As you can see the internal meter left to its own devices has tried to average out the scene. The subject is dull and lifeless. The shadows are pretty dark and the mids are dark as well....so the camera is trying to preserve the highlights at the expense of what the subject is. As you can see the camera not knowing what your subject is cant expose for your subject and compromises your pop on your subject. Look at the end for the PP version of this in comparison with the PP version of the metered subject shot. Trying to recover mid tones from shadow like information results in removing the pop from the main subject as there is less information in the shadows to recover from.