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Cryonics Failure

 Cryonics Failure
type
FeatureClass
 Cryonics Failure
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure
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CryonicsFailure
 Cryonics Failure
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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 or otherwise can't be revived. (Mainly so they can give a good skeleton scare.)
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. See also Cryo Sickness, for those cryosleepers that wake up damaged or ill, but alive.
As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples
 Cryonics Failure
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2024-02-20T05:59:30Z
 Cryonics Failure
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Cryoburn
 Cryonics Failure
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DBTropes
 Cryonics Failure / int_11a2f6c7
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Cryonics Failure
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In The Worlds of Aldebaran, all but two of the population of the Copernicus died while in cryo-stasis. This was because of a biological computer virus, however.
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 The Worlds of Aldebaran (Comic Book)
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During the Kobali Front mission series in Star Trek Online: Delta Rising, the player discovers that the Kobali have been avoiding maintaining Vaadwaur stasis vaults (or pulling out the Vaadwaur in them before they die) found on Kobali Prime (leftovers from the ancient Vaadwaur empire) in order to use the bodies to reproduce. There is no evidence they actively sabotage the stasis pods, but it is pretty clear they only care about the living Vaadwaur in stasis insofar as needed to know when they cease to be living.
 Cryonics Failure / int_14d341dc
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 Star Trek Online (Video Game)
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 Cryonics Failure / int_162b751d
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_162b751d
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In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, Jacob's Ladder is a combination generation ship/sleeper ship, with both a living crew and stored human popsicles. During the journey, most of the human popsicles die and are recycled for raw materials. It was known when they launched that the cryonics technology was unreliable; the passengers were people desperate enough to risk it anyway.
 Cryonics Failure / int_162b751d
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 Jacob's Ladder Trilogy
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Homeworld:
It's mentioned in passing that the cryos tech has a non-zero failure rate, although they aren't terribly worried about it. Beats the alternative, at least. Far worse off from their perspective are the ones who survive and are revived only to discover that everyone they know back on Kharak is dead. On the more extreme end of the trope, the six "cryo-trays" holding the majority of the crew are simply hanging in space when the Mothership returns from its shakedown cruise to find Taiidani ships attacking said trays. Only four are strictly necessary to complete the mission, meaning that if the player is slow or especially heartless, up to two hundred thousand pods can be lost. (Possibly averted in actual play; most players report being strongly motivated to do everything they can, even reloading if they fail, to ensure that Everybody Lives.)
In the manual for Homeworld: Cataclysm, there is a mention of a man who is awakened from cryo, only to learn that he is the last remaining member of his kiith. Only he and his wife were chosen to join the Mothership, and her pod was damaged when the Taiidani fired on it. Instead of Drowning His Sorrows, he goes before the Daiamid and demands to be given a ship. They give him a Vengeance-class assault frigate, and he gathers a crew of individuals, who voluntarily join his kiith. They become well known in the bounty hunter circles for bringing in plenty of Taiidani war criminals.
 Cryonics Failure / int_17bfcf60
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 Homeworld (Video Game)
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Brought up in The Empire Strikes Back. When Han Solo is forced into carbonite freezing so Boba Fett can deliver him to Jabba the Hutt, multiple characters bring up the potential dangers of the process, with Boba in particular complaining that "he's no use to me dead." Darth Vader assures Boba that he'll be compensated if something goes wrong. Fortunately for Han, he survives and eventually gets thawed out in Return of the Jedi.
 Cryonics Failure / int_1e015a5d
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 The Empire Strikes Back
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In the pilot of Better Off Ted, Phil is cryonically frozen, initially planned for a year, but while moving his tube to the basement, he thaws out. He survives but starts randomly shrieking in the same pose he was frozen in. As he was freezing, his co-workers started betting on whether his eyeballs would explode.
