instruments, gadgets and spacecraft, possibly explaining why the budget was so massive. On the other hand, the CGI scenes grew clunkier and sloppier with each passing episode. But it wasn’t really the visuals that posed the biggest problem. It was the many contradictions that occurred in space. The astronauts and mission control would spend a lot of the dialogue explaining what was possible in space, and what was not. Yet, after explaining to the audience what couldn’t possibly happen up there, the show would immediately contradict it. Some great examples: Not being able to perform open-body surgery on a human because the organs would float out of the body, yet they performed open-heart surgery on a mouse. Not being able to survive in space without electricity and life-support, yet somehow the two main characters didn’t freeze to death. Not being able to have sex in zero gravity to the point of successful insemination, yet the main characters did it (while freezing to death). Being able to travel into space within just a few short hours despite it actually taking longer than the standard Uber ride. Traveling to space for just a few hours, only to come back down right after (even though as I write this, there are two astronauts stuck on a space station for a year). Being able transport passengers dying of hypothermia back to Earth without zero complications, especially during orbit re-entry. Spacewalking being an incredibly difficult task requiring years of training, yet the space tourist did it randomly without dying (he also somehow knew how to operate all of the equipment on the station). These are just a few of the many contradictions that had me wondering what kind of crap I was watching. I should mention that I’ve seen quite a few space shows and movies over the years, but this was the first time I didn’t believe much of what I was seeing.

The second subject was science, specifically biology and the creation of life. Some may even argue that this was really the main focus of the show, as there was so much focus on motherhood (with so many characters wanting to get pregnant or actually getting pregnant). Ryong’s personal mission was to travel to space and fertilize Na Min-jung’s eggs using the sperm of her late husband. I need to take a moment to discuss how outrageous everything surrounding this process was. First, he snuck the eggs onto the space station by bringing ice cream from Earth as a treat for his fellow astronauts (the eggs were hidden in a trap compartment). I assume he was keeping the sperm in his pocket using MZ Electronics’ mini pocket freezer (how is that possible?). When he lost access to the microscope needed to conduct the insemination, he somehow injected the sperm into the eggs using his bare eyes in zero gravity. He then got trapped on the space station with Eve where they both almost froze to death without electricity, yet somehow the morula (fertilized egg) survived. After being frozen like ice cubes, he and Eve were rescued and immediately brought back down to Earth, yet somehow the scalding hot temperatures of orbit did not fry them or the morula (kept in his pocket). And so, this one single morula survived the most catastrophic and unprecedented events in the history of Earth. How.

Third, there seemed to be some very relaxed policies surrounding money, government, authority, and risk management. The fact that Ryong’s seat on a space craft and his vacation to a space station could be purchased was mind-boggling. In the real world, no space agency would allow for this because of the extensive astronaut training that would be required for space travel. This isn’t the same as manning the emergency exit row on a plane. There are many talks of space destinations being planned and built, but leisure space travel would need to be researched, created, and operationalized first. Then there was the fact that Ryong broke so many roles by spacewalking to save Eve while having no experience or training. I get it, the writers wanted us to feel the love as the main hero rescued his woman, but it was the dumbest shit I’d ever seen, yet he faced no punishment. Next, and perhaps this was when I started to really hate the show, we were expected to believe that Eve and Ryong could be rescued from the space station before freezing to death. Somehow, an emergency operation that would have seemingly cost billions was mounted with only hours to spare, and the emergency shuttle made it to space and back within hours. The government and NASA allowed this? Meanwhile, there are real astronauts trapped in space might now, and they were told to wait a year for the next mission. Back on Earth, Ryong eventually got caught with the morula and the KSA destroyed it—on whose authority? How did random space personal bypass private hospital security and destroy an entire fertilized egg without any legal counsel or government intervention? And finally, Ryong got arrested for illegal space experimentation and there was no prison time… AND they sent him back to space after. Why did the writers even bother to show the judge and the courtroom? This was so unserious, and it was insulting to watch.

There is so much more that could be said about how WTSG insulted space travel, biology, and the law, which is a scary thought. Usually, one can find a few gripes about a show, but having too many is a sign of absolute failure on the writers’ part. Let’s be real… These writers need to be fired.

I suppose it made sense that American characters would be necessary in a space travel show, seeing as how NASA and the USA play a very key role in astronomy. But I felt like the producers only attempted to add the most minimal amount of effort into incorporating these characters. Throughout the show, KSA mission control had many joint operations with the IOU Space Center (I’m guessing fictional NASA), but considering how much South Korea was relying on America’s technology, personal, and landing areas in the USA, a lot of critical decisions didn’t seem to involve the IOU. The times when the IOU was involved, I found myself wondering why they would be so amenable to helping with certain things, like the rescue operation for Ryong and Eve. America likes to take and likes to get involved if there is a benefit to them, but why put up all the equipment and technology they have just to rescue two foreigners? It just didn’t seem on message with the current state of the world. The writers tried to do a thing by bringing Santi’s character onto the space station. As far as we know, he is a man with defective sperm who was sent to space to ejaculate regularly and have his semen studied. Wild, right? While I applaud Alex Hafner for playing his role so well, I felt incredibly sorry for him throughout the show because he was constantly subjected to the other characters speaking in Korean almost 95% of the time. When they did have the courtesy to communicate with him in English, it was so broken and incomprehensible that I prayed for subtitles. They often only spoke English around Santi if they were directly addressing him, but otherwise he was left in the dark for most group conversations. This was another reason why WTSG failed to make me believe any of it could be real, because in the real-world colleagues would have the respect to involve their close coworkers as much as possible, especially if alone in space. The last international screw-up for me was making me try to believe that Eve grew up in America. I don’t doubt that Gong Hyo-jin is a great actress, but her English is heinous and there were two things they could have done with her: 1) Get her into some language classes to make this more believable, or 2) Scrap the whole American-upbringing plot background. There was absolutely no need for Eve’s character to have grown up in the US to a white daddy who was an astronaut. I get that the writers wanted to keep her character out of Korea to prevent her from searching for her birth mother sooner, but she could have just as easily been an astronomer living in Japan and it would have still made sense. For every effect that this production team made to try and create the illusion of coolness, it just further contributed to the lack of believability on my part.

I touched on the chemistry (or lack thereof) before, but I wanted to circle back because there were a few different romance trees that all pretty much amounted to nothing. The first couple was Ryong and Go-eun, who just didn’t make sense together. He was a middle-class doctor working with regular people to foster their happiness through childbirth, while she was a rich heiress who had an entire company handed to her. Ryong had a lot of personality on him, while she seemed bratty, miserable, and mean. Prior to Ryong, she was arranged to be with Kang Kang-su, the extremely rich banker’s son who was meant to bring secured finances to MZ Electronics. Kang-su also just happened to be an astronaut and happened to be versed in fertility and happened to be on the same space station as Ryong. It’s funny how it was never completely explained, yet referred to constantly, but Go-eun was pregnant with Kang-su’s baby, then she lost it and couldn’t have kids anymore. This was when she met Ryong, and when Kang-su became determined to get her back. Throughout WTSG, Kang-su was a complete asshole to everyone, so it certainly made no sense why he had love for Go-eun when he never smiled once.

I’ve already discussed the next pairing (Ryong and Eve), so let me move onto the weird romance plot between Eve and Dong-ah. To recap, Dong-ah was a fellow astronaut who taught Eve previously. For unknown reasons, he was set to leave the KSA for some other job, but ended up staying on after Eve went the space station for her expedition. He and Eve began having some kind of relationship before she left Earth. Now this is where things started making zero sense. As soon as Eve went up to space, Dong-ah slept with KSA Vice President Tae-hee, another former astronaut that went to space with him and Eve. Dong-ah was quite content with sleeping around, but within an episode or two he decided he was madly in love with Eve. When he started to suspect Eve had feelings for Ryong, he became immensely jealous. In an act of ‘love’, Dong-ah traveled to space to rescue Eve (and Ryong) from imminent death, only to be angered when he found them naked together. Back on Earth, Doug-ah beat up Ryong multiple times and professed his love for Eve at every juncture. He believed it to be true love. For me, it just didn’t make any sense as to why he easily cheated, then realized he was so in love. Its almost like the writers wrote his character one way and then immediately decided to walk it back. There was never any consequence for his cheating and the plot just moved on.

Halfway through the show, Mina Lee and Seung-joon ‘developed feelings ‘for each other. There was no lead in, no flirting, no back story, no catalyst, nothing. And we never found out what became of their relationship. The end.

Lastly, there was this budding romance teased between Ryong’s colleague Jeon Yi-man (played by Im Sung-jae) and one of Ryong’s adoptive mothers, Jang Mi-hwa (Choi Jung-won). The pair flirted in so many episodes, yet by the end of the show the love story was completely abandoned without any care.

K-dramas are notoriously known for their romantic and hopeful love stories, often weaving love into some of the most unexpected dramas. But in WTSG, the writers clearly did not care about making any of the love stories work. They did not provide any reasons for the relationships to have begun in the first place, and literally none of them were seen through to the end. I ask myself again, why did they even bother?

K-dramas remind me a lot of older Bollywood movies in that there is never too much vulgarity when it comes to love. American TV and movies just relish explicit sex scenes, to the point where some shows are no better than straight-up porn. It’s to the point that I can’t really watch any show when there are people around because an orgy might break out any point onscreen, and this happens even on Disney+. Personally, if I need to see raunchy sex, Pornhub exists, and quite often I feel that these stories can be told without exposed boobs or schlongs. This is one of the reasons why I respect Korean dramas, because majority of the time they sell romance without the need for sex scenes. We know the characters are intimate because of the great dialogue and great acting. While K-dramas have been known to tackle difficult topics like bullying and inequality, they typically do not contain overtly crass language or talk about sex in great detail. WTSG decided to go for the gold. From the moment the show started, sex had been a big topic, with Ryong almost immediately sleeping with Go-eon and the sexual affair between Dong-ah and Tae-hee. Under the guise of science, discussions about sex took place a lot, especially about the possibility of doing it in space. On the space station, Santi had X-rated magazines all over the place, and the rest of the crew were totally okay with it. Afterall, he needed to jerk off every day to have his sperm studied (why did we need to know this?). Then we got to the big, crazy sex scene in space, where Ryong’s and Eve’s naked bodies intertwined with each other in zero gravity. It’s okay, though, because they were already naked in order to huddle together for warmth as the space station was left without power. Even the fruit flies and mice had sex scenes in this show. But for me, the best moment in the show (and quite possibly the most unexpected) was towards the end when an English-speaking character from IOU in America called Ryong a motherfucker, literally. It was so loud, bombastic, and out of place. As if this show didn’t have enough of a shock factor, the writers really thought, “how can we push the envelope even move?” I found myself really confused about what the goal was here. Was it to be more westernised and incorporate very American qualities into the show? Sex, swearing, English-speaking cast, and wokeness? Speaking of wokeness, there is most lively a critical reason as to why sex was more prevalent in this show more than in others, so let me dive into that next.

I have to thank the people of Reddit for pointing out something that I would have never considered on my own. The more and more I think on it, this show was definitely planned propaganda. While I’d heard about it on social media, I completely forgot about the issues South Korea (among other societies) has been facing with regards to low birth rates. People are opting to refrain from having kids because of a few different reasons. There really is no work-life balance and South Koreans spend a lot of their time working tirelessly. They don’t have the time to date, let alone to think about raising families. Part of the reason for working so hard is because life can be quite expensive, so the government has even promised financial grants to those who give birth. But even with this incentive, youngsters would rather have lived experiences and enjoy their freedom instead with what little time they do get.

Enter When The Stars Gossip, a show disguised as a space travel drama, but is really a woke-ass attempt to remind the masses how vital it is to procreate. Imagine making an entire show filled with stories, characters, and great actors, but solely with the intention to push a singular message: have sex and make babies. Well, this is what you end up with. It’s like one of my more recent favourite sayings, “go woke, go broke.” Everything in WTSG was designed around birth, and it really shows based on the lack of care for character development, astronomical accuracy, scenario plausibility, and overall storytelling. Let’s do some numbers… A total of 3 characters were desperate to get pregnant, but could not (Go-eun, Min-jung, and Santi). 3 characters were completely obsessed with getting their experimental creatures to give birth (Eve, Kang-su, and scientist Ma Eun-soo). There were 2 OB-GYNs on the show (Ryong and Yi-man). There were 2 characters that were adopted (Ryong and Eve). Now let’s run some facts. One of Ryong’s adoptive mothers (Na-mi) had secretly given up her own child (who happened to be Eve) and she faced dire consequences for it, which I explain below. Ryong’s sole mission in the show was to protect the morula he created in space through completely miraculous circumstances, such as no equipment and the risk of dying. When he got back to Earth and failed to implant it into the host mother, he had a mental breakdown and did not fear the legal repercussions of breaking the law (because this was how important it was to create life). It became a point of contention between him and Eve, which then lead to him breaking up with her because she played a part in destroying the morula. Then Eve found out she was pregnant while on the space station and it became too dangerous for her to get back down to Earth and keep the fetus alive. Eve, who was a stickler for rules since the show started, suddenly decided to defy orders and remain in space to protect her baby. When she started to face complications, the KSA decided to send Ryong (a now convicted space-trained OB-GYN and the baby’s father) up to the station. His secret goal was to try and convince Eve to come back to Earth, even if it meant losing the baby. Eve, who again was always practical, argued that this particular baby needed to stay alive. Although Ryong convinced her to return to Earth, the writers double-downed on insisting this baby be born and they made her have a near-catastrophic panic attack aboard the space shuttle. This meant she had to stay up in space. At this point, Ryong and the other characters explained why it would be a bad idea for her to have the baby up there because of the various ways it could go badly. Once again, even after telling the audience about all of the bad outcomes, the show did the exact opposite, and Eve gave birth to a baby girl on the space station.

There is massive spoiler in this that I will discuss below, but the show pretty much ends off on the note of this new life finally being created above the Earth, opening the possibility for infertile couples to have babies at a ‘future space hospital’. The outcome of these highly illegal experiments doesn’t result in any criminal consequences and instead reinforces the message that the miracle of life is important beyond worlds, literally. Once this messaging was made clear at the end of the finale, nothing else mattered. As I mentioned above, many character storylines were left unfinished, which is highly unusual for K-dramas. I believe this is because none of it really mattered to the showrunners. WTSG was meant to serve the agenda of showing people how important it is to have intercourse and have babies, to the point where it can even be done in outer space against all odds. This was nothing more than woke propaganda where they tried to do something cool and underhanded, but it completely failed. It was a waste of talent and money, and had the writers only cared to prioritize the story and put the narrative second, it might have worked out better. I hope this show serves as a lesson to future studios and actors to not mess with what isn’t broken and to be selective with content choices.

Allow me to circle back to the spoiler I mentioned before. So, within all this mess, the show began with a focus on Ryong, but over time shifted a lot of that focus to Eve. Eve began as a stubborn and rigid space captain who eventually embraced a more vulnerable side after meeting Ryong. The show tilted focus to Eve’s insecurities surrounding her birth and her curiosity about her birth mother. When she eventually figured out the circumstances surrounding her birth, she grieved for her old self and almost turned a new leaf in the way she looked at things. She even jeopardized her esteemed career to ensure her crewmates and Ryong faced little to no punishment for their roles in creating a morula in space. When Eve discovered she was pregnant, she had already gone through the motions of almost losing her job, getting cheated on, being rejected by her birth mother twice, and being dumped by Ryong. All she had left was the baby inside of her. Despite the great odds, she remained in space and gave birth to a healthy baby. And after all that and the events of 16 episodes, the writers had the audacity to kill her.

Yes, you read that correctly. The main female lead died shortly after giving birth. Of all the things to keep real in this shitshow of a drama, it had to be the complications of childbirth in zero gravity. What the fuck was the actual point? I have very strong convictions about the lead characters dying at the end of a show. Romeo and Juliet? Fuck that entirely. I just can’t fathom 1,120 minutes of my life wasted. What a pointless and pitiful existence for this woman. Yet the writers would have you believe that she sacrificed her own life to create another, and that it was beautiful. The reality is that now a baby is stuck in space to grow, with the possibility her body will adapt in a way that means she can never go to Earth. Ryong, as father to this child, must stay with her, but the longest a human has ever stayed in space was a year max. His body could fall apart at any second. And the woman of his dreams and the mother of his child is now dead. Happy ending though because it was for the greater good! When realistically if Eve had gotten an abortion in space and returned to Earth with Ryong, they could have gotten pregnant again and raised a family together. Instead, all three of these charters will probably die. But again, it was worth it for the message.

It was beyond insulting to watch week over week as things made less and less sense. The plot holes increased while the integrity of the show decreased. During the final few episodes, there were some moments when I thought the show was getting better. And then as a final ‘fuck you’ to the audience, we were given this ending. Can my time be refunded, please?