Cloning Blues - Television Tropes & Idioms

I am a clone, I am not alone...

If you had ever seen us you'd rejoice in your uniqueness

And consider every weakness something special of your own

--Robert Calvert (Hawkwind), "Spirit of the Age"

In the real world, clones are actually fairly common. When created from the same single cell at fertilization, they're known as "identical twins." When created through asexual reproduction, (in some plants, bugs, fish, sharks and even birds) they are parthenogenetic offspring.

More rare, but increasing, are the recently pioneered artificially created clones, like Dolly the Sheep.

None of this has anything to do with Speculative Fiction, where clones are totally different, and being a clone absolutely sucks. It's enough to make a clone sing the blues.

Though real artificial clones have to start at conception and go through childhood all over again, and can even have phenotypes that vary from their parent, Speculative Fiction clones are like perfect meta-xerox copies of the cloned person. They are exactly like the target at the moment of cloning, (possibly excused by age acceleration) with all their forebearers' memories and skills, although their personalities can develop from there.

As a result, many clones brood about how they're not "real," just hollow imitations of the original. The clones tend to deal with this rather badly. Some make desperate attempts to act different. Others go mad and try to murder the original to take their place. (Emphasis on "try" -- hardly any succeed.) If the clone is a main character, they will spend the whole show angsting about how they're the Tomato In The Mirror. Occasionally they will have powers just like the Artificial Human. This often just ups their feelings of alienation, though.

That's for the lucky clones who are created properly. In many shows, cloning is an imprecise science, so there is a high probability that any clone will turn out to be an Evil Twin -- almost as high as the probability of creating an evil computer (Because everyone knows that Science Is Bad). Other unlucky clones will just have birth defects.

And that's for the clones who are just unlucky. The really unlucky clones have malevolent creators who can make custom clones, sometimes in bulk -- which are exact meta-xerox copies of the original except that they have fanatical loyalty to the creators. Or the innate skills of a ninja assassin. Or superpowers. Or just add some alien DNA to create Half Human Hybrids, or even a different set of reproductive organs. Or all five at once -- and those clones will still look, act, and think exactly like the original in every other way. A clone like this is always highly expendable, except in rare cases where said Evilutionary Biologist has developed an attachment to it.

Because of all this (or possibly as a cause of all this), clones get very little respect. Heroes who hesitate at killing intelligent life might still kill their evil clone. In the question of What Measure Is A Non Human, most clones rank somewhere between the Big Creepy Crawlies and the Mecha Mooks.

This assumes the clone ever had a mind of its own, of course. Sometimes a clone exists only so that the creator can overwrite their mind and personality onto it in case of accident. In this case, it's more like coming Back From The Dead -- although if the clone has a mind of its own at the start, this is yet another reason its life sucks.

(Some clones aren't biological clones at all -- they're robot doubles, or copies created by the good old transporter. These have more reason to be exact xerox copies -- but they get even less respect.)

This is one of The Oldest Ones In The Book, dating as far back as there has been Speculative Fiction, the Evil Twin, and a need to put the two together. It should be noted, however, that it may be something of a Truth In Television: firstly, that artificial cloning is still an imprecise science. If the mitosis cycles of the cell and the implanted nucleus are out of sync, problems can arise; this has in fact occurred to Dolly the cloned sheep. Secondly, even if cloning as a science is "perfected", it's possible that human societal norms will look down on anyone created artificially, which could very well lead to the social or emotional issues mentioned above.

Straight Examples:

