Cryonics Failure

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
...And this was the survivor.

"Harry, your odds of catastrophic failure in this situation is...120%? That, that can't be right. Oh, wait, I see. It's says 'Complete certainty Harry will die in the stasis unit, plus another one in five chance it'll decapitate him while he tries to climb inside.'"

—SF Debris lampshades this trope, which the episode surprisingly averts.

For such an advanced technology, cryonics is subject to a surprisingly high failure rate. Whenever our far-future heroes discover some long-forgotten set of Human Popsicles, at least one of them is inevitably dead (mainly so they can give a good skeleton scare) or otherwise can't be revived.

In some cases, this is practically a "cherry popsicle" in that a great number of the unrecoverables are insignificant to the story.

This might be an example of Truth in Television, though, given the real-life uncertainty of the process. For the situation when someone is frozen and then deliberately smashed to pieces, see Literally Shattered Lives.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Cryonics Failure include:

Anime and Manga

  • Three members of the Winter Team in 7 Seeds were mummified alive during the thousands of years they were supposed to be in cold sleep.
  • In the far-future chapter of Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix epic, the main character who has survived a nuclear apocalypse and granted immortality by a god stumbles upon a stasis chamber that is slated to open 10,000 years hence, and waits for it to open so that he will have someone to talk to. When the chamber finally opens, he finds...dust.
  • In Saint Seiya, Frog Zelos barely survives being turned into a Human Popsicle by Hyoga, but as he tries to move his frozen feet break and his body falls to the floor, completely shattering.
  • In one Fairy Tail arc, the Big Bad, a former training partner of Gray, was trying to Unseal the Sealed Evil in a Can their master sacrificed herself to freeze, in order to surpass her by destroying it. He succeeds in thawing the monster, only to find that over a decade as a Human Popsicle isn't conducive to Demon health either.

Comic Books

  • In the Worlds of Aldebaran comics, all but two of the population of the Copernicus died while in cryo-stasis. This was because of a biological computer virus, however.
  • Orolin in Elf Quest, the Guider of the High Ones' Palace-ship, was in stasis inside Preserver webbing when it crash-landed on the World of Two Moons. When his sole surviving crewmate Timmain returns to the Palace 10,000 years later she discovers that the webbing was torn during the crash and Orolin never woke up.

Film

  • The first Planet of the Apes movie. The astronauts awaken to find that their fourth companion and only female, Stewart (who wasn't in the book anyway), has died (Stuffed Out of the Fridge?). This one they can't blame on those "damn dirty apes".
  • The first few minutes of Aliens 3.
    • Also explained as an intentional part of Burke's plan to ensure that there'd be no Marines to tattle on him bringing Ripley back Alien-infected.

"He figured he could get an alien back through quarantine if one of us was...impregnated...then frozen for the trip home. Nobody would know about the embryos we were carrying, me and Newt."
"No, wait a minute, we'd all know."
"Yes, the only way he'd be able to do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home, namely yours."
"You're dead pal, you're dog meat!"