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 Better Off Ted
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There is cryonics technology in The Ship Who..., but it's largely obsolete thanks to developments in FTL technology. When a colony of Space Amish is invaded in The City Who Fought, survivors board their ancient Colony Ship and flee. The ship was centuries old and had been reconfigured to serve as an orbital station, and the survivors didn't have the time or resources to properly convert it back, so it was in terrible condition. On top of that they had to vent some of their life support to slow down pursuers, which all together means that to survive to reach any destination the survivors had to take long-expired coldsleep drugs to slow down their oxygen consumption. When rescuers board the ship a few months later they find clouds of flies and countless maggots - half of the people in coldsleep had died. One of the ones who lives and recovers still has a bad reaction to the drugs, making her Improperly Paranoid to the point of refusing the medications that would help even as psychosis makes her steadily more deranged.
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 The Ship Who...
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Zig-zagged and discussed in the same scene in Black Man. The investigation of a spacecraft's crash-landing that apparently was indirectly caused by cryonic shenanigans brings the characters to discuss the current state of cryonics and the various malfunctions that could happen to people in suspension due to them. The playing straight? Someone did mess with the cryosleep pods on the ship. The aversion? They didn't do it to kill the inhabitants, just to use them as a refrigerator for snacks.
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 Black Man
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In an episode of Eureka, Fargo's long-lost grandfather is discovered in a cryopod, defrosted and revived. He doesn't remember what happened (it's eventually revealed that a jealous friend pushed him in). However, after a while, his body starts to age rapidly, until he looks the way a man of his age ought to look (rather than the young man he was frozen as). The doctors figure out that it's a side effect of the imperfect freezing. They manage to stabilize him, but he still remains in the body of an old man. Strangely, he's fine about it. In the altered timeline, this event never happened, and he became an influential figure in Eureka, using his clout to put his grandson in charge of Global Dynamics.
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 Eureka
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In Alien: Covenant, Captain Branson is killed when his cryotube traps him inside and catches fire after the ship is hit by a neutrino blast, incinerating him.
 Cryonics Failure / int_2b6c0401
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 Alien: Covenant
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Used in an especially horrific 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.
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 Red Dwarf
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Alien:
In Aliens, this was 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.
In the first few minutes of Alien³, an alien egg hatches, and the facehugger that comes out of it attacks the cryonic pods that Ripley and the others are hibernating in. The ship transports the pods to an escape pod, which then crashes on the planet below.
In Alien: Covenant, Captain Branson is killed when his cryotube traps him inside and catches fire after the ship is hit by a neutrino blast, incinerating him.
 Cryonics Failure / int_35ada324
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 Alien (Franchise)
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The Lost Episode Creepypasta Not Long Enough describes an unaired episode of Futurama where Fry commits suicide by getting himself frozen again, with the process killing him and letting his body decay because of the cryonics chamber not working properly.
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 Not Long Enough (Fanfic)
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Cryonics Failure
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Rick and Morty: One of Morty's erased memories is of him accidentally killing an entire room of cryogenically frozen humans because he hit the wrong light switch.
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 Rick and Morty
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In Rage (2011), the protagonist is the only one from his "Ark" to survive the cryostasis.
 Cryonics Failure / int_41a37ebe
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 Rage (2011) (Video Game)
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Defied in Supergirl (1972) #7. Supergirl finds Zatanna's frozen body and does her utmost to thaw her carefully because Zatanna can die if she is not careful.
 Cryonics Failure / int_4368037e
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 Supergirl (1972) (Comic Book)
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 Cryonics Failure / int_44c7750f
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_44c7750f
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This is the premise for The Ark (2023): The Ark 1 starship was designed to keep several hundred colonists and crew in suspended animation for a six subjective year trip from Earth to Proxima b. Five years in, a collision later revealed to be a weapons strike from another Ark destroys the command staff cryo bay and damages the colonists' bays, triggering an emergency wake up and the evacuation of the survivors to the rest of the starship.
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 The Ark (2023)
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Planet of the Apes (1968): 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".
 Cryonics Failure / int_460f1a4f
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 Planet of the Apes (1968)
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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. It explains how they died in graphic detail. Some of them were wiped out by micrometeorite punctures, some devoured from within by parasitic worms, some, the machinery just failed over the 500-year cryosleep, so they died of old age in their sleep. They refer to the micrometeor one as being "cheesed". That's not even counting what happened to the woman who was pregnant, or the boy who remained conscious.