The Who's song "905" features a clone, who is presumably the 905th iteration of the line, lamenting his inability to do anything original whatsoever.
Video Game Example: In the Advance Wars series, Black Hole has a tendency to enjoy making clones of your commanding officers and pitting them against you towards the endgame. The clones have all the same statistical points of their counterparts, but their personalities are seriously lacking; they regularly proclaim, in an almost morose and self-defeating way, that their only purpose is to take orders and fight. Afterwards they're invariably destroyed.
- Days of Ruin provides a different version, in which Big Bad Mad Scientist Caulder/Stolos is a Truly Single Parent and views his clone children as expendable minions and test subjects, as he can always replace them if they die. Isabella/Catleia turns out to be a 'backup' of one of the original four, who was killed in one of his experiments. And yes, she whines about 'not being real', as does Cyrus. Sigh.
  - It gets better: Even Caulder/Stolos is a clone of the original, and it seems highly likely that the side-effects of cloning are partly responsible for his insanity.
The Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I. pronounced, for plot reasons, that clones could only exist for a single day before some meta-phlebotinium law of the space-time continuum destroyed them. This was filmed after Dolly the Sheep demonstrated the utter banality of clone life.
The rebooted Battlestar Galactica goes to town with this one in the case of Cylon Number Eight (aka Sharon "Boomer" Valerii). While the other Eights are fairly well-adjusted to being Cylons, Boomer is a sleeper agent and can't understand the crazy things that are happening to her. Like waking up in a water tank, with no idea of how she got there, or discovering multiple stolen explosives among her personal possessions.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Warren made a couple of robot doubles as sexual stand-ins for Buffy and his ex-girlfriend. The former was stored in a basement, and then destroyed while being used as a decoy against the Big Bad. The latter was allowed to run out of batteries when it started malfunctioning.
Doctor Who: "The Invisible Enemy" featured miniaturized clones of the Doctor and Leela, though K-9 explains that they aren't "really" clones, but a sort of phlebotinum-photocopy. Surprisingly, they gave no sign of having any trouble with their status as duplicates specifically created for a Fantastic Voyage, nor with the fact that their predicted lifespan was something on the order of twenty minutes.
Comic Example: During the Marvel Universe Civil War, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, and Hank Pym manufacture a programmable clone of Thor from genetic material collected when Iron Man first met him. He mercilessly kills C List Fodder Black Goliath, somewhat exceeding his programming, and ends up messily disposed of by one of Thor's old friends, Hercules.
- When the real Thor comes back, he is not happy at what has transpired.
The original Dungeons And Dragons tabletop roleplaying game included a spell called "Clone". It made a magical duplicate of someone, and when they became aware of each other's existence, each was filled with an unrelenting desire to kill the other. As of Third Edition, the "Clone" spell now just creates a lifeless copy of the user's body. It needs to be preserved somehow or it will rot (a relatively simple spell takes care of that), but if it is still intact when the original dies, they reincarnate in that body (though the clone does not gain any knowledge--i.e. experience or abilities--that the original gained since the clone was created). However a similar effect is preserved in the expensive item 'Mirror of Opposition'. It creates a temporary clone whose only purpose is to kill the original.
The clones in William Sleator's The Duplicate really have it rough. First off they get less and less sane the farther from the original they are, and even the sanest ones still develop black marks on their hands and die abruptly. And since they're not convinced they are copies (they're physically and mentally identical to the original until the marks appear), this all feels monstrously unfair.
In Xenocide, one of the sequels of Ender's Game, Ender enters a dimension that allows you to create anything that you can hold perfectly in your mind. Ender unintentionally creates copies of his siblings. The copies eventually deduce that they aren't clones of the original siblings per se, but manifestations from Ender's mind: the personification of Ender's innocence and kindness in his sister, and of his ambition and ruthlessness in his brother. This causes both copies to angst endlessly until they are re-integrated by Ender's death and the copy-sister's loss of her body.
