Expendable Clone

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"If I die, I can be replaced."
—Rei Ayanami, Neon Genesis Evangelion

The tendency of characters to treat clones and identical Doppelgangers as expendable, often to the point of killing them casually because they can be replaced with reserves, or, in cases where there is an "original", it is the only one that counts.

Occasionally, both clone and original will have a deep seated loathing akin to There Can Be Only One. May be justified if the clones are naturally Empty Shells or soulless and psychotic.

Compare Dream Apocalypse and What Measure Is a Mook?. See also Uniqueness Value and What Measure Is a Non-Human?. Related to Ambiguous Clone Ending, Cloning Gambit, Tomato in the Mirror, Evil Knockoff, Screw Yourself, and Teleporter Accident. All the Myriad Ways is when alternate realities similar to your own are given this treatment.

Contrast Clones Are People, Too.

Examples of Expendable Clone include:


Anime and Manga

  • In Vandread, this is revealed to be the underlying reason for the creation and maintenance of the sex-segregated planets of Meger and Talark where children are Designer Babies artificially engineered through mixed-cloning of the original colonists — the majority of whom still remain secretly secured in cryo-stasis — as the colony leaders were unwilling to sacrifice any natural-born children to the organ-harvest fleets of Earth.
  • In A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun, Mikoto is cloned and the clones are mass-produced in their thousands to be killed in an experiment to increase Accelerator's power. The mild discomfort she gets by discovering she is cloned pales to her reaction when she learns they're being killed off en masse for an experiment, and she breaks down upon her clones claiming that they are simply '¥180,000 lab animals' (roughly $2000).
  • Inverted in Franken Fran: Fran generally considers both the original and the clones equally expendable as long as there is at least one copy of the person left (though she will try to keep all involved alive).
  • Found in Afterschool Charisma. Rockswell thinks 'redundant' clones are unnecessary. After his suicide attempt, Mozart becomes bitter when he realizes this. Shiro and Mr. Kuroe disagree.
  • Lyrical Nanoha usually follows the Clones Are People, Too route, but Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS has an inversion of this in Doctor Jail Scaglietti. He considers even himself to be expendable as long as one of the Jail clones that he had implanted in the wombs of the Numbers gets away.
  • Played straight in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Rei has several dozen clones ready to swap her out if she dies or decides to not play along with her superiors' Assimilation Plot. All three of her superiors who know about it (Gendo, Fuyutsuki, Ritsuko) treat her like a tool and she lets them because she knows her replaceability too and considers resistance useless. Really, only Shinji treats her nicely with genuine intentions - which later comes back to bite everyone else in the ass in a MAJOR way.
  • Puella Magi Kazumi Magica has Nico during her combat with Kazumi against the Soujus.

