Can a series that takes place a year from now be considered science fiction? A new South Korean thriller will take place in December 2025, but there are aspects of the show that are definitely science fiction. Read on to find out what we’re talking about.
FREE OF BLOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: A pastoral shot of cows grazing in a meadow. Suddenly, the cows begin to stampede, and we see them turn into holograms in the middle of a corporate presentation. We then see these same cows being shot to death and their corpses hanging in a refrigerator.
The essence: The powerful presentation is designed to demonstrate how revolutionary the company BF Group (“BF”, meaning “blood-free”) has been. It’s Christmas Eve 2025, and the company’s founder and CEO, Yun Ja-yu (Han Hyo-joo), makes the presentation to boast about the success of his company, which has revolutionized meat consumption across the world. world with its artificially grown meat products. They have also started creating vegan clothing and she serves her assistants fish grown in her company’s laboratories.
Woo Chae-woon (Ju Ji-hoon) shows his VIP invitation to the performance and enters through the back of the ballroom. When the champagne corks pop, he has a flashback to a battle he was involved in as a soldier. He follows her when she leaves the presentation, her car stopped in the middle of a tangle of protesters against what BF is doing. She is also there when, in a traffic jam, a man’s body falls onto the roof of Yun’s car, injuring her and essentially killing the man who landed on the car.
The man is identified as a sharecropper and it is unclear if he jumped or was pushed. But the timing of his landing in Yun’s car was probably no accident, as Yun discovers when he recovers in the hospital. BF executives Jeong Hae-deun (Park Ji-yeon) and On San (Lee Moo-saeng) suggest that they should hire a bodyguard for Yun, but they aren’t quite sure who would fit his needs.
When Kim Sin-gu (Kim Sang-ho), the soon-to-retire bioengineer who created the formula for creating cultured meat, walks into his lab and turns on his computer, he sees a message on the screen. Apparently, BF has been the victim of a ransomware attack by a group that has never been known to decrypt victim organizations’ files, even after paying the ransom.
Yun leaves the hospital to help his team investigate the hack. At the same time, reports are appearing online that the liquid the company uses to create its cultured meat is contaminated. Yun, trying to take a different angle on who might be launching the coordinated attack, discovers that the Naval Intelligence Command was hacked by the same group in 2022; Woo, the man he saw at the scene of the jumper landing on his car, worked there at the time.
Woo is called to the former president’s house; he wants Woo to infiltrate Yun’s company so he can investigate her. He is convinced she is responsible for an explosion when he took her and other CEOs to visit displaced troops in 2024, due to her refusal to appeal the law banning cultured meat. He wants Woo, who was also injured in the explosion, to find out what he’s doing to her and take her and BF down from the inside.
What shows will it remind you of? blood free It’s pretty much the corporate intrigue part of Succession without the parts where the adult children of the founders fight for power.
Our opinion: It is interesting that Lee Soo-yeon, who wrote blood free, sets the show just 18 months in the future. While there is an aspect of the show that feels like science fiction, what BF produces is something that is currently in development. The fictional part is that by the end of 2025, cultured meat will be mass-produced and consumed enough that both government officials and Prime Minister Seonu Jae (Lee Hee-joon) will be in Yun’s pocket, and the industry agricultural sector feels threatened.
But is cultured meat really a, urm, fleshy A theme around which to build a story of corporate intrigue? We are not sure. What we want to discover during the rest of the first season is how Yun started BF, how he connected with the scientist who created the formula for the cultured meat product and how he has been able to wield power.
As Woo becomes Yun’s trusted bodyguard, the mystery of who was responsible for that explosion will come to light. It doesn’t seem like Yun is capable of such murderous activity, but as Lee pulls back the layers of the story, we can see that she is capable of such evil acts.
What we hope is that as the corporate intrigue increases, we get to see more of Yun’s personality, and that the whole real meat/fake meat thing takes a backseat. Corporate intrigue is corporate intrigue, no matter what the corporation he targets does. The less the program focuses on the product and the more it focuses on who does what and to whom, the better it will be.
Sex and skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: As Senou, the prime minister, asks the former president if Woo will believe what he is saying about Yun, Woo remembers seeing the numerous coffins after the explosion, thinking that he will catch whoever caused it.
Sleeping star: Lee Moo-saengas On Sa, co-founder of BF Group. There may be something romantic going on between him and Yun, but it may also be speculation the former president is using to goad Woo into action.
Most pilot line: Yun tells her phone’s version of Siri to “just get lost” and the AI voice tells her to use kinder words.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. blood free has the potential to be a good corporate intrigue thriller, but if it gets hung up on the whole cultured meat thing, it’ll probably lose viewers.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