The DNA Delivery clones employed by Bedlam in Get Ed are apparently so faulty that being hit hard enough (either by a board to the head or getting tossed out of a moving hovercraft at high speed) causes them to disolve into a puddle of goo (that can momentarily reform before splatting again) that, according to Loogie, tastes minty.
Comic example: In Fred Perry's Gold Digger, Brianna, the third Digger sister, is actually a clone/Biological Mash Up of Gina and Brittany. After her accidental creation, she quickly goes nuts and tries to eliminate her "sisters" (Due to a curse that was the reason for the process that created her), though they eventually manage to talk her down. Even then, for several issues afterwards, Brianna has something of an identity crisis. By 'several issues', about fifty or so, on and off.
Gundam SEED had direct cloning be highly illegal, in contrast to simple genetic modification, though it didn't stop a powerful politician from cloning himself several times, believing the clones would be superior successors to his biological son. At least three have been seen, and of those one became a manipulative nihilist that attempted to wipe out the human race, and another became a pawn of the secret Big Bad of the sequel. All of them apparently suffer from birth defects that prematurely accelerate their aging and cause intense pain if not treated with medication.
The Riku replica in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, lives a sad existence, constantly having his memories written and rewritten. There's a funny one pager at the end of the manga that jokes about just how sad it is.
The movie The Island starts off in an enclosed habitat somewhere on an apparently ruined and frozen Earth. People who live in the habitat can't get out because of a virus that'd kill them instantly, and are kept happy and given something to look forward to with the "lottery", which will eventually grant a lucky few a place on the Island, the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Things quickly start to go downhill when the main character finds a live insect from the outside. To make a long story short, it turns out the habitat is fake, all the people living within it are clones, the frozen Earth is a hologram, and those who win the Lottery are actually brought in the real world and sliced up to get organs, body parts and children. The whole thing is a giant body part backup bank.
- This entire premise is ripped off from the late 70's b-movie Parts: The Clonus Horror.
  - Incorrect- The Island is based off the 1930s book of the same name.
  - No, it wasn't. There is no such "1930s book" I'm aware of, and Michael Bay certainly didn't claim the movie was based on one. They claimed it was based on an original script, and they certainly took the impending lawsuit from the people who made Parts: The Clonus Horror seriously enough to offer them a seven-figure settlement.
The King Of Fighters series loves clones so much that there have been at least 5 or so clones of Kyo Kusanagi running around at one point (Kyo Kusanagi's 1 & 2, K', Krizalid, K9999, and Kusanagi). There was also the Opposite Sex Clone Kula, and one of the bosses, Zero, had a clone who was the boss in the game preceding him. The series is inconsistent about the use of the term, however, as K' is actually a normal human modified to have Kyo's powers and there is argument over whether Kula is something similiar.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its sequels have Fate Testarossa. Near the end of the first season, she's a Tomato In The Mirror when Precia reveals that she's a clone; Fate, though treated as an equal by her new employers, who know she's a clone, and her classmates, who don't, once briefly wonders if she even counts as a person once during A's. In later seasons she's surrounded by people who care for her individually, though, and this is quickly refuted. In StrikerS, she adopts children similar to her to be raised in a loving environment so that they will not have to ask the same question.
The Metal Gear Solid series loves clones. Liquid Snake feels inferior to his 'brother' Solid Snake because Solid Snake was supposedly given all the 'dominant genes' and Liquid got all of the 'recessive genes' from their clone-source (and if that wasn't bad enough, a plot twist then reveals it was the other way around -- of course, the Word Of God has it that neither was 'dominant' or 'recessive' and it was all a bunch of lies). While MGS-verse clones still have to grow up from scratch, once they hit about thirty they start undergoing rapidly accelerated aging, which seems to work at the speed the character designers dictate (this does have some basis in fact, as a few real life cloning experiments have caused premature aging in clones). Still, MGS isn't too awful compared to some.
