Melting Me Softly

and the Cryonics Imagination

Melting Me Softly is a 2019 South Korean romantic comedy that features cryonics its chief plot driver. Ma Dong-chan (Ji Chang-wook) is a flamboyant young television producer in 1999 Seoul who volunteers to be frozen for twenty-four hours as the stunt centerpiece of a variety show. Since every variety show needs a pretty girl, he takes along a companion: Go Mi-ran (Won Jin-ah), a cheerful, feisty, broke college student working part-time for the studio. Ma Dong-chan has a young and beautiful fiancée, Yoon Se-ah; Go Mi-ran has a boyfriend who reads Freud and is a complete idiot. Ma and Go hop into the fridge expecting to pop back out in twenty-four hours and see them all again the next day.

Things—of course—go wrong.

The two wake up not twenty-four hours later but twenty years later. It’s 2019. Stupefied and appalled, they try to return to their jobs and families and world to find everyone and everything they knew and has aged two decades.

Not only that: the process has potentially fatal side effects. The resurrected duo are remain cold. Not very cold: their body temperatures are 31.5 degrees Celsius (roughly 89 degrees Fahrenheit). But if that number rises to normal temperature for very long, they’ll die. (In fact, they’ll die anyway from the treatment, and fairly soon, unless the grey-haired scientist that put them under finds a cure. Quick. Alas, the scientist in question lost his memory after a car bomb attack by an Evil Corporate Bad Guy intent on stopping the experiment, but that’s another sub-plot.)

This is, scientifically speaking, complete nonsense. Vitrification — the actual cryopreservation technique used in both human cryonics and IVF — involves replacing cellular water with cryoprotective agents to prevent ice crystal damage during cooling. The process of revival, should it ever become possible, would have nothing to do with giving the frozen patient a shot through a syringe. Nor will the recovered patient remain as chill afterward as a good martini.

But fatally warm blushes and heart rates that spike lethally at lovestruck emotional moments are the stuff of screenwriters who Google the word ‘cryonics’ for twenty minutes and then chuck science and cryobiology wholesale for the sake of a cliffhanger-addled romantic comedy. Oh, there are some good jokes in Melting Me Softly, all right. But the biggest joke is the science. It’s a laugh riot!

But avoiding the show for that reason would be a mistake.

Melting Me Softly has all the elements that make K-Drama the fanbase powerhouse that it’s recently become: decent, honorable lead characters, portrayed by handsome likable actors; moving love triangles; violent action; tear-jerking moments; pratfalls and satire and gentle comedy. Everything that makes a good show fun is there. Best of all, there’s no Woke agenda, no incongruent diversity casting, no politics, no corrosive cynicism, no nudity, no obscenity. It’s as pleasant a show as you can watch nowadays, humane and funny and touching. If you can get past the implausible cryonics, it’s a very welcome break from the non-stop gore, coarseness, propaganda and cynicism of Western TV.

But perhaps accidentally, or perhaps with more cultural intuition than it intended, Melting Me Softly does get something exactly right about cryonics. Something important. What it gets right is the emotional topology of cryonic revival. It gives us a picture, with considerable precision, how actual cryonics revival may soon one day feel; and it helps illuminate why cryonics doesn’t feel that way now, which is perhaps why cryonics has had so few members and sign-ups and supporters.

Cryonics advocates constantly tell prospective members choosing cryonics suspension means choosing life over death. And they’re right.

But the general public sees it differently. To them, it is a choice for a kind of death: the death of everything that surrounds them. Sure, you may survive. But everyone and everything you’ve loved and known, won’t.

In The Prospect of Immortality, Robert Ettinger wrote that he expected a cryonics patient to be waiting in cryostasis for centuries before being revived. Put yourself in the shoes of that patient. What will you wake up to see? Will the friends you knew be waiting? Will you hear the pop music you loved, enjoy the fast food you ate, go to the places you once hung out? Will the TV shows and politics and fashions and comedians and tech still be there? Almost surely not.

You’ll giving up all you know for what may be a Utopia, or what may be a dystopia, but in either case will likely be a very different world—maybe a completely, incomprehensibly, alien world. You’ll likely be an anachronism in that world, as unfit for that future society as a Neanderthal would be in a Google board room. And you’ll be there alone.

Those who consider any kind of life better than death may find that risk acceptable. But most people don’t. If the price of survival means losing your whole world, and the people you know and love, for many people that price is too high.

Now the good news is that Ettinger’s centuries-long term of revival is no longer the default.

Recently the Cryonics Society put the following question to the world’s seven leading AI programs: when will a person entering cryonic suspension today be revived? The consensus response: revival will be possible somewhere between 35 and 75 years from now. One AI suggested it could come in as soon as 15 years.

The far future may not look like anything we could even now recognize. But the near future? The world of 2040? That may very well be recognizable. It may even be familiar. After all, will the world be that different in 15 years? If all your friends and family and co-workers were 15 years older, would that really be so bad? (15 years from now, there will probably be no Donald Trump. For half of American electorate, that change alone would be paradise.)