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 Remnants
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In World of Warcraft Dragonflight, the dracthyr were placed in a magical stasis in their vaults twenty thousand years ago. The area has been abandoned for at least ten thousand years, resulting in the vaults being compromised by various natural forces. Many dracthyr died when this disrupted the protective magics.
 Cryonics Failure / int_49ad83ee
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 World of Warcraft (Video Game)
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Supernova does this to its captain. Note that they're not frozen during the jump — they are put into separate chambers and get naked in order to prevent their flesh from being fused with foreign objects. Unfortunately, it's not perfect, and the captain is fused with the glass from the chamber itself. At the end, due to the Big Bad smashing all but one of the chambers, the two protagonists end up jumping in the same chamber to escape the title event. Some genetic material ends up being exchanged, and they end up with mismatched eyes; oh, and the chick is pregnant.
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 Supernova
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The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", four thieves put themselves in suspended animation with a special gas. Three of them make it; one doesn't due to a falling rock breaking his apparatus.
 Cryonics Failure / int_53a0bd32
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 The Twilight Zone (1959)
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In the Deathlands novel Ice and Fire, the protagonists find a cyro section in a Redoubt and try activating it. Several tubes have already failed, including one whose occupant was clearly clawing to get out of his confinement after he was revived. Some are unfrozen too fast and turn to goo. An elderly woman is in such pain that she gets a Mercy Kill, and a man suffering from head trauma tries to attack the protagonists, then kills himself. One man does revive properly but he has ALS; he finds himself waking in an After the End world where there no hope of a cure and his disability makes him makes him The Load.
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 Deathlands
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In the far-future chapter of Phoenix, 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.
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 Phoenix (Manga)
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In Superman: The Animated Series, Supergirl was the only one of her family to survive cryostasis.
 Cryonics Failure / int_5c208620
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 Superman: The Animated Series
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Schlock Mercenary has suspended animation using both cryonics and nanotechnology, the latter developed over the course of the series. Usually, this is quite safe. But people put into Todd "Lazarus" Lazcowicz's illegally modified cryokit may find themselves subjected to medical experimentation during the process. If that counts as a cryonics failure or not depends on if you ask the two people who were put into the cryokit or the one merged person made from their recoverable bits who comes out.
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 Schlock Mercenary (Webcomic)
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Vorkosigan Saga:
Cryonics 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 30 years, and anyone who was frozen using it is now Deader than Dead, leading to billions of dollars in liabilities for the cryonics companies who had been using it, so they're covering it up.
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Worldwar: In Homeward Bound, one of the cryonic pods malfunctioned during humanity's roughly 10-lightyear journey to the aliens' home planet. One of the medical techs describes it as "dying in slow motion", a phrase which horrifies the rest of the crew. 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). Averted for the Race, since they have perfected the technology over tens of thousands of years (they tend to perfect existing tech instead of inventing new stuff).
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The X-Files: In the episode "Roland", 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.
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 The X-Files
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Overwatch: As of the Rise and Shine video, we now know exactly what happened to Mei and her team of climatologists. They were doing research at Ecopoint: Antartica, keeping track of the mysterious climate changes that were happening. Overwatch was unable to re-supply or rescue them due to a massive snowstorm, so they went into cryo-sleep to wait it out. However, Overwatch disbanded while they were asleep, and what should have been a brief few months instead became nine years. While Mei survived, her five co-workers did not. We never get to see what shape they're in, but the pods' display show no heartbeat or brain activity in the animated short. She leaves them each a cup of hot cocoa on her way out, as tribute.
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 Overwatch (Video Game)
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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-cryonic syndrome".
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 Fallout 2 (Video Game)
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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.
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 Fallout 3 (Video Game)
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Fallout 4 reveals that everyone in Vault 111 were put into cryonic sleep. The Player Character is the only who actually survives the sleep, as everyone else's cryo pods ended up malfunctioning and killing them; fittingly, that character's main nickname is "Sole Survivor". However, you later find out that the pods did not malfunction, but were sabotaged by the Institute. They deliberately only refroze the protagonist after killing your spouse and kidnapping Shaun, leaving the remaining vault dwellers to die in their pods from asphyxiation.