- Ac!d-verse Snake gets a tomato in the face when it's revealed he is a clone of Solid Snake.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Sabrina The Teenage Witch: An identical clone of Salem is casually destroyed magically by Hilda in the episode 'Thin Ice'; in the much earlier episode 'A Halloween Story' a magic spell creates a copy, but this double is essentially mindless and soon absorbed back into it's creator.
In Stargate Atlantis, the clone of a previously killed off character joins the team. He looks exactly like the old character, has the same personalites, and has most of his memories. The catch? Without the regular injection of a special chemical, he'll eventually die because his cloned tissue can't regenerate fast enough to counter natural cell damage. Because of this, he was frozen in stasis until a cure could be found.
Star Trek has probably provided more examples of the Cloning Blues than the entire rest of television, fiction, and comic books put together.
- Namely, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Jem'Hadar and Vorta fit the "really unlucky clones" described above to a T, including innate combat or tactical prowess and the inbred belief that their creators are gods.
- Star Trek The Next Generation had one odd aversion, however: on discovering a transporter-cloned version of Riker who was trapped on a planet for many years, the new and old version have an equal claim as the "original" and seem to avoid most of these issues. "Tom" Riker continues his career, then appears in Star Trek Deep Space Nine having left Starfleet to join the Maquis.
In Street Fighter, depending on which plot twist you're in, BBEG M. Bison (known as Vega in Japan) has an army of clone soldiers, including Juni, Juli and Cammy. However, the term "clone" is used inconsistently and it's been stated that Juni and Juli are girls kidnapped from Germany.
The Spider-Man comic book, and its infamous "Clone Saga" (which ran long enough to include every single thing mentioned above).
Pokemon. The first movie features an angry, bitter clone(who is an actual separate Pokemon--the original that he was cloned from is a lot cuter) which makes a lot more from the trainers' Pokemon. He returns in a TV special, though he's mellowed down.
- What about Aitwo? She considers herself to be like the original Ai, though she's never angsted about being a clone.
Rah Xephon
In a truly staggering example of the clone inferiority complex, after the villain of first season of The Slayers, Rezo the Red Priest, makes a Heroic Sacrifice and dies on the apocalyptic magics of the protagonists to allow the destruction of the demon he was host to, the clone created by his spurned former lover becomes obsessed with convincing the same protagonists to use the exact same potentially world-ending spell on him so that, in the unlikely event of his survival, he can claim to have achieved something the original had not. The dubiousness of trying to one-up a self-sacrificing gesture by surviving your own is apparently lost on the mind of a megalomaniac.
Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 had Wodan Ymir, a W Number android-clone, based on Sanger Zonvolt who died in the Shadow Mirror universe, or to be precise, his Alpha Gaiden incarnation of 'Sword of Magus'. This is done so the said incarnation can come to being, while not discarding the development Sanger had in Original Generation 1.
This is essentially the whole point of the video game Tales Of The Abyss, though the clone does not have the memory or skills of the original in this case. They still have the same age, however.
In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels, The Thrawn Triology, an insane Jedi named Joruus C'baoth clones Luke Skywalker from the hand he left behind in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke shows no compassion towards his clone Luuke at all, and Mara's compulsion/curse to kill Luke is satisfied by killing Luuke, so she doesn't differentiate between them either. Now granted, C'baoth may have replaced parts of Luuke's brain, but none of the protagonists ever treat him as a sentient being. Of course, Zahn also subverts the trope by having C'baoth, one of the main antagonists, be a clone. His insanity is a side effect of faulty cloning procedures, but he is treated by the other characters as a person in his right.
In "V: The Series", a clone of Star Child Elizabeth is created by the invaders, that looks exactly like the original, but doesn't talk, and tends to eat humans. In the end, she's killed by an invader when she rushes him in order to save the life of the original Elizabeth and her boyfriend, Kyle.
Poor, poor Madelyne Pryor.