Comic Books

  • MODOK creates clones of himself in order to generate a steady supply of backup organs.
  • Usually but not always averted with Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man. His mutant power is creating duplicates of himself, which become more independent the longer they are separate. In the current series of X-Factor, in which Madrox is the lead character, the duplicates embody aspects of Jamie's personality at random. Jamie usually regards the duplicates as extensions of himself, but occasionally as independent people depending on circumstances. The duplicates themselves, however, are all over the map on how they think of him, themselves and each other.
  • Calvin intentionally created a duplicate to do tasks that he doesn't want to do, like clean his room. Predictably, the duplicate doesn't want to do them either, and runs off to misbehave, knowing the original will get all the blame. A few clones later, it turns out Calvin really doesn't get along with himself, and ends up turning them all into worms (but, as Calvin knows, this makes them happy, because now they're gross). Later, Calvin creates a good duplicate of himself that doesn't mind doing his chores, but ends up driving Calvin crazy anyway by trying to be nice to Suzie. Calvin and his good copy get so mad at each other that they get into a fight, since fighting is bad, the good duplicate self-destructs in a Logic Bomb. Hobbes comments on the irony that even Calvin's good version is prone to doing bad. Later still, Calvin meets "duplicates" of himself through time travel, and of course gets into a fight with those past and future selves as well, because none of them want to do a creative writing homework assignment, but each of them has "good" excuses for not being the one to do it. Meanwhile Hobbes gets along perfectly well with his past version, and they actually work together to complete the homework themselves by basically writing a story about how foolish Calvin's time-travel scheme is.
  • The Spider-Man Clone Saga went out of its way to avert this: Ben Reilly - and Peter Parker - whichever one was convinced at any given moment that he wasn't the original - couldn't go for more than two seconds without crying about how he was nothing more than a clone, even though almost everyone around him repeatedly insisted he was just as much of a man as the original.
  • By the 1970's, two members of the Legion of Super-Heroes had been Killed Off for Real. The Legion created clones of them, knowing that the clones lasted 48 hours and then exploded, in order to test whether they have the same bravery as the originals. The Legion seemed to think there was nothing wrong with creating sentient beings who die after 48 hours and think they're their old teammates, as long as they're clones.
  • In Alejandro Jodorowsky's Megalex, The police clones are terminated after living for four hundred days, the limit enforced by explosive control tabs implanted at the base of their skulls. This is done to prevent them being infected by dissidents. The clones are filed into a large room like a group show, made to strip, disinfected to allow more efficient recycling, and then their control tabs are detonated. The allusions to concentration camps are obvious. One of the protagonists, Ram, is an escaped police clone.


Film -- Live Action

Servo: So what happens if your clone is a hard drinking, hard living clone?
Crow: "Sorry, we need your liver to keep your clone alive!"

  • In The Prestige: One of the magicians constantly clones himself and kills one of them in order to perform a magic trick night after night. However, because they are perfect clones, he has no way of knowing whether the machine teleports him but leaves a copy behind, or if it creates a copy a distance away. He never knows whether the trick kills the clone, or if he kills himself and the clone carries on.
    • Either way, the original one is dead. The first time he used the machine, the one who stays behind kills the one who teleports. All other times, the one who stays behind is killed.
  • It's played straight and subverted in The 6th Day with Schwarzenegger's character(s). Arnie's clone lives in the end, albeit he had to move to another city and basically give up his family. Played straight by the Big Bad, who regrets his cavalier treatment of cloning when his clone, created because he is dying, does not even wait until he's dead before he grabs the clothes so that he can go after Arnie. Some characters consider their death not a big deal, providing a clone of them (with uploaded copy of their memory) will be made. Basically they treat such a clone as not a copy, but a continuation of themselves.
  • Sent up in the second The Gamers movie, when the Spoony Bard uses the nigh infinite resurrections the DM granted him out of sheer pity to tank a powerful demon… And even provide a fellow party member cover behind the resulting mountain of his own corpses!
  • Never Let Me Go: In the film (as well as the original book), the main characters are clones created by the government to serve as medical organ donors for "real" people. As children they meet at a boarding school at which they spend their time creating artwork, a project designed to prove whether or not clones have souls.
  • In Duncan Jones's Moon it turns out that lunar mining technician Sam Bell is unknowingly a clone of the original with a limited lifespan, destined to be replaced with another clone when his assignment is finished - i.e., when he's killed off. His company has been doing this for years in order to save on labor costs; it's implied that the original Sam was OK with the idea. The jig is finally up when one of the clones awakens prematurely, and the two Sams figure out a way to publicize the truth.