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 Fallout 4 (Video Game)
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In one episode of Stargate SG-1, where the team finds a crashed sleeper ship where one of the crew had downloaded the consciousnesses of six others who didn't make it into his brain. He puts six more in Daniel before the rest of the team catches him and offers him a naquahdah reactor to wake up the survivors in exchange for transferring Daniel's extra personalities to himself.
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 Stargate SG-1
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One of the popsicles in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Empok Nor" would have survived, had part of the station not collapsed through his pod.
 Cryonics Failure / int_73d7930f
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 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
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A magical version of this occurs in later The 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.
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 The Black Company
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Parodied in one That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch: In the future, a popular edition of Big Brother or a similar Reality Show features only contestants who chose to be cryonically 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.
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 That Mitchell and Webb Look
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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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_7668653b
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 Mass Effect 3 (Video Game)
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Mass Effect:
Done deliberately: 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 started 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. They did, however, travel to the Citadel and sabotage the primary means for the Reapers to return from Dark Space.
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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_7988cb68
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 Mass Effect (Franchise)
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In the first few minutes of Alien³, an alien egg hatches, and the facehugger that comes out of it attacks the cryonic pods that Ripley and the others are hibernating in. The ship transports the pods to an escape pod, which then crashes on the planet below.
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 Alien³
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In Aliens, this was 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.
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 Aliens
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In Project Hail Mary, the protagonist Ryland Grace wakes up with Laser-Guided Amnesia with a feeding tube in his mouth. He has no idea who he is, but the other two people in their beds are dead. Later on, he remembers (through flashbacks) that there's no magical cryogenics procedure. Instead, they were in a medically induced coma (with advanced medical machinery ensuring that most medical emergencies are taken care of) in order to conserve on supplies and to prevent the crew from killing one another due to the extended isolation. Only about one in seventy thousand people has a genetic mutation that gives them a higher probability of surviving an extended coma fairly intact, and the crew was put together only from those individuals. Still, two out of three didn't make it.
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 Project Hail Mary
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In Traveller, 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. The entire concept (including the chance of death, the lottery and the name) was lifted from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series.
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 Traveller (Tabletop Game)
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Cryonics Failure / int_7de8951a
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Fallout:
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-cryonic 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.
Fallout 4 reveals that everyone in Vault 111 were put into cryonic sleep. The Player Character is the only who actually survives the sleep, as everyone else's cryo pods ended up malfunctioning and killing them; fittingly, that character's main nickname is "Sole Survivor". However, you later find out that the pods did not malfunction, but were sabotaged by the Institute. They deliberately only refroze the protagonist after killing your spouse and kidnapping Shaun, leaving the remaining vault dwellers to die in their pods from asphyxiation.
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 Fallout
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Cryonics Failure
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ThunderCats (1985): This is generally accepted as the reason why Lion-O aged but the two Thunder Kittens did not. His chamber malfunctioned, so he grew into adulthood while in stasis.
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 ThunderCats (1985)
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Star Trek adores this trope:
In 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.
Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"The Neutral Zone" has the Enterprise encounter a ship full of frozen passengers, complete with skeleton scare. There are dozens on board... only three are alive, and that's in the sense of being revivable by mid-24th century Federation medical science. It is noted that they would have been regarded as dead by medical science at the time of their freezing.
"Relics" has a variation, with Scotty doing one of his engineering miracles to preserve himself and the other survivor of a ship crash in long-term transporter suspension. Scotty is successfully re-materialized; the other person isn't.
One of the popsicles in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Empok Nor" would have survived, had part of the station not collapsed through his pod.
Star Trek: Voyager, never being one to let a good trope pass them by, has two:
In "Dragon's Teeth", an ancient race of warriors went into suspended animation to avoid destruction when every nearby race showed up and carpet-bombed their planet from orbit. The protagonist alien makes it, but his wife wasn't so lucky.
In "The Thaw", some aliens went into suspended animation deep inside their planet to avoid the radiation created by solar flare. When Voyager shows up, two of them are splatted, despite all evidence showing that the pod they're in is in perfect order. It turns out that the occupants are being held hostage by a computer program that manifests from their subconscious fear of being frozen and is now preventing them from leaving, killing any dissenters by scaring them to death.