Parodies, subversions, and exceptions:

In The 6th Day we follow the main character Adam Gibson as he stumbles on an evil plot involving clones. Halfway through fighting the organization who he believes has put a clone of him in his place, he finds out he is really the clone, and the one living in his house with his wife is actually the real Adam. He does get pretty disappointed, but he quickly recovers and enlists the original Adam to help him destroy the conspiracy.
- And the film avoids one of the other tropes, the magically identical clone. The woman in the Quirky Miniboss Squad, upon awakening after coming out of the clone tank, is pissed that she was obviously killed and has to get her ears pierced and hair coloured again.
Variation in the novel Altered Carbon: Psyches can be transferred between 'sleeves' (physical bodies), usually for transportation between planets as data. It is possible, through an illegal and expensive process, to have your psyche copied to another body, producing a psychological 'clone' who is your twin in mind, but could have a completely different body. For example, "Dimi the Twin" (an assassin notorious for this technique, because he doesn't trust anyone but himself enough to work with them) features with backup from his psyche copied into the body of a woman.
The novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is very realistic about artificial clones, treating them just like twins. This is pretty amazing, since it was written in the 1930s. (On the other hand, the techniques used to make the clones act the same are quite a stretch.)
- Mind you, they technically were twins - none of the manipulation was genetic, and the technique essentially created a dozen sextuplets. Again, though, this was pretty damn visionary considered DNA wouldn't even be discovered for 20 years.
  - The structure of DNA wasn't discovered till 1953, DNA was originally discovered in 1869 or 1919, depending on how you want to count it. (Though the idea that DNA (rather than the much more common RNA) was the actual hereditary material did take longer and was shown in the 40s with the definitive Hershey-Chase experiment in 1952).
The Ira Levin novel The Boys From Brazil has Hitler clones that are just like identical twins -- including the part about acting differently when they're raised in different environments.
The Leo Kottke/Mike Gordon song Clone (from the album of the same name) has fun with this idea.
Clones in the Dune novels, called gholas, are realistic to an extent in that they are created as embryos, and must fully gestate and grow up at a normal rate. The similarity ends there, though -- a ghola can be "shocked" into recovering all the memories its original had up until the moment of death, even if the original was still alive at the time his cells were harvested (note that this applies for ALL humans, not just clones. In Dune, you possess all the memories in your entire lineage).
The webcomic El Goonish Shive offers at least a partial subversion: Ellen, an accidentally created female duplicate of Elliot, becomes depressed because she believes that because she's a duplicate, there is no place in the world for her. However, unlike most clones, she is accepted by the rest of the cast as a real person, and she ends up living a normal (at least by EGS standards) life, taking on a role as Elliot's twin sister. Although she was established a bit quickly as the "solution" for Elliot's lesbian ex.
Futurama gets this more or less right: Professor Farnsworth's clone looks like a younger version of him, but has a completely different personality. The clone also has a deformity that the original doesn't have: a piglike nose from pressing against the glass of the cloning chamber.
Thailog from Gargoyles was cloned from Goliath's DNA and rapid-aged to match Goliath's age; however, unlike the stereotypical clone, he didn't share Goliath's memories or worldview (indeed, he was indoctrinated via subliminal messages into becoming a Machiavellian villain), and had no real desire to destroy Goliath other than that of every villain to destroy the meddling hero. As well, the rapid-aging process was portrayed as having the side-effect of causing Thailog's coloration to be different from Goliath's.
The radio version of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy featuers Lintilla ... and Lintilla and Lintilla. Apparently there were some problems with a cloning machine which would be forming a new Lintilla while halfway building the previous one, so turning off the machine would be counted as murder. There was also Allitnil and his buddies Allitnil and Allitnil, who were Niallivs, sort of, sent by the same cloning corporation to eradicate all the Lintillas by 'marriage' licences which were really agreements to stop existing, getting around the whole homicide aspect.
In Judge Dredd Dredd is a clone of Chief Judge Fargo, as is his Evil Twin Rico, and several other Judges, including another one called Rico. They were "artificially aged" to five, and from then aged normally (the latter Rico is therefore noticeably younger than Dredd, the oldest Judge on the force). While the assumption behind the cloning programme is that clones of great Judges make great Judges, this does not appear to be the case (Dredd himself may be the ultimate Judge, but as well as the first Rico there's Judge Kraken, who was More Than Mind Controlled by the Sisters of Death and turned to The Dark Side, and Cadet Dolman, who didn't have a Face Heel Turn, but did say Screw Destiny and quit to be an astronaut).
Christmas in Kurau Phantom Memory is Kurau's "pair". As a Rynax, she is basically an energy being and has to borrow Kurau's genetic material to form her human body, making her technically her clone. Kurau loves her immensely and will do anything to protect her "little sister", but Christmas still gets her share of grief when Kurau loses her Rynax, causing Christmas to be terribly lonely for many years.
