This review may contain spoilers
ILLOGICAL BUT BEAUTIFUL
I don’t care how absurdly ridiculous this whole space ride of a drama; seatbelt clutched, spacesuit on. Brain turned off, only feels and emotions —take off: When The Stars Gossip. ride it with an open heart. Because the galaxy, in its vastness, is as chaotically beautiful as this drama.There are countless things I could pinpoint just how much this drama objectively do not work. It genuinely feels like all the food you eat, congested and ground messily in the stomach, forming a big clamped turd as it ends up in one’s rectum. To put it simply, it’s as shitty as it could be. But what Korean MSG did the production put in for me to completely ignore all logic and be able to enjoy it as questioningly as I did? Yes, I was bemusedly amused through and through. One of the comments I read said, “You just gotta turn off your brain when watching this.” and it works! I was introduced to a new level of zany that ends up capturing hearts instead. In this drama, you open a new sense of wonder, a strange affection for the chaos that doesn’t make sense but somehow feels real. It’s like the mess becomes a kind of magic. Absurd and messy and utterly predictable and yet, you can’t help but hold on tight in this wild, messy story. It’s like getting your heart broken by someone with a clear red flag, but you just let it be because you felt happy, and you enjoy the moments of rawness only you could understand. Those imperfect flashes that cut deep but also shine bright, the kind that make the whole mess worth feeling. Maybe this was what the new album of Katseye meant. BEAUTIFUL CHAOS.
I love how everyone here shined in the embodiment of their roles. No one felt like they were stealing the spotlight, because the story allowed each of them to hold it. There was a rhythm in the mess. Llike constellations in a sky you didn’t expect to understand, but still found comfort in tracing.
Take Eve. Setting aside my immense love for Gong Hyo Jin, her character here hits hard to the core. You see a woman — driven, obsessed even — with creating life. And not just creating it, but preserving it, chasing it, almost romanticizing it. A woman so ambitious in giving birth to life in the most unexplored of environments, at her root, is an infant who was left alone on Christmas Eve. abandoned by the very person who gave her life. That moment with her biological mother, who stood there so audaciously, spouting excuses about just wanting to live and saying the child was nothing but a hindrance in front of Eve’s face. I really felt my whole heart break into pieces. Hearing that, you catch a glimpse of why Eve clings so desperately to the idea of life.It’s a rebellion. A beautiful, aching rebellion from someone who eagerly wants to let everyone know the miracle of life, and how this miracle should be nurtured and protected even despite being denied the same privilege from the one that birthed her. Thankfully enough, she got adopted by a loving man who molded her into becoming the Eve that she is. She is such a strong woman, so admirable. I mourn for her character, deeply..
And we have Gong Ryong. This, by far, may be Lee Min Ho’s best role and performance in my opinion up there with his character in Pachinko. Gong Ryong is a man with the unwavering need to save lives, even when he doesn’t quite know what to do with his own. It was so refreshing to see him as such a destitute, emotionally weathered character which made the performance all the more remarkable. Here, even when he's fumbling, hurting, scared, you believe him. You believe in him. Because despite everything, he believes in life. And in a drama where the science bends like gravity for how inaccurate it is, his resolve rings so loud and clear, it becomes the one thing that actually feels real, and you hold onto that. So even if the plot fails on logic and rationality, the characters don’t. They were played with heart. And Gong Ryong, I believe, was created and portrayed so beautifully.
We also have Chief Kang my most favorite character in the series, played wonderfully by Lee El. Her level-headedness and leadership are truly admirable. Even when her feelings were toyed with by Dong-a, who was in a relationship with Eve, of which two are her precious companions, she didn’t let her emotions interfere with her duty or cloud her judgment. Instead, she handled the situation with such cool composure, showing that her respect for both Dong-a and Eve was far greater than the role their feelings played in the ordeal. The level of emotional maturity she showed breathed a leeway for the plot to shift through motion more conveniently allowing the narrative to keep moving without drowning in melodrama. This, in retrospect, is a brilliant move from the writer and Lee El was able to portray it convincingly.
