Writer Lee Soo-yeon — who previously brought us the acclaimed Forest of Secrets and Grid — is finally back with the Disney+ original Blood Free, and from the looks of it, it’ll be just as thought-provoking as her usual fare. In the near future, rapid advancements in technology have allowed for a groundbreaking invention — the replacement of farmed animals with synthetic meat.
As the researcher Yoon Ja-yoo who pioneered the foray into artificial meat, Han Hyo-joo (Moving) stands proud at the helm of the BF — or Blood Free — corporation. “In order to become perfect, the chains must be broken,” Ja-yoo declares, and her words are met with applause from her enraptured audience. “Humankind must liberate itself from the food chain.”
A stoic salute introduces us to Joo Ji-hoon (Jirisan) as the ex-marine Woo Chae-woon, who currently serves as Ja-yoo’s personal bodyguard. “That was the beginning of BF,” Chae-woon narrates, and we witness the high-tech process of culturing meat in a laboratory. A new age of lab-grown meat has dawned, and Chae-woon proclaims that mankind has reached “the apex of the pyramid that will completely dominate the ecosystem.”
For all its game-changing utility, Chae-woon seems to realize the implications of such an innovation, and the danger lurking behind it. “The best technology I’ve known has always taken the form of a weapon,” he observes, as Ja-yoo is accosted in her car by a crowd of anguished protesters. Does BF meat truly shatter the shackles of the food chain, or does it simply transpose it within the human race itself?
A tempest of instability is brewing on the horizon, summed up in brief glimpses of gas masks, gun shootouts, and a body falling onto a car’s hood. A chyron elucidates the dilemma brought on by synthetic meat: is it a disaster, or a blessing? There are always two sides to a coin, but even with blood staining her face, Ja-yoo remains resolute in her vision. “Don’t you want to become a wholly dominant species?”
Helmed by writer Lee Soo-yeon and PD Park Chul-hwan, who previously collaborated on Grid, the ten-part thriller Blood Free will be serving up its first slice on April 10.