In the Kim Possible episode "Kimitation Nation", Dr. Drakkhen creates an army of duplicates of Kim, Ron, and classmate Bonnie. When discussing it with Wade, she comments that cloning shouldn't work like that according to science class. He agrees; it's not "really" cloning, but they'll just refer to it as such to simplify things.
Kyle and Jessie of Kyle XY are clones grown in a lab, but the cloning itself is realistic; they were grown at normal speed, not fast, (spending a lifetime unconscious in tubes), and they don't have clone memories. The word "clone" is never used, either, though cloning is clearly described and they look exactly like the originals from many years ago. (Now, the explanation of their intelligence and powers, on the other hand....)
There is a reasonably accurate portrayal of a clone in Lois Mc Master Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series: Miles is visibly deformed (less than five feet tall, slight hunch, serious problem with fragile bones). A clone is taken from him (by enemies who intend to use it to replace him), but since Miles' problems are teratogenic -- caused by fetal poisoning -- rather than genetic, the clone starts to grow normally. The enemies physically alter him, through surgery, to match Miles' appearance; they also use pain (from the surgery and separate) to train him to obey. His life seriously sucks -- until he actually meets Miles, who regards him as a younger brother and gradually alters his attitude (over about 4 books) until Mark manages to break his conditioning and really consider himself an individual.
- Even before meeting Miles, Mark is one of the luckier clones in the universe. On Jackson's Whole, there are farms of clones raised specifically so that their progenitor can have his or her brain transplanted into the clone just before death.
In the Outer Limits episode "Think Like A Dinosaur" (and the short story it is based on) the teleporter creates perfect duplicates of people at the destination. The catch here is that it is the original who is now worthless - and destroyed. This sort of duplication/destruction teleportation turns up a lot in Sci-fi.
Game example: In the tabletop RPG Paranoia, life in Alpha Complex is so dangerous (especially for Troubleshooters, such as the player characters) that everyone gets five clone back-ups of themselves. Depending on the mood of the campaign, these can run out pretty quickly.
In the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, the character of Gav Bleuel (based on the real-life comic artist of Nukees) put himself into suspended animation in the 21st century, and is later awoken (after being found in a disused storage locker) in the 31st, where he is accidentally duplicated nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
- He's just the most extreme example. The entire webcomic is full of clones - mostly gate-clones like Gav (created by exact sub-atomic-level duplication), but also a time-clone: time-traveller meets his old self, and because the timeline is changed, they both continue to exist. Also, biological cloning is possible, but outlawed.
In Solaris, the crew of a space station are each faced with the person most important to them, in the flesh, even if that person is dead. These creations function as clones of the original person, with their memories only up to a point. The subversion is that one crew member, Snow, turns out to actually be a clone. The person most important to the original Snow was himself, so he created his own clone unintentionally. Then the clone killed him, stuffed him in an air duct, and resumed the dead man's life.
Ba'al and his many clones on Stargate SG 1 have clones of both the host and the symbiote. They are completely indistinguishable and they even set up a Xanatos Gambit by pretending that the clones are fighting against the "real" Ba'al, convincing SG-1 to capture every single one (with a string of puns)--and then each one claims to be the real one.
- Also in Stargate SG-1, the entire Asgard race is a race of clones that is portrayed fairly realistically. They don't have magical "clone memories"; those need to be transferred via computer from the original body (Thor undergoes this procedure almost as often as Daniel dies). Also, the Asgard have been cloning themselves for so long that they have suffered severe genetic degradation and are no longer capable of reproducing themselves in any way other than by cloning themselves.
  - After reading the above, this troper realizes that Ba'al likely used the Asgard cloning methods, since he was Anubis's right-hand man for awhile, and Anubis had access to Asgard technology.
Star Trek often subverted the Cloning Blues by having the crew be unwilling to simply kill the clones. However, the writers were usually quite willing to kill clones, and often casually dispatched them in ways that would never happen to a regular character.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine specifically establishes that "killing your own clone is still murder," at least in the 24th century Federation.
- But note that in the Star Trek The Next Generation "Up the Long Ladder" showed the characters acting with astonishing callousness toward clones: When the ship comes upon a colony (after discovering and evacuating the now-rustic descendants of its crashed sister-ship) populated by the cloned descendants of five shipwreck survivors (the rest of the colony ship's crew died in the crash, leaving a gene pool too small to reproduce naturally), the colony says that their genes are starting to degrade to the point where cloning won't work anymore and plead for genetic donations. Disgusted, the Enterprise' crew declares that no one onboard nor anywhere in the Federation will participate in such a practice. The colony then discreetly steals genetic samples of Riker and the doctor whom, upon figuring out what happened and discovering their clones being grown, both decide on the spot to single-handedly murder all of their not-yet-conscious clones with hand-phasers in cold blood. The Enterprise then forces the colony of clones (to whom the concepts of sexual intercourse and romance are utterly alien) to absorb and intermarry with the rustics from their evacuated sister colony (which is kinda difficult with a 3-2 male-female population).
