Cloning Gambit

Luke Skywalker: Clones! So it's true!
Emperor Palpatine: The dying is painful... the transition is not an enjoyable experience. But the suffering is a small price to pay... for eternal life.

— Dark Empire

A Cloning Gambit is a scheme involving a character cloning themselves, by some means and using said clone to last out multiple deaths. Maybe they send clones out on suicide missions that they don't want to give to anyone else. Maybe they can Body Surf and transfer their mind from clone to clone, or use a set of "inactive" clones as a Body Backup Drive. Maybe they can't transfer their consciousness between clones per se, but each clone in a succession of them activates with their memories and personality. In any of the above, there's always a version of them out making trouble or appearing, in person, to crash the enemies' celebration party.

The clone may or may not be subject to Clone Angst; they may or may not realize that they're not "the original", but they are very disposable, they rarely come up with their own unique identities, and they are very rarely prone to Which Me?. Only rarely does this overlap with Send in the Clones, since typically neither the other characters nor the viewer see more than one or two of that character walking around at any one time. Floating in People Jars, perhaps, after the reveal that the character is using this trope, but not up and talking.

The genetic duplicate to Backup Twin. Either trope can easily turn into an Ass Pull, if not properly foreshadowed, and often results in Opening a Can of Clones. Compare Actually a Doombot.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The series Akumetsu is almost entirely based off of this.
• Used in an early episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A resistance leader appears to keep surviving assassinations by using clones. Somewhat subverted in that its actually other high-ranking members of the organization who keep the charade going, while the original has been dead for years.
• Yamato Takeru from Maken-ki! got the ability to Body Surf after his current body dies, though this put a massive strain on his soul unless his new host is related to him. To make full use of this, he has been producing countless clones of himself to make sure he always have a spare body to inhabit once he's killed. Which makes him basically unkillable no matter how many of his bodies are destroyed by the heroes. To add to this, he makes use of his clones as elite warriors in his army through genetic engineering or putting souls he's stolen from others and modified into them.
• Naruto only uses short-lived clones, but he is very good at this. One bonus to the shadow-clone technique is that a clone's memories return to the user upon its death, which is useful for reconnaissance and fast learning.
• A variant is used in Neon Genesis Evangelion: when Gendo cloned his wife Yui to create Rei, he also created dozens of clones he keeps in a tank of LCL somewhere around Central Dogma. In the event that she dies (which has happened twice so far), a new clone is pulled out and uploaded with some of her memories. Rei knows that she's replaceable, so she lets herself be used by the Commander, since she would be killed and replaced at the first sign of defiance. He knows that she knows this and uses it as leverage against her... until Ritsuko destroys the clones in episode 23. Gendo's plans are screwed up even more by the fact that Rei, while not associating with anyone because she's going to die anyway, does eventually grow fond of Gendo's son Shinji (and likely falls in love with him, despite them technically being half-siblings), so when Third Impact comes, Rei instantly betrays Gendo since after she took Adam from his body, she no longer needs him to trigger Instrumentality and gives control over mankind's souls to Shinji instead. Tons of Mind Screw, indeed.
• Played with in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. The evil twin-type clone, despite being created by the villain, manages to fill this role nicely due to a really last-minute Heel–Face Turn. He then reincarnates back in time to reappear five minutes later (though it was decades to him), and dies for his original(s)/sons a second time.

