Episode Guide
Episode 1 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 2 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 3 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 4 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 5 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 6 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 7 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 8 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 9 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 10 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 11 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 12 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 13 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 14 – | Review Score – 4/5 Episode 15 – | Review Score – 4/5 Episode 16 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 After watching the emotional Hotel Del Luna and the fantasy epic Arthdal Chronicles, I was looking forward to siunking my teeth into a new k-drama and Melting Me Softly offered up quite the intriguing premise. Unfortunately, the show fails to live up to expectation, dabbling with several different themes and ideas early on and haunted by inconsistent pacing throughout the show. Despite some questionable dialogue, Melting Me Softly does manage to improve a little during the second half of its runtime but not quite enough to make this a drama I’d recommend watching in a hurry. The story starts in 1999 with variety director Ma Dong-Chan busy creating new shows and Ko Mi-Ran doing her best to find work to help support her family. Together, they decide to take part in an experiment where they will be frozen for 24 hours. However, due to some unfortunate circumstances they wake up 20 years later. Our two main leads are then faced with many challenges, as all their friends and family have aged and moved on. To make matters worse, they’re also left to deal with a fatal side-effect resulting in their body temperature needing to remain at 31.5 degrees. While Melting Me Softly offers up an interesting concept with people frozen in time, the first few episodes spend far too much time with flashbacks and to make matters worse, toward the end a lot of these feel more like filler than genuinely contributing anything to the series. Having said that, the final few episodes do pick up the pace though and offer up some enjoyable plot twists and fun scenes. While the show dramatizes its concept, at the same time it does tackle some controversial ideas around the ethical implication of the freezing, especially when we see the reason why some people would want to be frozen in time. For the most part though, the show dabbles a lot more in its comedy, especially when it comes to our two leads dealing with the aging of their relatives and evolution of technology, both of which offering up some really entertaining segments to watch. Acting as the antagonist of the show, Lee Suok Du presents a threat for our characters to overcome, especially during the second half of the show. It’s here Melting Me Softly improves, salvaging some of the damage done during the opening episodes, and offering up some decent story development as Dong-Chang and Mi-Ran find themselves in some tricky situations. Much like other Korean dramas of its kind, Melting Me Softly offers up a real winter-warmer of a soundtrack. While the songs were not as memorable as the ones in Hotel Del Luna, “Ice Cold” and “Right In Front Of You” were quite catchy and certainly fit well with the theme of the drama. Melting Me Softly has had quite the tumultuous journey; it struggles to find its footing when it comes to tone and pace, rendering it a difficult Korean drama to recommend. Thankfully though, if you stick with this one the drama does settle a little as we reached the last few weeks. There are better Korean Dramas out there though and while Melting Me Softly is far from reaching the same heights as the likes of Hotel Del Luna or When The Camellia Blooms, the show has enough drama and entertaining scenes to make it an easy to watch Korean drama, flaws and all.