Melting Me Softly adopts that new timeframe. And that’s what’s so touching, and thought-provoking about it. The people who come back have subjectively been gone only a day. The world they knew is gone. But it hasn’t vanished. It’s changed, yes, but not really a lot. The streets and houses, the malls and colleges, relationships that defined their previous life are still there. They’ve been bent and stretched by twenty years of time passing, true. But not unrecognizably. The relationships remain. They simply require adjustment.

Some of those adjustments are small, some are wrenching. Our heroes pass from landlines to iPhones with relative ease, but showing up on your parents’ doorsteps unchanged after they thought you were dead twenty years is not so easy to navigate. Everyone has had to go living as though you were dead. What do they do now that you’re back?

Ma Dong-chan’s fiancée, Na Ha-young (played with considerable wounded depth by Yoon Se-ah) is the series’ most interesting figure. She lost the man she loved. She mourned. She grieved. She rebuilt herself. She became, over the two decades of her fiancee’s absence, a successful, armored, managerial corporate leader, someone she never imagined she would be. When Dong-chan returns, unchanged, thirty-two years old to her forty-four, she wants things to be as they were before between them. But the engagement can’t simply resume. One of the people in that relationship has changed, and altered, and the relationship now something different, tangled and unresolved. Yoon Se-ah communicates all of this with a poignance and restraint the rest of the show rarely shows.

Go Mi-ran’s situation, by contrast, is pure comedy. She dumped her boyfriend in 1999 for cheating on her. Now she finds him twenty years later as a college professor, married to her best friend, still a womanizer but one who’s romanticized Go Mi-ran into the great lost love of his youth. He gives chase, tripping over himself ridiculously to win her back, totally oblivious to the fact that she’s even more repelled by him now than before. Meanwhile, Mi-ran takes college classes to acclimate to the modern world, and there she finds another admirer, one much more to her taste—only it turn out to be her former boyfriend’s fully grown son. The generational scrambling is genuinely disorienting, and in its better moments the show leans into this strangeness with real feeling.

That’s not to say that it dwells on it. Melting Me Softly was written to amuse, and it does. But that doesn’t detract from its modest but genuine significance as a cultural artifact. After all, here’s a mainstream prime-time hit from a major South Korean cable network, produced by Studio Dragon, the prestige studio behind some of the most watched Korean dramas of the past decade, and featured internationally on Prime Video, treating cryonics not as horror, not as dystopia, not as scientific hubris science gone cosmically wrong, but as something that… just happens. A mishap, certainly, but a recoverable one, one that can be folded back into ordinary life. The frozen person returns. Their family is still there, older and different in some ways, but still present. Their relationships are changed a little bit, but not destroyed. The world dealt with their absence and can absorb their return.

Cryonics, in this telling, isn’t a completely new beginning nor the end of a person’s story, or their story as part of a greater community. It’s a parenthesis in a deeper continuity.

This is, in its quiet way, a remarkable cultural shift. The cryonics patients of Western science fiction tend to arrive in futures that are alien and alienating, stripped of everyone they loved, orphaned in time. Melting Me Softly proposes something different: that revival within the span of human relationships is not possible but manageable.

Asian science is increasingly embracing cryonics—see the Cryonics Society paper on the Shendong — but parallel to that development is an influence from the East Asian cultural imagination, shaped by different assumptions about the continuity of family obligation, and the persistence of relational bonds across time and transformation. It may well be naturally hospitable to a version of cryonics in which revival is a complication rather than a catastrophe, a difficult homecoming rather than a complete reconstruction of identity—a communitarian cryonics. Here, the Confucian weight placed on family continuity, on honoring the past while navigating the present, maps unexpectedly well onto the cryonics scenario. The ancestor returns; the family receives them; life continues, changed but unbroken.

Melting Me Softly only flirts with the philosophical depth its premise demands. It all too quickly retreats to the safety of the romantic comedy formula that underpins it. Still, the cultural ease we see in its very existence, the casual normalization of cryonic revival as a narrative possibility, no more exotic than amnesia or a plane crash or any other disruption that tests whether human bonds can survive, is an experience that the series aired in millions of Korean households, and now in ones across the globe.
And it’s rooted in two far more realistic scientific trends. The first: that thanks to breakthrough developments like quantum computing and AI, medical technology is accelerating at a pace once considered unthinkable. The second: that as a result, the arrival of viable cryonics resuscitation is coming every closer in time.

The argument is quiet, and Melting Me Softly wraps it in comedy and romance. But it is being made: the show tells us that the cryonics patient may come home dressed in clothes that are twenty years out of fashion, using slang decades out of date, and needing to relearn how to use new phones, and Apple Pay, and electric vehicles. But they will. And many of the people who loved them will still be there to help.

For a Western culture has mostly learned to treat the future as Zombie apocalypse, ecological desert, or political nightmare, that is a surprisingly welcome experience: an experience of hope.

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