Literature

  • Two-thirds of the Mayflower passengers died during the trip in Remnants. The technology was incredibly experimental; Jobs' immediate response to being told they would be going into hibernation was to point out that most of the subjects died during its most recent testing on monkeys.
  • Used in an especially Nightmare Fueled example in the Red Dwarf book Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, where every stasis tube on a ship has been broken, killing their inhabitants, except one. This half broken tube causes the bottom half of a man's body to decompose over thousands of years, while his top half remains alive. Upon being revived, he screams for two minutes straight then dies of shock.
  • Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn novel Xenos opens with a large-scale one. A villain caused the problem to massacre large portions of the upper-class of the planet by having them revive without the medical assistance they needed.
  • A magical version of this occurs in the later Black Company novels, when some of the characters are trapped in magical stasis. Disturbing the magic killed some of them, and the first efforts at revivification were fatal for a few of the Mauve Shirts.
  • In a Young Adult novel called The Starlight Crystal, the heroine's spacecraft comes across another satellite orbiting the Earth, filled with people in cold sleep. Only two of the frozen people are long dead, one of which is the heroine's boyfriend. The other is the heroine's future self, who deliberately caused both cold sleep chambers to malfunction.
  • In The Eyes of Light and Darkness, some frozen people remain conscious during the journeys (which can result in them being conscious but frozen for hundreds of years). Needless to say, many humans ended up losing their minds. The colonization project went awry because of that. Fortunately, the humans found some intelligent aliens at their destination, but those aliens were also nuts. Being frozen long enough also causes death.
  • In Harry Turtledove's Homeward Bound, one of the humans doesn't survive the roughly 10-lightyear journey to the aliens' home planet. This makes things interesting for about 5 minutes since he was the head diplomat (also because he was Henry Kissinger, even though the text doesn't outright say it).
  • In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Slartibartfast complains that the cleaning staff didn't freeze so well... leaving nobody to clean up the bodies.
  • Andre Norton uses "cold sleep" in The Stars Are Ours as a way for a remnant of fugitive scientists and their families to flee a dystopic Earth for what they hope will be a fresh start on another planet. Some of them don't make it.
  • A non-lethal but still devastating Cryonics Failure takes place in Philip K. Dick's short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon". An off-world colonist is woken up from cryonic slumber, but is still immobile. The sentient ship tries to keep him sane by putting him back in happy memories. Trouble is, he carries so much guilt and anxiety, no memory will stay happy. By the time he gets there, his mind is still pretty much shot.
  • In Oryx and Crake, Snowman is living After the End. At one point, he walks by an old cryogenics facility and comments that everyone who was frozen died when the power went out.
    • Assuming they were alive to begin with, it's strongly implied earlier in the book that the entire company was a scam preying on desperate rich people.
  • In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, cryogenics is a pretty mature technology, but when people are frozen under emergency conditions in the field, there is a high risk of them suffering some brain damage or memory loss. People frozen under controlled circumstances in hospitals have a much better chance of making a full recovery.
    • In the novel Cryoburn it turns out that a particular brand of cryo-fluid -- used to replace the frozen person's blood -- used several decades earlier was not stable for more than about thirty years, and anyone who was frozen using it is now Deader Than Dead, leading to billions of dollars in liabilities for the cryogenics companies who had been using it, so they're covering it up.
  • In Andrey Livadny's The Third Race, a female astronaut awakens from cryo-sleep on a deep space sublight ship to find the rest of the pods empty, which is strange since the ship has two crews, one of which is usually frozen while the other works until they change shifts. She soon finds that the entire crew has been replaced with droids by the ship's AI, whose negligence allowed a meteorite to hit the ship, killing all on-board but her. It can be assumed that the rest of the pods were damaged, but the bodies were cleaned up to maintain the ruse.
  • In Across the Universe, a murderer starts pulling the plug on cryogenic pods aboard the spaceship Godspeed. Main character Amy survives, though she wakes up many decades before she was supposed to; several other human popsicles aren't so lucky.
  • In one of S.P. Somtow's Inquestor novels, there's mention of some human colonists who were travelling in time stasis. Unfortunately the device malfunctioned, causing some of them to become irreversibly frozen, so they're now used as ornaments.