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In The Worthing Saga, the title character Jason Worthing is a space pilot in a society that uses cryonics for colonization. He is attacked as he approaches his target, and not only are some of the colonists killed, but the remainder all have their personalities, which have to be stored on hard disk prior to cryo, wiped—leaving Jason the task of singlehandedly raising 99 adult-sized kids. (Oh, and the one guy whose personality did survive? Jason's Arch-Enemy.)
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 The Worthing Saga
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In Across the Universe (Beth Revis), a murderer starts pulling the plug on cryonic 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.
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 Across the Universe (Beth Revis)
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Xenoblade Chronicles X: Preventing this trope from happening is the main reason why retrieving the Lifehold Core is absolutely imperative for the remaining humans. Their bodies are frozen inside of the Core, controlling artificial bodies called mimeosomes from a distance. If the humans don't find the Core before its emergency power generator runs out, or if the Ganglion finds the Core first, this trope will kick in full gear and the humans will die out, or so we're told.
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 Xenoblade Chronicles X (Video Game)
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The History of the Galaxy: In 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. Also, other novels in the series mention that a sizable chunk of the colony ships sent out during the initial Blind Leap after the discovery of hypersphere probably ended up like this (i.e., some malfunction has resulted in the crew and settlers never waking up and, eventually, dying when the power ran out).
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 The History of the Galaxy
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In 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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_9a7088bc
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 Star Trek: The Original Series
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Pandorum's plot features this plus numerous fates worse than splat, even those who survive come out with partial amnesia and in many cases psychosis. Horrifically averted in the case of the Eden disaster, where the hibernation capsules worked perfectly and awoke their occupants with no problems whatsoever... at least, until the occupants discovered that a psychotic crewmember had ejected them all into deep space.
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The human body that Bug uses in Starship was a victim of one that left him brain dead but the body intact for mind control.
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 Starship (Theatre)
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Parodied in the NewsRadio episode "Space", in which the entire station (save Matthew and Bill) have to go into cryonics to avoid a disaster. Then Matthew trips over the power cord...
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 NewsRadio
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Referenced in Futurama with the Cryonics Lab having an X Days Since sign, but never actually occurs. While the staff is clearly incompetent, the closest thing to a "failure" was them dumping tubes containing the wrong people in the desert, where they woke up just fine.
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 Futurama
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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.
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 Orion's Arm (Website)
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In Don't Look Up, only half of the cryopods make it to the destination after evacuating Earth. Isherwell happily notes that this outcome is better than he expected. It seems not to matter much, since the survivors are probably about to be eaten by native beasts anyway.
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 Don't Look Up
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Mega Man Zero: Almost happened to 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 & 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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_a599305d
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 Mega Man Zero (Video Game)
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Portal 2:
The game 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.
The finale of the co-op campaign sees Atlas and P-body discover tens of thousands of other subjects still in storage, so GLaDOS can continue her tests, who luckily for her, probably aren't as dangerous as that "mute lunatic".
Wheatley suggests that Chell may have suffered some form of brain damage, since she jumps instead of saying "apple", theorising this is the reason for her Heroic Mime behaviour. Word of God however states that the reason she refuses to speak and jumped in response, was simply because she enjoys screwing with the computers, since her lack of response really infuriates them!
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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.
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 7 Seeds (Manga)
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Zigzagged in Batman & Robin when Poison Ivy attempts to kill Nora Fries, Mr. Freeze's terminally ill wife, by unplugging her cryotube, but Batman manages to save her life.
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 Batman & Robin
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Played with in The Outer Worlds. The sleeper ship Hope got knocked out of FTL on its way to the colony and as a result the 10-year voyage turned into 70 years. The cryonically stored people left on it are still okay, but they've been frozen so long that if they're thawed out, they'll suffer from "explosive cell death" and liquify more or less instantly. Mad Scientist Phineas Wells has perfected a chemical formula that can safely wake them up, but unfortunately, he used up his entire stock reviving the Unknown Variable.
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 The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
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Inverted in Nona the Ninth: in flashbacks to the Emperor's human days, he was a scientist working on cryogenics technology for use evacuating Earth in sleeper starships, and his test subjects were already cadavers. When the project got shut down, the power to the cryogenics pods was cut, too... but some of the unfrozen corpses remained perfectly preserved, no matter how much time passed and no matter what other conditions they were subjected to. This miracle was the first sign that he'd come into divine power.