Comic Books

• The creation of Brianna Diggers in Gold Digger manages to be an accidental version of this. Gina was deliberately trying to fake out a deadly curse by copying her and Brittany's auras onto a non-sentient blob of protoplasm. They did not, however, expect the curse to interact with the protoplasm and become a Two-Donor Clone.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Avengers:
    • Ultron does this routinely. He always has hidden equipment set up to rebuild him from a backed-up copy of his memories if he is destroyed. Amusingly, this happens when he's presumed dead during the original Secret Wars (1984). When that Ultron finally returns to Earth, he not only finds that not only have his machines built an improved replacement copy, but he's also horrified to find that the "improvements" have made the copy nice. They fight and the evil Ultron wins, naturally.
    • The Avengers (Kurt Busiek) eventually declares that this is how Iron Man's enemy Madam Masque keeps coming back from the dead, and why her personality is inconsistent from one appearance to the next. The story which introduces this idea also kills off the last of the clones, asserting that only the original Madame Masque is still around.
  • Knowing that he's liable to die at some point, Loki sets up one of these. After his demise in Siege, Loki is reborn as a young boy, with none of his older self's memories or issues. Then a copy of the original Loki's personality appears, planning to take possession of the child Loki and thereby get away with more schemes. However, the process doesn't go exactly according to plan, as the new Loki feels guilt over killing a child and part of the child Loki's personality seeps through into them. After their self-loathing nearly destroys reality itself in volume 2 of Young Avengers, they attempt to make a genuine Heel–Face Turn in Loki: Agent of Asgard. In this case, Which Me? is extremely common and invoked/exploited/lampshaded/etc. like there's no tomorrow (it's in Loki's nature to create as much confusion as possible).
  • Any time you see someone or something kill Nick Fury, it's actually a Life Model Decoy.
  • After a few rather poor showings by Thanos, Jim Starlin wrote a story in which it is revealed that those various Thanosi have all been clones, much weaker than the original. As a snarky response to this, another writer later wrote a comic in which Squirrel Girl defeats Thanos, with Uatu the Watcher right there to confirm that it's the real Thanos, and not a "clone, robot, or doppelganger". Starlin, being petty enough to take this joking incident seriously, then wrote a comic in which Thanos is revealed to have created a new type of clone that can fool even the Watcher's cosmic senses. Another comic was then written in which Squirrel Girl confronts Thanos again, pointing out that if she defeated a doppelganger that was completely indistinguishable from the real Thanos, then she's equally capable of defeating the real thing, at which point Thanos cuts and runs.
  • X-Men:
    • Mister Sinister has become famous for this since the 2010s. Not only is he extremely hard to kill to begin with, if you do manage it, there will be at least a dozen more waiting. He's even started taking it to the point of creating entire cities full of his clones, all programmed for specific roles within his society (even rebels against said society, in the case of Sinister London), and more recently the Bar Sinister, both on Battleworld and in the main 616 reality.
    • In X-Men: The End, it's revealed that Sinister once created a clone from his original, baseline human DNA as part of a plan to take down Apocalypse (he needed a body without Apocalypse's genetic meddling). He spliced in some DNA from Cyclops, believing that the Summers genes would ensure awesome superpowers. He was right; the clone would grow up to be, ironically enough, Gambit.
    • Sinister is also known for doing this with his chief minions, the Marauders (though he hasn't used them so much in recent years), activating cells of them when they're needed. In the run-up to Secret Wars (2015), Magneto finds and hijacks them, reprogramming the clones as disposable minions.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • This was the explanation created as a way to rectify the two contradictory deaths of Sate Pestage in the comics. Canon holds that the one in the X-Wing Rogue Squadron series is real and the one who survives until Dark Empire is the clone.
  • In Dark Empire, Palpatine, following his death at Endor, inhabits a clone waiting in a storage facility on a secret fortress world. Six years later, apparently spending the whole time building superweapons, he reappears to the Empire and launches campaigns against the New Republic, being killed multiple times and always activating a new clone. Things then go wrong when one of his Royal Guardsmen sabotages the process so that each clone degrades quickly, forcing Palpatine to look into other options — like, perhaps, Leia Organa's unborn son. In The Hand of Thrawn, Mara sardonically says that she doubts that this was really Palpatine, since during all that time he never called on her, his agent. Never mind that she was just one of his many agents, despite his telling her that she was unique.
• Superman: Lex Luthor famously does this a few years after John Byrne's Post-Crisis reboot when the kryptonite ring which he constantly wears to keep Superman at bay gives him terminal cancer.

Fan Works

• At the end of Children of Time season 1, the heroes Never Found the Body of Professor Moriarty — even worse, they caused his death, were right there, but were focused on the injured heroine. Two episodes later, in season 2, the Professor Moriarty responsible for terrorizing New London is revealed to be a clone. He later tells Beth Holmes that his conscious can return to life in a new clone again and again, as many times as necessary to accomplish his goals. However, the intended Badass Boast fails in an epic way when Beth can only express horror for this, as she, too, has died and can't imagine the thought of experiencing death over and over again like that.
• Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters uses this for a major twist at the end of the Dark Hand arc. The Bartholomew Chang arrested by Section 13 after Harold Hale "changes sides" is actually a magically created clone. This enables the real Chang to keep running the Asian branch in secret, while Harold takes over the American branch, while pretending to be Section 13's Mole in Charge.
• In Ladder, the Professor tries to revive his daughters by cloning them and transferring their memories, but each time fails. He repeats this dozens, if not hundreds, of times to the point where he becomes the antagonist. He also has clones of himself for whenever he's killed.