Live-Action TV

  • The Blake's 7 episode "Time Squad": of four programmed guardians in a capsule carrying them and genetic stock, three survived stasis.
  • Star Trek adores this trope:
    • The Deep Space Nine episode "Empok Nor", where one of the Popsicles would have survived, had part of the station not collapsed through his pod.
    • Scotty coded himself and a Red Shirt into a transporter beam for seventy years until the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew found the ship in "Relics". Guess which one made it out.
    • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed". The Enterprise finds a ship with a cargo of 84 humans, 72 of whom are still alive, in suspended animation.
    • Repeated in Star Trek: The Next Generation‍'‍s "The Neutral Zone", complete with skeleton scare. (There were dozens on board... only three lived.)
    • Star Trek: Voyager, never being one to let a good trope pass them by, had two:
      • "Dragon's Teeth". An ancient race of warriors went into suspended animation to avoid destruction when every nearby race showed up and carpetbombed their planet from orbit (they deserved it).
      • "The Thaw". Some aliens go into suspended animation deep inside their planet to avoid the radiation created by solar flare. When Voyager showed up, two of them were splatted and the others were being held captive by a computer program (they didn't deserve it as much).
  • The Babylon 5 episode "The Long Dark". In this case the tech worked, but an alien showed up and ate one of the two.
  • Showed up in an episode of The Twilight Zone where four people put themselves in suspended animation with a special gas—three of them made it, one didn't, due to a falling rock breaking his apparatus.
    • Rod Serling, who wrote the episode, also co-wrote The first Planet of the Apes movie in which something very similar happens (no falling rock, but the glass is cracked). See Film folder above.
  • Parodied in the News Radio episode Space, where the entire station (save Matthew and Bill) have to go into cryogenics to avoid a disaster. Then Matthew trips over the power cord...
  • In an episode of The X-Files, a man's brain is put on ice and he dies anyway when an enemy of his sabotages his cryo-thing so that the temperature rises too high.
  • Davros turned Human Popsicles he deemed worthy into Daleks in the Doctor Who serial Revelation of the Daleks. The rest he turned into Human Resources.
  • Parodied in a Mitchell and Webb sketch: In the future, a popular edition of Big Brother or a similar Reality Show features only contestants who chose to be cryogenically frozen after death and have been brought back... only because they were all dead, they're just gray-skinned reanimated corpses clumsily staggering around trying to perform simple tasks with their stiff limbs.
  • Stargate SG-1 had an example where the team found a crashed sleeper ship where one of the crew had had downloaded the consciousnesses of six others who didn't make it into his brain. He put six more in Daniel before the rest of the team caught him and offered him a naquahdah reactor to wake up the survivors in exchange for transferring Daniel's extra personalities to himself.

Radio

  • The BBC's interstellar drama Earthsearch mainly takes place aboard a starship, with a depleted human crew of four versus two psychopathic computers. In one episode a scheming warlord tries to blackmail the computers into letting him join the crew: he hides a military robot on board that's programmed to activate if his life signs fail. He thinks this is perfect insurance against the computers killing him by sabotaging his cryosleep pod. He's wrong.

Tabletop Games

  • In the Traveller RPG, cold-sleep tubes, common on most ships for "Low Passage", have a certain chance of failure. Passengers in low passage often place bets on how many of them will survive the trip. The captain gets the winnings if the winner was one of the deceased.