Literature

  • Timothy Zahn kickstarted the Star Wars Expanded Universe with no knowledge of the cloning system that would be used years later in Attack of the Clones, so his clones were grown quickly in "Spaarti cylinders" and could be programmed with the original's memories (though the quality of the memory transfer was said to be somewhat variable, accounting for any personality differences that might crop up between the clone and the original). Some other EU authors took this idea up and had various high-ranking Imperials have possession of their own personal cylinders. The most notable one is Ysanne Isard, who would send out her clone, who believed herself to be the original, to do jobs she could entrust to no one else. When the job was done, she would have the clone killed and prepare another, updating her memories. When a clone survived, she went as far as arranging an Enemy Mine with her worst enemy, revealing that she wasn't dead, to take her down. This didn't work out quite as well as Isard intended; the missing clone was killed, but her enemies figured out exactly how she was planning to double-cross them.
  • Played with in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon with it being a major criminal offense to have your self copied into more than one body at a time. The protagonist does it anyway near the end because his plan to bring down the Big Bad requires him to be in two places at once (also the copy doesn't even look like him). They discuss what they will have to do after it is over, assuming that they both survive, as they will be too different to be reintegrated. In the end they settle it with a game of rocks/paper/scissors, with the loser being the one who gets deleted.
    • Played with again in Woken Furies, except this time the Big Bad has brought out an illegally obtained backup of the protagonist that was made a long time before the events of Altered Carbon and sends this older, more sociopathic version after the original.
  • In Playing With Fire, Valkyrie lets Skulduggery shoot her mirror doppleganger to trick the Torment, who wants her dead. Slightly subverted in that she has been explicitly assured that her reflection cannot have a real mind of its own, it is compared to Skulduggery tearing up a photograph of her - even so, she still feels horribly guilty over the plan.
    • Also, the reflection need only be returned to a mirror to revive it.
  • In the short story Identity Theft, people can opt to have their minds transferred into robot bodies. One character is copied twice (so that another character can secretly interrogate the extra one). Despite the fact that he's also technically a copy, the legal copy is horrified at the thought of an extra him running around. To keep him from demanding that the illegal copy be destroyed, the hero helps the extra copy assume a new identity.
  • The hero of John Varley's The Golden Globe—an unknowing clone—gets away with killing his own "father" on a technicality due to an obsolete anti-cloning law that prohibited two people from sharing identical DNA. Fortunately for him the law didn't actually specify which clone had to be killed.
  • First played straight, then inverted in Good Night, Mr. James by Clifford Simak. The original sends the clone on what's probably a suicide mission, with the intent of killing it anyway if it completes the mission. The clone figures it out and attempts a Kill and Replace.
  • Another Kill and Replace inversion is The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve by Robert Silverberg. Let's just say the title doesn't indicate which far side of the curve the main character's on.
  • The entire plot of Destination: Oblivion, a pre-Dune novel by Frank Herbert. All of the main characters are expendable clones, basically a living simulation to iron out all the kinks in the mission before sending out "Real" people. They're not meant to survive. This isn't a spoiler: the audience finds this out at the very beginning of the book. The characters take a lot longer.
    • That goes throughout the Wor Ship series; clones will be sent on the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, and if there's ever a shortage in supplies or necessities, clones will be the first to suffer.
  • In Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief the Sobornost Founders have uploaded their minds to millions of artificial bodies. These collectives are called copyclans, and their members synchronize their memories and brainpower whenever they are together, allowing them to be everywhere in their massive empire at once. It doesn't matter if a few die, since there's always backups. Although their interests don't always coincide, and some of the Founders are said to be in war against themselves. Also, the main protagonist, Jean le Flambeur has millions of copies of himself trapped forever in the Dilemma Prison, but he's just happy that he was the one that got away.
  • The Vorkosigan Saga is all over the place on this trope. Betans think that Clones Are People, Too, but one of the big industries on Jackson's Whole is to clone a rich person and surgically transfer the brain of the original into the clone, which restores the client to his/her late teens/early twenties at the cost of the life of the clone (Assuming the surgery is successful). One of Mark's main goals in life is to shut that industry down.


Live Action TV

  • Very much averted in the Doctor Who two-parter "The Rebel Flesh"/"The Almost People", in which a group of 'Gangers' are animated by a solar tsunami. The gangers insist they are just as real as the originals, sharing all their memories and personalities. But at the end Ganger!Doctor sacrifices himself to save the real Doctor.
  • Dollhouse:
    • Carol-lite (Fan Nickname), being a copy of Caroline in a little girl.
    • Topher's mind imprinted on the doll Victor:

Victor!Topher: Maybe I could provide a second opinion...
Topher: But it wouldn't be a second opinion, it would be the same opinion twice!