Films — Live-Action

• In The 6th Day's climax, main character Adam Gibson and his clone pull of a series of these. Subverted in that all are voluntary.
• In Diamonds Are Forever, Ernest Stavro Blofeld pulls this trick on James Bond with variable success — albeit it's a case of Clone by Conversion instead of genetic replicas.
• The Prestige has its fair share of Gambits, but through the course of the film, Robert Angier receives a steampunk matter duplicator from Nikola Tesla, and in one of the most glaring cases of (intentional on the writer's part) Misapplied Phlebotinum ever, uses this device to perform a stage magic trick: He tells the audience that the device is a "teleporter", he activates the machine, his clone materializes behind the audience, and his original self falls below the stage through a trap door, into a tank of water, where he drowns. The entire shtick may have been an elaborate ploy to frame Alfred Borden for his own "murder".
• The Rise of Skywalker opens with Palpatine inexplicably alive. There are a few hints, confirmed by the novelization, that he's Body Surfed into a clone, taking a cue from the Star Wars Legends franchise.
• In the ending to Short Circuit, Johnny Five uses his previously demonstrated repair skills to build a physical duplicate of himself, which he sends out for Nova Robotics to kill so they'd assume they got him.

Literature

• Played straight and inverted in 7th Son. While John Alpha's clone willingly and knowingly sacrifices himself, Klaus/Special K sacrifices his original self so that his clone, into which he's downloaded his memories and personality, is free and clear to carry on with the Evil Plan.
• The central character of Against a Dark Background gets lucky with this — the Big Bad has a clone made of her, which is killed. The corpse is soon found by the religious fanatics who want her dead.
• In the Age of Fire series, this is revealed to be the secret behind why the Red Queen can't be bothered to die. She has a magic tree that grows copies of her; every time her body's killed, her spirit just moves to another. AuRon destroys the tree after killing her... but then she just possesses Infamnia.
• Artemis Fowl:
  • The Opal Deception has a variation. Fairy cloning technology can create a clone that is physically and genetically identical to the original, but has no brain functions beyond life support. Opal Koboi clones herself, fakes a coma, then leaves the clone apparently catatonic in the hospital while she skips off to ruin the heroes' lives.
  • Played straight(-er) in the final novel by Artemis himself, who realizes that the reason these clones are catatonic is because they have no soul, so he gets Foaly to create a clone of himself, pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice to ruin Opal's final revenge plan, then later allows his spirit to inhabit the clone's body, effectively bringing him back to life, albeit at the cost of his memories.
• Inverted in Brandon Sanderson's "Firstborn", in which the clone is created by someone else for the sole purpose of being pitted against the original, who has grown too powerful.
• In the fifth The Garden of Sinners chapter, Aozaki Touko is revealed to have created a perfect puppet of herself (a clone, for all intents and purposes) out of pure scientific interest, then went into hibernation until it is killed by Araya. Or it may have been the other way around. Since the copy is completely identical, she doesn't care which one is original, completely discarding concept of identity. She makes several bodies, links their memories with some ersatz Hive Mind spell, and stuffs all but one in multiple freezers, achieving punctuated linear existence: once the currently active body is killed, nearest one activates and pick up on wherever she stopped. And then she makes new copy, both for practical reasons and to prove that she is still the same being.
• The involuntary Cloning Gambit for involuntary immortality is used in the Maps in a Mirror short story "A Thousand Deaths".
• In Sandpaper Kiss, Lucretia discovers that her best friend Lucy is a clone grown to give her disease-free spare parts. She doesn't like the idea, and instead gives the clone her diary so a part of her can live on.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the X-Wing Series novel Isard's Revenge, Isard tells the Rogues that she had clones, each of which believed herself to be the original, which she activated and used regularly to be where she could not, and killed once they were no longer useful. One of them was sent to scatter the prisoners from the Lusankya, managed to survive afterward, and unwittingly opposed Isard by working with a warlord the real one wanted dead.
  • Also in the X-Wing Series, a clueless Imperial talking to a disguised Wedge speculates, based on the number of times the most famous Rogues have seemingly come Back from the Dead, that Wedge Antilles, Tycho Celchu, Wes Janson, Hobbie Klivian, and others have died again and again, but the New Republic just keeps activating new clones.
  • One of the (many, many, many) subplots in The Hand of Thrawn is that Grand Admiral Thrawn, who died at the end of The Thrawn Trilogy, set up a clone to be activated ten years after his death, telling his people to be ready when it happened. It didn't fall through (thanks, Luke and Mara), but there are occasional hints that There Is Another. Timothy Zahn has said that he would like to introduce a Thrawn clone one day, when the Galaxy Far Far Away needs a master strategist — but, unusually, this clone will be fully aware that he is not Thrawn, and will be under enormous pressure to live up to the original.
  • Outbound Flight has Palpatine sending all of the Outbound Flight Jedi to their deaths, but taking genetic samples first, making it a Reverse Cloning Gambit.
  • The novel Darksaber had an involuntary Cloning Gambit: Whenever Bevel Lemelisk did something to displease the Emperor (such as failing to notice a certain thermal exhaust port in the Death Star designs), Palpatine had him killed in a variety of hideously painful manners (eaten alive by piranha beetles or slowly dipped into a smelter full of molten copper, for example), and then transferred his mind to a clone at the moment of death so that the Empire would not lose his services as a master engineer. When finally captured by the New Republic and sentenced to death for designing numerous weapons of mass destruction, Lemelisk is actually relieved that he will be Killed Off for Real this time, and asked the New Republic to make sure they got it right this time.
• Time Wars: The main villain, Drakov, created a number of identical clones and implanted them with his memories, so that even he/they aren't sure which one is the original. This allows the heroes to kill him in one book and still have to fight him in the next one.
• One of the many things Jackson's Whole is infamous for in the Vorkosigan Saga is the clone brain transplant business, where the brains of the rich are transplanted in the bodies of their younger clones. The clone's brains are then discarded.
• A central factor in the rather convoluted plot of A.E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A and its sequel The Players of Null-A.