Dong-a, who was a jerk for playing with my two girls — Eve and Chief Kang, and although another convenience for the writer to play the whole cheating thing off, had a redemption when he — as I dare say — was so poignantly sexy as he risked his life taking off into outer space just to save Eve, including Gong Ryong. I was laughing and crying when the video was played of him crying for Eve’s life on his flight up to save her. And the whole flight down on Earth with the three of them, I was on edge the whole ride! My soul almost left as swift as their whole ride. But lol, before that, the way I screamed when he found Eve and Ryong naked in one thermal tent cuddling for dear life almost lifeless….and it being broadcast in the KSC headquarters, aaaaaaaaaaaaaa ahhaahashflsahfs 😭😭😭😭😭 The whole episode with those three on that particular flight made me pray for a preproduced drama hadahdfahs 😭 Dong-a was a real hero for what he did for real. Well, cheating aside.
Kang Kang Su, played by Oh Jung-se, I have to say, it feels like he wasn’t quite able to wash off his character embodiment from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, which was a bit of a downer for me. I would’ve loved to see another side of him as an actor. But that aside, I have mixed feelings about the character he played here. He came off as selfish, strict, and nonchalant at first, but as the plot progressed, you start to see that he’s actually a really hardworking man despite his wealthy background. His dedication to his work — even at the expense of his love life, which later fell into the cliché of a man desperate to get back with his ex still made his development compelling. The gradual unfolding of his layered personality was a good sight. I even felt bad for him when he got fired as an astronaut and stripped of his long-invested fruit flies space project, and yet no one stood up for him. Everyone was so ready to let him take the fall, but selfishly helped Gong Ryong using the lottery ticket that belonged to Kang Kang Su himself. That was a total what the heck moment. And the fact that Kang Su didn’t even blame them? Wild. Not to mention the enormous amount of money he personally spent for the robot arm and other things– and not even a pinch of gratitude from them. I mean, he deserves the punishment as per protocol, but the team’s loyalty was just nowhere to be seen.
I love the characters individually, but as a team, they’re bad.
Go Eun, played by Han Ji Eun, is the most rational character out of everyone. Not the typical selfish chaebol brat you mostly see on TV, she was a solid grey character here and I really liked her. As for the rest of the space crew; Mina, Seungjun, and Santi..they were great companions, but they really screwed up when they got choked up by greed over Kang Su’s lottery ticket. They tried to make up for it later, but the fact that they stayed silent when Kang Su was being interrogated ust to protect Gong Ryong, whom they initially refused to help for selfish reasons, that part stung. Still, their trio added so much charm and life to the series. Flawed, yes, but undeniably lovable.
The whole team in the KSC headquarters was actually my favorite. Although they didn’t get the same level of character progression as those in space, they were personas I genuinely loved. Do-na with her snobbish energy but deep down is a pro-life softy, Eun-so as Eve’s mouse companion ust as obsessed with mouse copulation as she is, and Han Si-won, who always looked like he was one minor inconvenience away from quitting. He literally had that “of course that happens” look as everything was just a problem after problem. Their presence kept the ground scenes alive and entertaining in their own right.
Some may say the characters in this series are bad and senseless, but isn’t that the very nature of humans? Flawed, imperfect… yet still, they try. They continue to take each step into the unknown future, just as vast and uncertain as the universe itself. There’s no perfect way to live life, and maybe that’s fine. The decisions we make, the roles we try to mold ourselves into. They’re messy, confusing, and sometimes laughable. But in that chaos, there’s something honest. Something that mirrors the way we stumble through our own lives, holding on to meaning wherever we can find it. Maybe that’s what When The Stars Gossip was trying to tell us all along: life is absurd, beautiful, and heartbreakingly human. And somehow, that’s enough.