Video Games

  • Almost happened to Mega Man Zero, despite being a robot. Damaged nearly beyond repair by prolonged exposure to the elements after the lab he was being stored in caved in due to a century or so of neglect and only brought back to life with the power of a semi-mystical electrical fairy. In a later game in the series we see a similar facility with some others who weren't so lucky.
  • In one area in Fallout 2 you can actually stumble upon, and unfreeze, a soldier put into hibernation shortly before the nukes fell. He thanks you, tells you his story and melts into a pile of goo. The game tells you he "suffers from post-cryogenic syndrome".
    • In the Fallout 3 add-on "Mothership Zeta", you unfreeze a group of people from various eras because one of them has a space suit and someone needs to go outside the ship. Unfortunately, the astronaut died at some point and so you have to take his spacesuit for yourself.
      • There are also two soldiers who die shortly after being defrosted, possibly due to being experimented on.
    • In the Fallout 4 prologue, all Vault 111 “residents” are put into cryo chambers. All of them except for the player and their spouse (who is shot by a man known as Kellogg before their son is taken by an Institute scientist) die from “asphyxiation due to life support failure”.
  • In Bubble Symphony, one of the many exaggerated ways to die is getting hit by an enemy snowman's snowball, causing an ice block to form around the character and quickly shatter, and then he/she dies.
  • Done deliberately in Mass Effect. The Protheans on Ilos froze themselves until the Reapers disappeared. While waiting, as the power became insufficient to keep the entire team alive, the overseeing computer starting disabling life support, starting with the least essential personnel, and working its way up the ranks until all but the most critical scientists were dead. Even they were in danger of being splatted when it finally became safe for the computer to wake them up.
    • Unfortunately, by that point there were too few of them to repopulate the species.
    • A similar fate befell the Prothean division on Eden Prime, as shown in Mass Effect 3: From Ashes. In this case, there was only one survivor, who is eventually revived by Shepard.
  • In BlazBlue, Jin is said to have frozen Bang's master to death. In gameplay, his various ice powers culminate in his Astral Heat, where a successful use results in the enemy being frozen in a giant block of ice that shatters to let their corpse fall out.
  • Space Quest 5 featured a two-part puzzle where you had to freeze a character in a cryonic chamber and later unfreeze her. Failure to read the instructions fully before doing so could result in under/over-freezing her in the first part and under/over-thawing her in the second. Any of these alternatives would lead to Game Over due to a Stable Time Loop (she is to become the mother of Roger's son who will go back in time to save Roger).
  • In Darkstar (the game with all the MST3K alumni), this happens to one of the crew members. Even worse, someone cut off his hand.
  • Portal 2 opens with a scene in which the protagonist wakes up after an unusually long period of hibernation in the Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Vault. During the escape, your AI companion explains that you are the sole survivor of ten thousand test subjects, the rest of whom all died when the hibernation systems ran out of power, or became gibbering vegetables due to brain damage; he's not very clear on the subject.

Wheatley: "The reserve power ran out, and the Relaxation Center stops waking up the bloody test subjects. And of course nobody tells me about any of this. So now I'm the one who's responsible for explaining why we've got ten thousand flippin' vegetables." [...] "So let's just get our stories straight. If anyone asks -- and nobody's going to ask, don't worry -- but just in case anyone does ask, just tell them that the last time you looked, everyone seemed pretty much alive. Not dead."

    • The finale of the co-op campaign sees Atlus and P-Body discover tens of thousands of other subjects still in storage, so GLaDOS can continue her tests.
    • It's kind of suggested that Chell also suffered some brain damage, since she jumps instead of saying 'apple'. Maybe it explains her Heroic Mime behavior.
  • The Vahnatai in Exile/Avernum periodically put their entire civilization to sleep with Alien Phlebotinum to conserve subterranean resources. They always expect a high attrition rate, which players get to witness themselves.
  • In Rage, the protagonist is the only one from his "Ark" to survive the cryostasis.
  • One chapter in Live a Live, which coincidentally plays out like a collage of various famous movies such as 2001 and Aliens.
  • Mei’s backstory in Overwatch. Short version: She was one of a team of meteorologists at a base in Antarctica when a strange storm hit. Cut off from the outside world with a limited amount of supplies, they decided to cryogenically freeze themselves until help arrived. Nine years later, an incoming message from Winston caused her to wake up, and she found that the storm had caused everyone else’s pod to malfunction - she was the only survivor. After barely managing to pull back from a Despair Event Horizon (helped in part by knowing Overwatch was still in business and they knew she was there) she managed to put together the makeshift survival-gear she needed to hike back to civilization, and the rest is history. Though it does seem rather odd how, as a fighter, she’s chosen to use the form of energy that killed her friends, she has mastered it rather well.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Clade Stevens in Orion's Arm got started as a result of one of these. All but six people on an early colony ship perished in suspension, concerned about inbreeding the survivors and their children eventually decided to reproduce solely by cloning.

Western Animation

  • In Superman: The Animated Series, Supergirl was the only one of her family to survive cryostasis.
  • New Captain Scarlet: In "Homecoming", an escape capsule from an ill-fated Jupiter mission lands in the Arctic. Two crew members in stasis are dead (one frozen mid-scream), only one has survived. It later turns out he died too - the "survivor" was a Mysteron replica.

Real Life

  • Many early cryonics patients have already died from various causes, particularly unfreezing. Which is probably why this is now only legal to do to people who aren't going to become more dead.
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