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In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronauts other than Poole and Bowman are intentionally killed by HAL forcing a malfunction in the coldsleep system while trying to follow conflicting orders.
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 2001: A Space Odyssey
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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.
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 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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Space Quest V: The Next Mutation features 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). Opening the chamber before thawing her makes the game unwinnable, as the game does not allow the chamber to be closed after that. Clicking on it results in Roger picking up the frozen Beatrice, at which point she breaks into ice cubes.
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 Space Quest V: The Next Mutation (Video Game)
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In the first minutes of Pitch Black, a lot of people die in their universe's version of cryo-sleep because some small meteorites crash through the ship and puncture the devices.
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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.
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Chrono Trigger has a non-Human Popsicle variation: In the Bad Future, a group of survivors says one of their own left to try to find food in an area infested with mutant bugs and killer robots. When you find the man, he's not only dead, the food he was trying to get at has all rotted away due to the refrigeration failing. However, you do find a seed, which you bring back to the survivors.
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Non-lethal but still horrifying example in Verlore Geleentheid, the passengers of a damaged sleeper ship survived and were kept in stasis, but fully conscious and unable to move for ten thousand years.
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Cryonics Failure
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In Hull Zero Three, all but one of the Destination Guidance team were dead and decomposed in their cryonics pods. It is also heavily implied that the 'biogenerators' [Teacher/Sanjay invents this term to describe the birthing systems] are not supposed to be functioning — they are supposed to create Factors on arrival to prepare the target planet, or in the event that the sleeping crew were killed, birth a new one. Even if there was still part of the original crew in the Hulls, they are dead after Destination Guidance shut off fuel transfer to the Hulls' engines, and for Hull Zero Two, it was practically guaranteed when it was gutted by meteorites.
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Cryonics Failure
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In the Blake's 7 episode "Time Squad", of four programmed guardians in a capsule carrying them and genetic stock, three survived stasis.
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1.0
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Cryonics Failure / int_c6f7e804
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Cryonics Failure
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In one of the many side-stories of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, a defecting Imperial nobleman and his family attempt to escape into Alliance territory through an escape stasis raft. Unfortunately, nearly everyone was found by Kircheis to have died mid-procedure, with only the nobleman's daughter left alive.
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Cryonics Failure
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A possibility in Alien Legacy if you're too slow in building habitats for the crew, who get awoken as space becomes available. A random event warns you of an impending power failure in the cryonic system.
 Cryonics Failure / int_ce4f5b7d
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1.0
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 Alien Legacy / Videogame
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Cryonics Failure / int_ce4f5b7d
 Cryonics Failure / int_d036e404
type
Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d036e404
comment
In Oryx and Crake, Snowman is living After the End. At one point, he walks by an old cryonics 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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d036e404
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Cryonics Failure / int_d036e404
 Cryonics Failure / int_d1ee3220
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d1ee3220
comment
Gerry Anderson's 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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d1ee3220
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Cryonics Failure / int_d1ee3220
 Cryonics Failure / int_d29994ae
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d29994ae
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One chapter in Live A Live, which coincidentally plays out like a collage of various famous movies such as 2001 and Aliens.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d29994ae
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_d29994ae
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Cryonics Failure / int_d29994ae
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4642985
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4642985
comment
In the Revelation Space Series, cryonics are a very safe technology because it's been the only way for humanity to cross space for 500 years, but they have issues beyond outright failure. Scorpio, a hyperpig, is outside of the cryopods operating parameters and is pretty old, leading to him being informed that he stands a good chance of dying from shock next time he is thawed out of cryo. When the Melding Plague hit Yellowstone and lighthuggers departing from it, Trans Human people in cryo were generally safe so long as they remained frozen, but if they were thawed out with the Plague still nearby, boom goes their Brain/Computer Interface.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4642985
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4642985
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 Revelation Space Series
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Cryonics Failure / int_d4642985
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4f68ddc
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4f68ddc
comment
The Vahnatai in Exile/Avernum periodically put their entire civilization to sleep with alien Applied Phlebotinum to conserve subterranean resources. They always expect a high attrition rate, which players get to witness themselves.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d4f68ddc
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1.0
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Cryonics Failure
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In the first Kreed game, you're investigating an abandoned space station filled with monsters. One of the last logs you uncover is a survivor noting how everyone are about to put themselves into the cryochamber to escape, which didn't work as you found out.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d54850ca
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1.0
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 Kreed (Video Game)
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Cryonics Failure / int_d54850ca
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d54b59cc
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Presumably, a lot of the occupants of the cryo-prison destroyed in the final battle of Demolition Man had their sentences extended permanently, with no hope of parole. It's certainly what happened to Simon Phoenix, courtesy of John Spartan's boot.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d54b59cc
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_d54b59cc
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Cryonics Failure / int_d54b59cc
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_d914e4ff
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Reaper (2016): When the server for Avalon is destroyed in the bombing, every player there is dumped back into their body, resulting in eleven thousand of them dying from shock.
