Meet our male lead. His name is Ma Dong-chan and he is a smoking hot GENIUS film maker who wins awards and grasps complex scientific theories in mere days.

Ma Dong-chan starts this episode walking down the dingy, menacing hallway of an OCN drama and into a set piece from Circle before bypassing a short slapstick sequence to ensconce himself in a lightweight romcom while waiting for the serial killer to show up.

Because this writer never met a genre she didn’t want to smash together into the same ten minutes.

What genre is this show, Chingu?

ALL THE GENRES.

Our Salted Caramel ice cream starts the episode frozen. We don’t know why he’s frozen, just that he has a female popsicle with him. Who is she? What’s her name? Why is she there? Who cares? She’s female, that’s all that matters. We shall call her Candy, the love interest.

The episode is called The Origin of Cryogenics and we segue straight into a prolonged science montage where our hero looks knowledgeably at science stuff and a mad scientist with one of his former lab animals on his head gestures vaguely at DNA strands and shows him around the lab. Our boy Chang Wookie finally turns meaningfully to us and declares

And we all kind of melt. Let’s admit it. It’s the voice and the semi-smirk, the swagger. The Healer memories. (Hey, remember when JCW did a good drama?)

But honestly, this first five minutes is amazing. It’s like JCW being sciency, JCW being inspirational, JCW being cryogenically frozen and… some female thing also, we’ll need her later for a love interest. Who is she? Who cares!

So far she’s not even a pot plant. Pot plants have life. Right now, she’s a seed in the Svalbard Vault waiting to be defrosted when they need her for plot.

Speaking of the plot, it goes something like this: our GENIUS popsicle man wants to make a documentary about the cryo technology and he volunteers to be frozen for 24 hours to prove it works.

As we flashback to the time before the great freeze, we’re introduced to our female lead, Go Mi-ran, finally.

She looks something like this:

Go Mi-ran is unemployed and poor and lives with her lively impoverished family and is devoted to her little brother and takes part time jobs being humiliated on television in embarrassing slapstick sequences that put Ma Dong-chan in very literal superior position to her while she flails around out of control.

She is of course plucky and cheerful and no doubt has an innate sense of justice that I’m sure we’ll see demonstrated before the end of the drama – probably even this episode.

Her icecream flavour is strawberry. Sometimes she comes in a waffle cone with sprinkles on it.

She is a shocking Candy. He is a suave and successful GENIUS.

And that’s when I developed my drinking problem

Ma Dong-chan wants a female volunteer for the freezing project so he quickly settles on the “crazy” Go Mi-ran who of course turns him down. But not before consulting “a professional” in the guise of a shaman; a scene just as painful as any of the similar ones from Strong Woman Do Bong Soon. Who knows why this writer finds shamans so frigging hilarious but it establishes that, like most Candies, this one is just not that bright.

Neither Dong-chan’s perfect girlfriend nor Mi-ran’s skeezy Freud-quoting boyfriend are too thrilled about the freezing but that becomes irrelevant when Mi-ran catches the boyfriend cheating and dumps his ass in a scene that frankly I fast forwarded because we all know what this writer is like with their slapstick gags.

Following this incident Mi-ran decides to get frozen and Dong-chan tries to talk her out of it. I literally have no idea why but anyway, we know they get frozen so that’s all that matters really.
And Dong-chan has already started to give her a few looks that say he definitely might fall in love with her in 20 years or so and we all know JCW kills that shit dead.

Speaking of, there’s a thriller plotline running underneath this episode. It doesn’t make much sense but I didn’t expect it to now and I don’t expect it to in the future. It involves smirking evil men walking away while flames lick the walls behind them and our scientist with the bad wig being murdered.

As the episode ends in the lab with flashing warning lights around the cryo chambers and a scientist indicating panic by clutching his hair, we start to wonder how precisely these two end up 20 years in the future. I guess our two ice cream cones aren’t getting defrosted this week.

Oh and yeah, this was one of the worst premieres I’ve ever seen and – let’s just say – it’s good that I don’t knit.

just please stop calling me Shirley.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, epic! 😀

Omg, I love Airplane, and all the gifs! I have no intention of watching whatever this is, I don’t even know, but PLEASE tag me so I don’t miss this GEEENIUSSNESS. The male lead has nothing on you, LT!

This is great.