Live-Action TV

• In the Doctor Who episode "Heaven Sent", the Doctor clones himself literally billions of times, one after another in an endless loop, to enable himself to break through a twenty-foot-thick wall made of a substance harder than diamond, with only his bare fists at his disposal. It takes him a total of 4.5 BILLION years to break through.
• Dollhouse features something like this trope. Those closest to the Dollhouse elite can back up their memories every month, ready to be uploaded into a new body after death. Of course, they don't actually have the body-cloning tech that goes with it, so you have to "borrow" someone else's body to make it work. Good thing there's so many dull, unimportant poor people around who don't matter.
• A season finale in First Wave ends with Cade's best friend shooting him on live TV in front of a Gua. The first episode of the next season flashes back to Cade and Eddie finding a clone of Cade created to house their Antichrist. While Gua/human hybrids normally dissolve after death, they gambled that this "feature" is activated by the process of Brain Uploading. It's only a short reprieve, though, as the Gua find out they've been duped fairly quickly.
• Power Rangers S.P.D.: Z uses one of her duplicates as a decoy to fool a monster that turned people into dolls.
• In Smallville, Lana Lang does this to get away from Lex Luthor.
• This is the m.o. of Ba'al for the last few seasons of Stargate SG-1. The viewer is never sure which is the real one, but it's strongly implied in Stargate: Continuum that Col. Mitchell killed the last one off.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • In the episode "A Man Alone", the villain clones himself and then kills the clone in order to frame Odo for murder.
  • The Vorta have several clones on standby at all times, all of whom share their predecessor's memories (including how they died), and can be restocked almost instantly. The main Vorta of the series, Weyoun, is actually the fourth one when he first appears. He's on his eighth life when the base holding his clones is destroyed, and is finally Killed Off for Real in the Grand Finale.
• Terrahawks has its lead character, Doctor "Tiger" Ninestein (or should that be characters?). An early episode sees him unambiguously killed... then, in the aftermath, as his friends are grieving, he calmly walks in. Ol' Tiger has a Meaningful Name. He's been cloned nine times, so if one of him is killed, a full memory/personality download is made on the next clone in line, who promptly fills the gap of his predecessor.