  - Worthy of mention is how the crew found out that they had genetic material stolen - with the doctor realizing that they were missing cells compared to their last cell count. Yes, It seems that in the future, we will not shed hairs or skin cells.
  - That's not correct. She already had reason to suspect that samples were taken, and then scanned the stomach lining for missing cells because that's the best area to harvest them from.
Boba Fett from Star Wars is described as a precise genetic copy of his "father" Jango, unlike the clone troopers, who were genetically engineered to allow accelerated growth, among some other changes. Thus, Boba ages at a normal rate (he is seen as a child in Attack of the Clones). Being genetically identical to Jango, however, does not stop him from contracting a disease called "clone degeneration" in the novel Bloodlines, at the age of 71. Why this condition only affects clones is anyone's guess.
- That might make some sense, assuming cloning in the Star Wars verse is as tricky as it is in ours. Many, many clones of adult organisms die young because they get an extra early dose of chromosomal degeneration.
In Justice League Unlimited, Supergirl learns that the now-villainous Professor Hamilton took genetic samples of her to create a murderously sociopathic clone of Supergirl, named Galatea. However, Hamilton modified the clone to be an older version of Supergirl to make her tougher. Furthermore, Galatea is also a homage to the later copy of Supergirl, Power Girl, as noted by her white costume with a chest hole intended to show off her cleavage, as well as her more developed...musculature.
In the MMO Tabula Rasa, all of a player's characters on one server are clones of each other, in order to explain why they all have the last name and share a supposedly rare special ability. Despite that, clones don't share memories by default. Players must earn special credits to use the ubertech necessary to share experience and training from one character to a new clone, and even then there can be differences in how that knowledge is actually applied. Clones can also look different, or even be a different gender. It's been stated that human science is working on the creation of Half Human Hybrids using this technology.
- Not quite right, as non-cloned characters may be relatives.
- Half Human Hybrids are available now, playing all the related tropes (That this newbie troper remembers off the top of his head) straight.
In the third season of Transformers: Beast Wars, a clone of Dinobot is created who bears little resemblance to the original beyond his name, a similar-sounding voice, and having an alternate mode based on the same animal. (Thankfully, the aging issue can just be tossed aside in this case... It doesn't apply to robots.) In an earlier season Dinobot's biological form was cloned by the villains to serve as an infiltrator; Dinobot was implied to have eaten him, but he was an enemy so it didn't matter that he was a copy.
Parodied in the Season Two opener of The Venture Brothers.
- Although it is implicitly played straight. If Morpheus trip to the nether in an attempt to resurrect the Venture Brothers is any indication, Dr. Venture cloning experiments rendered the Venture Brothers soulless casks of themselves, since Morpheus is unable to find their spirits therein.
The webcomic It's Walky! initially played it straight, when the saintly, innocent girl Joyce gets a 'reverse' clone, thanks to accidental exposure to Imported Alien Phlebotinum. The clone is not so much evil as sluttish, but still manages to be a complete antithesis to Joyce, who then shoots her. In the head. The subversion comes in much later, when an Evil Lawyer catches wind of the incident - and suddenly, she's wanted for murder.
A totally different kind of Cloning Blues occurs in real-life, with creatures that reproduce asexually -- by dividing their cells into two, creating an identical clone. Studies have indicated that it's way easier for parasites to optimally adapt to a strain of creatures with identical DNA than to a species whose biology is based on the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction, and there's evidence that that might be the reason sexual reproduction evolved in the first place. (Go read Carl Zimmer's book Parasite Rex to find out more.)
- Most fruit bought in today's grocery stores are in fact clones, a practice much simpler than "cloning" depicted on TV and a practice that goes all the way back to ancient China - in essence it's an artificially induced botanical form of asexual reproduction.
An earlier Outer Limits example is the original series' "The Duplicate Man". Twenty Minutes Into The Future, an anthropologist illegally brings a Megasoid, a member of an intelligent but bloodthirsty alien race, to Earth. When the creature escapes, the cowardly anthropologist has himself "duplicated" so that his clone can secretly hunt the Megasoid. As in the episode's literary source (Clifford D. Simak's short story "Goodnight, Mr. James"), the clone unknowingly has a poison in his bloodstream that will kill him at a preset time. The Outer Limits version adds the twist that the anthropologist's dissatisfied wife is happier with the clone, since her real husband has become cold and distant. However, the Outer Limits version cops out of killing the protagonist by revealing that he's not the clone but the original.
Some genetically engineered X5 supersoldiers in Dark Angel have clones, which are treated basically as identical twins with their own unique identities. It still sucks to be them, because Manticore (the evil organization that made them) punished them for the escape of their originals. Alec has had a particularly rough time on account of being a clone of the serial killer Ben.