 Cryonics Failure / int_d914e4ff
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_d914e4ff
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1.0
 Reaper (2016)
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Cryonics Failure / int_d914e4ff
 Cryonics Failure / int_da82c908
type
Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_da82c908
comment
Ugly Americans had one of these, where a scientist, expecting civilization to be destroyed in the "Dirigible Wars" which he predicted, froze himself in a capsule in his underground laboratory (underneath the UN building, apparently), leaving behind a robot tasked with impregnating surviving women with his semen. When the main characters find him, he seems very much well-preserved, but upon his capsule being opened, he ages and decomposes within seconds.
 Cryonics Failure / int_da82c908
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_da82c908
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Cryonics Failure / int_da82c908
 Cryonics Failure / int_ddb7ff4e
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_ddb7ff4e
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The Eisenhorn novel Xenos opens with a large-scale one. The inhabitants of a planet with an orbit that causes it to freeze solid for 11 months every 29-month year enter suspended animation during that time to survive. A villain massacres large portions of the upper-class of the planet by having them revive suddenly and without any medical assistance.
 Cryonics Failure / int_ddb7ff4e
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_ddb7ff4e
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 Eisenhorn
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Cryonics Failure / int_ddb7ff4e
 Cryonics Failure / int_e8d13e52
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_e8d13e52
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At the climax of the second Urusei Yatsura film, Beautiful Dreamer, during a nightmare sequence inflicted on Ataru by the vindictive dream demon Mujaki, Ataru wakes up in a futuristic laboratory while a recording of his father recounts how he and Lum supposedly fell victim to an unknown sickness 500 years ago and had been put into cryogenic suspension until a cure could be discovered. However, when Ataru goes over to Lum's cryo pod, he discovers that a terminal fault had occurred 100 years into her sleep and she's dead. Even though we know it's only a dream, it's possibly the single darkest moment of the entire series.
 Cryonics Failure / int_e8d13e52
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_e8d13e52
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1.0
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Cryonics Failure / int_e8d13e52
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_ee8e63ed
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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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_ee8e63ed
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_ee8e63ed
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1.0
 Earthsearch (Radio)
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Cryonics Failure / int_ee8e63ed
 Cryonics Failure / int_ef076a36
type
Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_ef076a36
comment
Star Trek: Voyager, never being one to let a good trope pass them by, has two:
In "Dragon's Teeth", an ancient race of warriors went into suspended animation to avoid destruction when every nearby race showed up and carpet-bombed their planet from orbit. The protagonist alien makes it, but his wife wasn't so lucky.
In "The Thaw", some aliens went into suspended animation deep inside their planet to avoid the radiation created by solar flare. When Voyager shows up, two of them are splatted, despite all evidence showing that the pod they're in is in perfect order. It turns out that the occupants are being held hostage by a computer program that manifests from their subconscious fear of being frozen and is now preventing them from leaving, killing any dissenters by scaring them to death.
 Cryonics Failure / int_ef076a36
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1.0
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1.0
 Star Trek: Voyager
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Cryonics Failure / int_ef076a36
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f163bd9f
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Orolin in ElfQuest, 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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_f163bd9f
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_f163bd9f
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1.0
 ElfQuest (Comic Book)
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Cryonics Failure / int_f163bd9f
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f269dd2f
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In RimWorld, there's a chance that the occupant of an ancient sarcophagus will thaw out dead.