Tabletop Games

• In the Car Wars universe, it's possible to buy true life insurance from Gold Cross, which will maintain a clone body and memory tape, enabling you to pick up where you left off (as of your latest memory update session) if you die. Just don't miss a payment or the clone gets used for spare parts.
• Champions: The robotic villain Mechanon (an Ultron Expy) can either detach his head and send it off if he's about to be destroyed, or upload his mind to his closest base. Either way, when he builds his new body, he'll be able to tweak things to adapt to whatever caused his failure the last time.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • A "simulacrum" is a short-lived duplicate of the caster that is basically designed to be treated as expendable.
  • There's also a 'Clone' spell. The spell creates a clone of the body of the target. In AD&D, the clone has all of the original's memories up to the point where the tissue sample was taken and if it meets its original, they each have an irresistible urge to kill the other, though the clone can be grown after the original dies. After 3rd Edition, the clone is merely inert flesh until the original body is killed, at which point the creature's soul enters the clone.
  • The "Acererak" that you kill in the original Tomb of Horrors module? Pfft, forget it, he's just a underpowered clone of the real demilich. Who sits right in the middle of the Negative Energy Plane in the sequel module...
• Easily done in the world of Eclipse Phase, where humans back up their brains as software on a regular basis. True clones can get expensive, though; it's more cost-effective to get an off-the-rack body and have it cosmetically engineered to match.
• GURPS has a lot of stated ways to do this. In the basic rules a clone spell and the Advantage "Extra Life" exist to help facilitate this (and keep players alive).
• This is one of the main mechanics in Paranoia. Should one of the PCs die — and if someone DOESN'T die at some point during the session, the GM is not doing their job right — their next clone is just shipped off to the scene with the same personality as before, and thanks to MemoMax technology, the same memories as well. Including how they died. One module even suggests a way to get the clone to the party Outside: the new Sub-Orbital Clone Insertion Module! When somebody dies Outside, the GM starts a long, descending whistle... the number of descending whistles shortly afterward depends on how many Troubleshooters have the presence of mind to take cover at that point.

Video Games

• Akatsuki Blitzkampf uses this trope with some twists:
  • The Elektrosoldat Praetorian Guard are all clones of the Smug Snake Adler, but one of them begins to grow a mind of his own and realizes how expendable they all are. So he decids to rebel and fight back...
  • Murakumo is known to have cloned himself twice and having placed his two clones in huge positions of power in a Chinese Triad and the Japanese Army. At least one clone has been ultimately offed after trying to seize power for himself instead.
• In the ZX Spectrum game Astroclone (definitely a Meaningful Name), the in-universe explanation for the player's extra lives is that the mission has been entrusted to a squad of clones.
• Frank Fontaine of BioShock pulled one of these by using Plasmids to turn one of his subordinates into his Body Double. When the double was killed, all of Rapture thought that the illustrious criminal mastermind had finally fallen, allowing him to organize La Résistance in the guise of the charismatic rebel leader Atlas.
• A major, title-dropping plot point in Chrono Trigger. At least the clone is completely mindless.
• In Crying Suns, the main character is a clone of the Empire’s greatest admiral. He comes from a secret facility dedicated to churning out clones of him and his crew: if the current clone dies, his memories will be transferred to a fresh one.
• This explains respawning in Destroy All Humans! and is the reason why Cryptosporidium-137 is there on Earth in the first place. The Furon have cloned themselves so much that they run the risk of going extinct, so Crypto and his clones have to collect Furon DNA contained in human brains to add fresher blood into his species.
• EVE Online: Upon death, the players transfer their consciousness (or at least some of their memories) to a prepared clone, hence explaining their ability to respawn.
• You can pull a Cloning Gambit in Evil Genius, transforming one of your minions into a duplicate of your evil mastermind. If the clone is killed, the world powers will think you're dead, reducing your heat significantly.
• From what appears to be the case in the Five Nights at Freddy's series, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator saw the long-overdue real death of William Afton, series Big Bad and the infamous "Purple Guy", leading to an eternity of suffering in Ultimate Custom Night. However, in Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted we learn that he managed to leave a copy of either his mind or his soul in the chips for the Spring Bonnie suit he was trapped in, and tries to use it to perform Grand Theft Me on the player. Worse yet, he appears to have picked up an apprentice...
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, having a Cloning Bay turns all scenarios in which a crew member may die into a joke, with the flavor text describing them running recklessly into dangerous situations, because they can't really die. In combat, you can use the clones to Zerg Rush rival ships and kill their crew. Of course, they can do the same to you, and if your Cloning Bay is knocked offline by laser fire...
• Futurama: The Game uses this to explain the characters' multiple lives. Every time they die, their consciousnesses are transferred to new cloned bodies.
• In Hack 'N' Slash, Alice is the result of one of these. Her creator/source code is still around, though — just incapacitated.
• In Infinite Space, Zenitonian Admiral Rubriko has a base full of clones standing by to receive uploaded memories in the event of his death. After fighting him four or five times, the player party finds the base and activates all of them, resulting in psychic feedback that kills all of them in a pretty horrifying way.
• The King of Fighters 2000 hinges on one of those backfiring; Zero has a clone created of him to continue NESTS's agenda, but unfortunately, Clone Zero goes behind his back and ends up causing unchecked mayhem. Needless to say, in 2001, the original Zero is not happy with the results.
• Implied in Little Big Adventure, since Dr. FunFrock has perfected cloning technology. You have to kill him twice in the first game, and twice more when he reveals himself as the Big Bad of the second as well.
• In Mass Effect 3's "Citadel" DLC, we learn that Cerberus created a clone of Shepard for the express purpose of harvesting his/her organs should the original need a transplant. They never do, but the clone escapes and is understandably angry. Unfortunately, they turn this anger against the original and their friends and try to kill them in an attempt to take the original's place.
• Pretty much the entire scheme enacted by Big Boss in Metal Gear. (To a lesser extent, completed by Liquid Ocelot in Guns of the Patriots.)
• The clones P.B. Winterbottom makes in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom so he can get all of his pie.
• Neverwinter Nights has this in its expansion pack where Halastr Blackcloak (not a big man in the sanity department at any time) tries this, only for the clone to be saved by the Player before he wanted it to be saved by him. Or not, it might be that the original that was captured and the clone who came to save him... They can't agree.
• A version of this gets pulled off in Persona 5. Suffice to say, the main characters trick Akechi into believing he's won by having him kill the cognitive version of Joker, saving the real one. However, since the cognitive version of someone is essentially a realistic hallucination and not really alive (no more alive than a robot or puppet is) it's okay.
• Tales of the Abyss:
  • Sort of used: Big Bad Van needs Ashe's powers for his "End of the World" Special, but a prophecy had dictated that Ashe was going to die at the age of 17, so Van creates a clone to take Ashe's place in the world, including his death. Things get complicated when the clone actually survives the event that would have killed him.
  • Another example is in the case of the original Fon Master Ion, who was also prophesied to die, so Ion creates a bunch of clones in the hope that one of them will die instead (or that their mere existence will be enough to throw off the prophecy). Unfortunately for him, it doesn't work.