The drama explores motherhood in so many brutal, quiet ways. Eve wondering if her unborn child will ever understand why she chose to go down to Earth — knowing full well it could kill it. Fearing that Gong Ryong would hate the child because of the choices she made. Doctor Na, pleading with the universe to just give her one chance to become a mother. Women breaking under the weight of creation, trying to hold on to something that might love them back. All of life on Earth is carried in the hollow space of a woman’s womb… and the --sometimes too incomprehensible desperation of some to be a mother, a parent. All of which sits between nature’s supposed blessing, the selfishness of some to abandon, and the selflessness of others to love and protect what was left behind. The instincts of it all tangled, wild, and deep. And this drama tackled it in the most quietly devastating way. It didn’t scream about motherhood or glorify it blindly. Instead, it showed the ache, the desperation, the contradictions. It showed how creating life isn’t just biological. It’s emotional, spiritual…and terrifying. And in between all the chaos and absurdity, those moments hit the hardest.
All of which may have seemed like prolife propaganda by Korea, but honestly, they did well. Because it makes you reflect on your own being. Not just on producing life, but on being the life itself.
All in all, this drama was beautiful to me. Science is grounded in facts, yet it can be falsifiable. So you have to accept the absurdity of the drama’s scientific background -- its imagination giving birth to a theory. But they captured something meaningful: the connection between space and birth. It reminds us how small we are in the vast universe, yet how lucky we are to exist. To become something from nothing. A speck beside the brightest star. Living and breathing. The poetry of placing space and birth side by side. Both show how tiny we are, yet how miraculous our existence is. Even in the silence between stars, there is room for pain, forgiveness, and love. That feeling may be small, clamped tight inside us, but when we look up, we see it reflected in the night sky; clear, clean, and still shining.
Maybe that’s why this mess made sense. Despite the chaos and red flags, I held on. Because it made me feel something real. And maybe, that is all we needed.
I am beyond glad to give this series a chance. I would have let one of the most beautiful productions in Kdramaland.
Thank you so much, When The Stars Gossip Team! You all did a great job. 끝!
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I went in blind with this one, with only Zhao Liying as the impetus. It wasn’t until a few episodes later that I realized the male lead was actually Lin Gengxin, ZL’s counterpart in my first-ever cdrama, Princess Agents. Their tandem once again reminded me of why I was so obsessed with them before. Even with the passage of time, their chemistry has grown stronger than it ever was. Watching them together again healed something in me I never knew had festered deep in my unconscious. I BELIEVE THIS WAS A GIFT TO ME SPECIFICALLY BAHLA KAYO JAN RGEGGWGSHEHSH 😭😭😭😭
But yeah, my sentiments aside, this was genuinely a good watch. As I’ve observed in the limited number of cdramas I’ve seen, there’s something so poetic about historical cdramas, especially xianxias (fantasy), and Legend of Shen Li perfectly solidifies that impression. The build-up of the story, though a bit all over the place, was beautifully executed. Since this drama is centered on love and vulnerability, each character’s embodiment of it was so heart-striking in its fluidity—mainly magnified by the two leads: Zhao Liying and Lin Gengxin. The they represent the "I know you can, but let me" typa love. How Shen Li can be Shen Li and not the strongest phoenix general with Xingzhi, not to mention, Xingzhi not minding to bear the feminine energy in the couple..both possessing yin and yang all throughout. Really both soft and strong in relaying their love languages I LOVE THEM SO MUCH 😭
To sum up Legend Of Shen Li, it’s a beautiful love story between two powerful beings in their struggle between love and responsibilities. But beyond that summation is a heartfelt, remarkable work of art...effects, cast portrayals, and the flow. Everything was just picture-perfect, and it will remain one of my dearest drama to ever exist. I could never thank enough the people behind this amazing production. NEEDLESS TO SAY, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT TO ALL. LIKE REALLY 😭
#LegendOfShenLi
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