  • It ain't a Tomato in the Mirror trope without an Outer Limits episode devoted to it.
    • Though the Revivial series episode Replica averted the trope; when a bioengeener's wife emerges from a coma that was incorrectly thought to be terminal she states that the clone (who has her memories) created prior to her awakening needs to be "disposed of". She quickly notes that she does not mean termination: she is instead suggesting erasing the clone's memories and leaving her in a far away city where she can hopefully start a new life (in the end, the clone ends up with a clone of the bioengineer himself and Everybody Lives).
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation has Will Riker being split by a transporter accident a couple years ago. They send him on his way as "Thomas" Riker once he is recovered.
    • Star Trek: Nemesis: Data dies. However, since B-4 and he shared memories, it's strongly implied Data will 'resurrect' through B4. Expanded Universe material, such as the prequel comic to the 11th movie, outright states it to be the case.
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has a man who murdered his clone to frame Odo for his murder. He is arrested in the end, Odo saying that killing one's own clone is still murder - a rarity of a clone being valued as a life form of its own in Trek.
    • Star Trek: Voyager plays with this one in "Tuvix," wherein the named hybrid makes an overwrought speech about how splitting him back into Tuvok and Neelix will be murder. Much of episode was about the moral dilemma of killing one to save the other two, and even the Doctor refused to perform the procedure, due to the Hippocratic Oath. Janeway had to do it herself, and left in a guilty mood. A lot of fans never forgave her.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise has the episode with "Sim" Tucker, in which he is made and harvested for parts in order to save Trip. He doesn't take it all that well at first, but comes around in the end. (He was going to die anyway in an hour or two, after all. And in their defense... harvesting him for parts wasn't the plan, they just needed the injured Trip's skills in a big hurry, and no one expected the clone would retain Trip's memories (or IIRC even be cognizant))
    • The teleporters can be considered this. They create a clone of you somewhere else and destroy you where you are.
  • An episode of Friday the 13th: The Series had a guy using a cursed artifact to create duplicates of himself and send them to kill people while he himself was on live TV (perfect alibi). He'd destroy the duplicates after. One dup' who knew what was coming decided to kill the original and thereby become a real boy, but forgot he'd been shot earlier. He bled to death immediately after becoming real.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place (yes a Disney show) where it's implied in an episode that Alex does this to her own magic copy.
  • Surprisingly averted in Farscape. The main character is duplicated for the greater part of Season Three, but neither duplicate is actually a fake, and neither is the original (the original was somehow just split into two, and each half made whole). Neither Chrichton is treated as expendable, and in fact, when one does die later in the season, it's played with just as much drama and residual emotional trauma as if there hadn't been a spare Chrichton. This is probably helped by the fact that they spent most of their time apart from each other. Unsurprisingly, though, they killed off the one who had progressed in his relationship with Aeryn and figured out the all-important control of wormholes.
  • An episode of Earth: Final Conflict had Liam split in two using a side-effect of quantum teleportation, although Street notes that the duplicate will be erased out of existence at some point in the future. For the rest of the episode, the duplicate assumes the role of Liam, while the original is in an induced coma to fool Sandoval and Zo'or. The duplicate is treated no differently than the original, but chooses to sacrifice himself in the end to save Renée. The duplicate is not mentioned after that.
  • Seen several times in the Stargate Verse. Once with Teal'c when he shot his Alternate Universe Doppelganger, saying that theirs was "the only reality of consequence.". Inverted with an alternate universe SG-1, who try to steal "our" universe's ZPM in order to save their reality. Also inverted with alternate Woolsey in "Vegas", who doesn't care that their failure to find a Wraith threatens other Earths. Additionally, Ba'al does this with his own clones at the end. Slightly subverted with the clone of Jack O'Neill, though his two other doubles weren't so lucky.
  • An episode of Sliders has the protagonists land In a World where human cloning is real, and clones are grown for spare parts. When the real Quinn is grabbed because the locals think he's a clone of this world's Quinn (who is in need of new eyes), his friends break into the cloning building and rescue him. Except they really took the clone, who was kept in a vegetative state. Then the clone starts developing a personality of his own. In the end, this world's Quinn chooses to remain blind rather than take the eyes of his clone. Acting For Three.


Radio

  • Happens in the CBC Radio program Canadia 2056. When the crew of the Canadia find a Negative Space Wedgie that leads to another universe, they meet themselves, who save them from being destroyed by said "anomaly", and send one of them over to help repair the damage. The Canadia's Captain and Max Anderson repay the Alternate Canadia by stealing their engines (theirs were destroyed escaping the anomaly), kidnapping the Alternate's Skip Conners so they could steal her body (so they could put their Skip's brain in it) and causing the American Warship accompanying them to destroy the alternate Canadia. They also accidentally kidnap one of the Alternate Canadia's Crew. The reason? The Alternate Crew must have been evil, because the Main Crew were not.


Tabletop RPG

  • The Clone spell in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, which created a magical duplicate of a living creature. If both the clone and the original existed at the same time, "the original person and the clone will each desire to do away with the other, for such an alter-ego is unbearable to both." This had exceptionally amusing results in the Forgotten Realms when unknown forces released all twenty or so of the archmage Manshoon's backup clones from stasis, resulting in the "Manshoon Wars."
  • Later Dungeons & Dragons editions deal away with the issues by making the clone effectively a dead body until the original dies. They also include the simulacrum spell that creates a duplicate (that can't learn or grow and is under perfect command to its creator) that could be used as an expendable distraction, impersonator and other uses. Due to being a spellcaster under your full control, if the creator has the "circle magic" class features it can burn all of its spell slots to boost the circle leader's casting to an insane level.
  • Played with on the April Fools special Penny Arcade Witchalok class, which has the following spell description:

Create two duplicates of yourself, and place them in adjacent squares. Each duplicate is a real person with his or her own hopes and dreams. These duplicates die at the start of your next turn.

  • Changeling: The Lost features the fetch, a clone made by the Gentry that abducted you out of stray detritus and animated by a piece of your soul. Once you break out of Faerie, you come back and find this thing living your life. The various changeling Courts are somewhat split on how to respond to fetches, but the general inclination seems to be, "Kill the impostor." Thing is, it's still something that acts human and, up until your return, thought it was you entirely. It could be a pawn of the Gentry... or it could be an innocent bystander. What you want to do with it is entirely your choice...
  • In Paranoia every character starts with six expendable clones. The Computer recognises the need to have backups in case of accidental loss or erasure. Six is generally insufficient to survive a session.
    • Depending on GM interpretation, the non-player clones are either stored in People Jars until needed, or actually holding down productive jobs in Alpha Complex society, which means they can get up to all sorts of things out there. One scenario had the clones actually accompany the players en masse (they were going into space to determine if "Mars the red planet" was a Commie enclave). Having five times as many NPCs as PCs hanging around messing with everything they can find is bad enough, but when they realize they can become prestigious Troubleshooters through Klingon Promotion...


Video Games

  • A scene during the finale of Planescape: Torment, when the protagonist's personality is shattered and has to convince the "other hims" to merge back with him so that he can continue his quest. One is particularly persistent about making you merge with him.
    • The Paranoid Incarnation, who was Exactly What It Says on the Tin, came to the conclusion that future incarnations (who were merely new personalities assumed through Amnesiac Dissonance) were actually evil spirits looking to steal his body. He therefore spent an inordinate amount of time laying traps for people who matched his physical description, which he would know to avoid but the future incarnations wouldn't. This in turn is a plot-point and also helps convince him to merge by speaking in a language only he and the player speak (if the correct quest for this is done) thus showing him the player is someone to trust because he and TPI are the same person.
  • Deconstructed in Tales of the Abyss. Luke, upon finding out he is a replica of the REAL Luke fon Fabre (now called Asch), begins to view his life as expendable because of his sub-human status. His friends however, don't accept such perspectives because they feel he is human based on the time and memories they share together.
  • Fire Emblem (the first US release) features this to almost Tear Jerker effect in the form of Nergal's Morphs.

Limstella [upon dying]: I am not human. This body and mind are constructs. Yes, as is this sorrow.

  • The clones of P.B. Winterbottom in The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom which are only there to get him his pie. They disappear once they're done.
  • The entire point behind the Replica in F.E.A.R. is that they're cloned soldiers of Paxton Fettel who can be quickly grown, trained, and deployed at a substantially reduced cost when compared with normal Private Military Contractors, and their training, conditioning, and psionic control turns them into fearless, highly disciplined and unswervingly loyal troops. This gets turned on its head when the psychic commander who controls the Replica goes bonkers and turns them against the corporation that created them.
  • EVE Online subverts (Averts?) this, as clones are a way to cheat death, but each one is equally valuable, and forgetting to keep them updated results in losing knowledge you've learned, requiring you to spend time re-learning it. Compounded by the fact that EVE trains skills in real time.
  • Played with in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. Big Bad Caulder/Stolos has created multiple clone offspring of himself, and seems to view them all as ultimately expendable. Isabella/Catleia is one of them, or to be specific she is the "backup" of one of his children who got killed in one of Caulder/Stolos' experiments. We later learn that Caulder/Stolos himself is, in fact, one of many identical clones the original Caulder/Stolos made of himself: The clones decided There Can Be Only One and killed each other, and the last surviving clone then killed the original.
  • Chrono Trigger pulls this off pretty well, with the option to have one from the start of the game. (It ends up being necessary to switch the real Crono with the clone later on in order to avoid disaster)


Web Comics

  • Inverted in Girl Genius. After Lucrezia gains the ability to upload her mind into multiple bodies, she doesn't mind dying as long as some copies remain elsewhere.
    • Also, she really doesn't want to kill/commit suicide in Agatha's body, as it will cause her to lose very valuable knowledge that she had gained, and that knowledge will not transfer to her other copies, nor back to the device that she uses to create the copies in the first place.
  • Subverted in El Goonish Shive: An Opposite Gender Clone of Elliot is made, who has all of his memories up until that point. It's initially believed Ellen's doomed to vanish after a certain amount of time, which causes her to panic and briefly try to be an Evil Twin. It's quickly discovered her existence is secure, and thanks to a few pulled strings, she is now living as Elliot's "twin sister". She has since become a character rather different from Elliot, and is completely accepted by everyone privy to the secret.
  • Gate-clones in Schlock Mercenary are treated as sentient individuals, and the lives of most sentient individuals are often treated pretty cavalierly if they aren't protagonists. They're definitely legally unique; the problem comes from the fact that gate-clones have all the memories of the original up to the cloning. For example, if a man kills someone, then gets gate-cloned, both clones are guilty of murder.
    • The trope is played dead straight by the F'Sherl-Ganni, who created the gate-clones; they made a practice of duplicating people, interrogating the duplicates, and then disposing of them. This practice killed about fifteen billion people every three hours and thirty-nine minutes, for hundreds of thousands of years. They murdered the equivalent of the entire galaxy's population several times over. Good thing they were just clones.
    • The Gavs are something of a special case. Given their sheer number (950 million to start with) a certain amount of attrition could be expected to random chance.
  • Averted in It's Walky! where Joyce has to face criminal charges after killing her duplicate.
  • Subverted near the climax of the "There But For The Grace" story arc in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob. Jerry fires his gun at Molly and Galatea, and it looks as if one of them (presumably Galatea, the clone) has been killed. But it turns out in the next strip that they're both fine; he was aiming at another target.
  • "Debated" in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal here
  • In a Parking Lot Is Full strip a rich man uses cloning technology to make endless copies of himself... Into hamburger. Self-cannibalism: The ultimate in decadence.
  • Grey Gerling, of Barfquestion fame, illustrated a story he wrote when he was ten. The protagonist, to escape from a monster he created, cloned himself and got the monster to attack the clone instead of himself. In the title of the page Grey mentions that he didn't see how morally wrong it was fourteen years ago.


Web Original

  • Pan can create copies of himself and others in Thalia's Musings. The copies are explicitly stated to be like shadows or projections in nature, incapable of feeling. He creates a copy of Echo to help her fake her death in front of Hera.
  • In Doppelganger Vincent accuses Victor as using him as this.


Western Animation

  • Used in Danny Phantom. No one, least of all Danny, seems particularly bothered when Danny destroys the less-human looking clones. Only the human-looking Danielle gains his sympathy. This is subverted, however, by the fact that Danny also doesn't seem to be bothered when he destroys the so-called "perfect clone" of himself, which would be, in theory, at least as "human" as his Opposite Gender Clone Dani. Vlad himself only considered the "perfect clone" human, even rejecting the only person who probably loved him. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.
    • Danny probably had no problem eliminating Vlad's prime clone because if it had been completed, it probably would've been his Evil Twin and after the trouble he had with Dark Danny, the last thing he probably wants is to deal with an evil version of himself.
  • In the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score, not only can you kill yourself in another time without messing up your life history, but there's actually a plot point that time duplicates are always doomed and will die in some random accident shortly after they are created. Note that "random" and "shortly" can extend up to "suicide" and "one thousand years later."
    • This feature of the Futurama verse shows up again in "The Late Phillip J. Fry." Fry, Bender, and the Professor travel so far into the future that the universe ends, a new Big Bang occurs, and a universe exactly identical to the one they left emerges. When they arrive in this new universe's "present day" their time machine accidentally lands on and kills their new universe equivalents. They don't seem at all upset about this.
  • Men in Black: The Series plays this for comedy value with the Quick-Clones, which are explicitly expendable clones, meant for short-term uses, and even if they aren't killed, melt into goo after a certain amount of time. They don't seem to mind their short lifespan, though; in one episode, a group of them play basketball after their job was done, saying that their lifespan is too short to worry about much.
  • In one of the Simpsons Halloween specials, Homer buys a hammock that creates clones of him, except lacking belly buttons. Initially he uses them to help him do chores around the house, but eventually they get out of hand and he drives them to a field and abandons them, after shooting a few. In the end, all but one of the Homers go off a cliff after a giant donut and are killed. Marge and the remaining Homer are relaxing in bed when she discovers... he doesn't have a belly button!! Marge: "Then the real Homer was..." Clone Homer: "First off cliff."
  • An episode of Æon Flux has Æon captured and her DNA used to make clones for Travis Goodchild. The initial clone escapes and trades places with the real Æon. Inverted at the end of the episode, when the real Æon is killed and the clone becomes the show's new protagonist.
  • The Republic troopers from Star Wars: The Clone Wars are treated as pretty much expendable, and they know it. You can tell who is supposed to be a good guy and who is supposed to be a jerk based on who treats them as expendable or not.
  • In Centaurworld the centaurs of the main herd sometimes shoot tiny versions of themselves. In "The Rift: Part 1" they run around panicking and fall off a floor and it's not clear how far their fall is and aren't seen again.

Real Life

  • This is one of the philosophical/moral quandaries behind the ethics of cloning, particularly the idea of "growing" full-body people for harvesting organs that are identical matches.
    • This is an old-fashioned fear even today, since we already know that cloned organs can be grown in pigs or sheep instead of human bodies, and we aren't far from growing at least some organs in vitro, as well.
  • Averted with identical twins. While they are genetically identical, neither is considered remotely expendable. It's only in fiction that twins are treated as expendable.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Expendable_Clone?oldid=1950252"