Webcomics

• Schlock Mercenary:
  • F'sherl-Ganni wormgate technology can be used to make a very quick (perfect) copy of whatever passes through it. When threatened with murder by a sinister military force, three scientists decide to escape using the gate-copy technology. One of them figured out how to turn that same technology into a small WMD, leading to this line:
    Gav-0: That begs a question: Does it count as selfless sacrifice if you clone yourself before your suicide mission?
    Kevyn: I'm putting it in my resume and hoping nobody asks.
  • Petey manages to cheat death by cloning a blank Ob'enn and uploading his own mind into its brain, then sending it off before the attacking Ob'enn undo Tagon's standing orders to not think about ghosts by resetting his loyalty switch, which predictably drives his original self crazy in a matter of minutes and ends with him blowing up the ship.
  • Tagon's Heroic Sacrifice during the Uli-Oa mission more or less hinges on him being cloned from a RED-REO backup afterwards; for this reason, he quickly turns down assistance from Doctor Bunnigus when she offers to help, clueing her in to the nature of his plan.
    Bunni: I'm the one dressed for this fight, sir. It's okay for you to admit you need my help now.
    Tagon: If I admit anything, it's that my plan involves me needing your help later.
    Bunni: Oh.
• In Starslip, protocol officers are deemed mission-critical, so on their death their minds are automatically uploaded to a fresh clone. We find this out two strips after we see protocol officer Quine stabbed through the heart.

Western Animation

• In the second season of Exo Squad, Big Bad Phaeton sends a clone of himself to fight in the Battle for Venus. The clone is betrayed and left for dead by treacherous General Draconis who, in turn, is executed by the real Phaeton.
• In Invincible (2021), Robot hires the Mauler Twins to clone him a new body with a copy of his consciousness, as his original one was horribly deformed. They inform him that the process doesn't copy over his consciousness and that he'd still be stuck in his original body, but he doesn't care and wants to die in peace while someone with his Super-Intelligence can help save the world in his place.
• Men in Black: The Series:
  • This is the most second most common use of the Quick-clones, behind being simple decoys. The clones only last for a few hours anyway before melting, so it's no big deal. In one episode, a bunch of Quick-clones play a basketball game once their job was done, since their lifespan isn't long enough to worry about much.
  • Another episode had an alien criminal clone himself before being captured, so that the clone could free him from custody.

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