 Cryonics Failure / int_f269dd2f
featureApplicability
1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_f269dd2f
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1.0
 RimWorld (Video Game)
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Cryonics Failure / int_f269dd2f
 Cryonics Failure / int_f4abd380
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f4abd380
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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.
 Cryonics Failure / int_f4abd380
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1.0
 Cryonics Failure / int_f4abd380
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Cryonics Failure / int_f4abd380
 Cryonics Failure / int_f64ceaf2
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f64ceaf2
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There is a Creepypasta with this topic, entitled "Thaw". Sometime in the distant future, a man wakes up from his cryonic suspension onboard a spaceship, only to find himself only partially dethawed and trapped in his capsule, which seems to have failed. Then, he notices that the ship is on emergency lighting, and even that seems to be failing. Then he notices that the other capsules in the room have also failed and either contains decayed corpses or blood splatters like someone bashed their heads open from the inside. Realizing that some sort of disaster has befallen the ship, he suddenly notices that they are still in orbit around Earth, having never left... except this Earth has a giant glacier of a new ice age covering most of the northern hemisphere, and no signs of human cities anywhere...
 Cryonics Failure / int_f64ceaf2
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Cryonics Failure / int_f64ceaf2
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f74b5f80
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In the Babylon 5 episode "The Long Dark", the tech works, but an alien shows up and eats one of the two.
 Cryonics Failure / int_f74b5f80
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 Cryonics Failure / int_f74b5f80
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Cryonics Failure
 Cryonics Failure / int_f8c5624f
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Exile players in WildStar start out in one of the few functioning cryo-pods in a section of The Gambler's Ruin where a reactor failure destroyed most of the pods.
 Cryonics Failure / int_f8c5624f
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Cryonics Failure
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Present in The World at the End of Time. Cryonics technology is stated to have a probability of one between one hundred eighty of going wrong and killing the popsicle, and across the novel some characters are stated to have died that way, or at best having suffered frozen burns as the main (human) protagonist on his last freezing especially if frozen with no proper precautions.
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Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"The Neutral Zone" has the Enterprise encounter a ship full of frozen passengers, complete with skeleton scare. There are dozens on board... only three are alive, and that's in the sense of being revivable by mid-24th century Federation medical science. It is noted that they would have been regarded as dead by medical science at the time of their freezing.
"Relics" has a variation, with Scotty doing one of his engineering miracles to preserve himself and the other survivor of a ship crash in long-term transporter suspension. Scotty is successfully re-materialized; the other person isn't.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Cryonics Failure
processingCategory2
Death Tropes
 Cryonics Failure
processingCategory2
Index Failure
 Cryonics Failure
processingCategory2
Speculative Fiction Tropes
 Blue Gender / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Eden / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Origin: Spirits of the Past / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Yoko Tsuno (Comic Book) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Supergirl (1972) (Comic Book) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Not Long Enough (Fanfic) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Alien³ / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Aliens / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Batman & Robin / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Aliens / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Pitch Black / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Planet of the Apes (1968) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Empire Strikes Back / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 2001: A Space Odyssey / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Across the Universe (Beth Revis) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Black Man / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Cool Air / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Eisenhorn / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Harsh Tales / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Hull Zero Three / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Jacob's Ladder Trilogy / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Project Hail Mary / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Reaper (2016) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Sholan Alliance / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Black Company / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Downloaded / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Worthing Saga / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 7 Seeds (Manga) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Earthsearch (Radio) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Life After People / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Snowpiercer / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Ark (2023) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Starship (Theatre) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Bubble Bobble (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Deliver Us the Moon (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Dwarf Fortress (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Kreed (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Mass Effect (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Outpost 2 (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Space Quest V: The Next Mutation (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 The Silent Age (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Timelapse (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 WildStar (Video Game) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Alien Legacy / Videogame
seeAlso
Cryonics Failure
 Portal Stories: Mel / Videogame
seeAlso
Cryonics Failure
 Orion's Arm (Website) / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure
 Superman: The Animated Series / int_ba014235
type
Cryonics Failure