In 6 Days a Sacrifice, the final game in Yahtzee Croshaw's Chzo Mythos games, the player repeatedly encounters a man in ridiculously old-fashioned clothing (funny thing, he looks sort of like Trilby, the protagonist from the first and third games in the series) who is invariably killed by a tall, faceless, demonic man. Later we learn that the installment where the protagonist has found himself was built on the original site of Defoe manor, and the people there are trying to summon an elder god with the help of John Defoe, a rather angry spirit (named John for convenience, as his father never named him; he was apparently somehow deformed and his father viewed him as a sin against God) bent on generic murder, and the Trilby-like men are, in fact, clones of the original Trilby, there to keep John in line, as Trilby is the only person John ever actually feared. For clones they seem remarkably well adjusted, especially because they tend to die at the hands of the Tall Man, often gruesomely.
The novel The House of the Scorpion plays with this one. The main character is a clone, created as a heart donor for his aged drug-lord "twin."
One episode of Care Bears has No Heart kick Mr. Beastly out for yet another infraction of common sense, which means that Shreeky is left to do all the menial labor normally left to her dimwitted partner. She eventually comes up way to get out of her unenviable situation: she creates five magical clones of herself, and introduces them all to No Heart. But when she gets to the one who's supposed to "take the blame for [making] messes", the Shreeky clones start bickering amongst themselves, at which point No Heart bellows that he'd rather have Beastly back than deal with them. After he leaves, Shreeky smugly expresses her satisfaction with the results of her apparent Xanatos Gambit, at which point the other Shreekies start bickering over who really came up with the idea...prompting the real Shreeky to say "there's only room for one Shreeky around here!" and casually disintegrate them all with her magic mirror.
The idea of a stereotypical, perfect-copy clone is used in a fantastically original manner in the web-novel ''John Dies at the End."
Danny Phantom gets the "Evil Clone Created To Destroy Me" - only the clone isn't really evil, just manipulated by Vlad Plasmus. The clone is also a she (Dani Phantom).
Tsubasa: reservoir chronicles.
Time to watch Clone High. Their angst is entertaining.
The parody song "I Think I'm A Clone Now" by Weird Al Yankovic.
- Note that it details the transition from embarassment ("...What would people say/If only they knew that I was/Part of some geneticist's plan...") to enjoyment ("...I've been on Oprah Winfrey - I'm world renowned...") of one of the two clones.
A series of sci-fi novels written by Steven L. Kent explores this trope. All enlisted men in the future armed forces (not officers or NC Os) are clones and the main character is a special kind of clone himself. A twist is that all the regular clones have no idea they're clones and are biologically programmed to die if they ever find out.
The Regeneration book series by L. J. Singleton features 5 cloned teenagers that aged naturally. One of them was cloned from a serial killer and struggles with his violent urges and all of them have some form of minor superpower
Doctor Who subverts this with Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter. Well, she's not actually a clone so much as someone with a Truly Single Parent.
The C.J. Cherryh novel "Cyteen" averts this quite nicely - much of the plot involves attempting to re-create a dead scientist by raising a clone much like the original - and there are many difficulties.
Parodied in The Non Adventures Of Wonderella, in an installment titled "BadToTheClone".
Literary example: Anna to the Infinite Power, a YA novel (and later movie) which actually provides a thoughtful take on how the attempt to clone a single genius multiple times might be hampered by the distinctive personalities of her clones.
Averted somewhat in Code Lyoko. William's phenominally stupid artificial clone, created through the supercomputer, has to replace him for several months, and yet he never complains or angsts about his situation, probably because he doesn't realize what he really is, or just accepts it without really understanding it. It's actually the real William who suffers in this situation, as he comes back to find that the clone has completely trashed his reputation through said stupidity.
This troper remembers reading a book in which the protagonist cloned himself. Unfortunately, the clone believed he was the original, and in turn cloned himself, who ALSO thought he was the original. Unfortunately for them, clones tended to develop mental illnesses quickly. The second clone became clinically depressed, while the first one was basically the original's Evil Twin.
A biology (three is a trilogy, so...) of novels, Farthest Star and Wall Around a Star by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson, feature a form of teleportation that basically sends a copy of you elsewhere but leaves the original too. The copy can also be modified en route, since all you're transmitting is information. Interestingly, this is how most physicists figure real-life teleportation might someday work.
An episode of Farscape featured a villain who could make perfect copies of people, and lampshaded the common mistake by being mildly offended when someone referred to it as cloning. Very unusually, the "twin" of John Crichton survived the episode and neither of them tried to kill each other, though for the sake of sanity the crew split into two groups, each with a copy. This troper is not sure whether it is specified if the copy that eventually died was the original or not.
Lampooned in Multiplicity as Michael Keaton duplicates himself (and the clones duplicate themselves) with each clone having a different personality.

Clingy Mac Guffin

« Applied Phlebotinum »

Collapsing Lair

AB Negative

« You Fail Biology Forever »

Gender Equals Breed

Clap Your Hands If You Believe

« Speculative Fiction Tropes »

Coconut Superpowers

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools