When The Stars Gossip – K-drama Episode 3 Recap & Review

The Space Walk

Episode 3 of When the Stars Gossip begins with the group onboard the space station sitting down to eat. Ryong isn’t there though, as he’s inside his room looking at a photo of Go-eun. But, of course, he can’t stop thinking of Eve. Like clockwork, Eve shows up and catches him off-guard, encouraging him to come and eat something with the group.

There’s also the social aspect here too of course, where the group gather and watch the lottery numbers read out. However, this is also Kang-su’s opportune moment to sneak out and continue his insemination mission.

Back on Earth, Go-eun shows to see her father and tries in vain to make Jae-ryong reconsider and let Ryong go ahead and do his job. He refuses, naturally, and settles down in his office to watch the lottery numbers be called out.

Jae-ryong is also fed information from his colleague, which serves as exposition for us, to understand the process of artificial insemination. Kang-su goes ahead with his mission and feeds back to the Chairman that he’s done 7 out of the 10, and promises that all of them will be done by the end of this mission. However, he’s interrupted by Ryong before he can finish the job.

Ryong is still a newbie onboard of course, and he’s shocked when he finds out that Kang-su and Eve will be going out and doing a spacewalk on the side of the ship. This is very dangerous and Eve explains that all astronauts usually write wills before they go out just incase.

Ryong is worried for he safety, but of course couldn’t care less about Kang-su, which is pretty amusing given how he phrases it. Speaking of Kang-su, he receives a call from Go-eun, who’s furious about the whole egg mission. She calls him a melon-headed asshole but he doesn’t listen to any of it, instead marvelling over her beauty and saying “how pretty”.

As fate would have it, one of the astronauts, Mina Lee, finds a winning lottery ticket and is shocked given the winning amount is 500 billion won. There’s a whole montage here involving what she’d do with the winnings, before we get back down to brass tacks.

Ryong rings through to his friend back home and decides to put a new plan into action. He intends to set off the fire alarm by going all-out on the treadmill, short-circuiting the power and getting the eggs for himself. Now, while the others are out on their spacewalk, this will be the opportune time for him as the power will shut off, it’ll deactivate the locks on the cryogenic freezer, and he can get the eggs.

While he bides his time, Eve writes up her will, at the request of Ryong, and comes with happy news. Turns out those fruit flies from before are pregnant! Ryong and Eve agree to keep this a secret from Kang-su, knowing that he’d just get rid of them if he finds out. There’s some nice banter between them here too, as Ryong encourages her to meet up when she’s back and they’re on earth together.

For now though, the attention turns to the 141st spacewalk. Their mission is to fix the broken solar panel and while Eve and Kang-su are busy outside, Ryong does what he can to shut down the power. It works, and he hurriedly takes the samples and hides the eggs inside the flowers, where he also discovers the winning lottery ticket that Mina Lee has stashed in there.

Ryong makes it just in time as the other astronauts show up. He’s predictably reprimanded by Mission Control for almost causing a fire, but Eve sticks up for him. The power comes back on but Kang-su has to head back before Eve thanks to issues with his suit. However, Eve has problems of her own when she loses her footing and ends up getting entangled around the solar panel. It’s a really tense endeavour, as she finds herself flinging around at crazy speeds, wrapped up and grabbing at anything she can.

Unfortunately, in grabbing the panel, Eve’s glove ends up damaged and that means she needs to get inside asap otherwise she could lose pressure and potentially die.

Seung-jun is desperate to head out and save Eve, who’s caught in a precarious position, while she tries to untether herself and make it back to the airlock before it’s too late. Unfortunately, the suit loses pressure and as she fades out of consciousness, things look bleak.

The Episode Review

When the Stars Gossip returns with another decent episode, this time showing the high-stakes drama of being out on spacewalks and how dangerous they can be. Sure, here’s some liberties taken with the CGI and the G-force effects on Eve as she flies around, but the tension around the whole sequence is more than enough to make up for it.

Eve has to have survived that too, right? Otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a show, but the preview for tomorrow’s episode cleverly doesn’t show this either.

These dramatic spikes work really well to contrast some of the more light-hearted drama going on, including the lottery win mystery and the issues involving the other astronauts. Hopefully we’ll see a bit more about Seung-jun and Santi as they’ve kinda been bystanders for a lot of the run-time so far but we obviously have plenty of time to play with for that to come to fruition.

The drama involving the eggs is likely to encapsulate a lot of the main drama in this show going forward, but around that we also have plenty to whet the appetite regarding characters and their ties. So far at least, this one has been a decent watch.