User Reviews

Clever story about the consequences of cloning (but by episode end, it doesn't *condemn* cloning, finding an answer to a difficult situation that didn't seem to have one that would end well) has the lovely Sherilyn Fenn as the brilliant wife of fellow scientist, Peter Outerbridge, a married team who have perfected the technology that is successfully able to clone organs. But they are visionaries and believe they can clone humans and actually have the technology to "neural map" the brain, "copying" the intellect, memories, and feelings of a person, storing them into a program. Fenn and Outerbridge present their work to the man behind the company that funds them. The federal government has banned the cloning of human bodies or neural mapping so their boss is insistent that the married couple cease and desist any sort of plans to go forward. Fenn, however, urges Outerbridge to neural map her before their work could be undermined by possible outside sources. The process suffers a malfunction which puts Fenn into a coma, leaving Outerbridge emotionally devastated. He decides, when all doc evals tell him she'll never wake up, to clone the body of Fenn, "implanting" his wife's neural memory into the second version. When Fenn II awakens, it is as if his wife had never left…that is until the first Fenn wakes back up! Two Fenns are always better than one, in my opinion. The dilemma of what to do about the clone, when the original returns from a coma, is central to the episode's success. If you decide to clone your beloved and provide that new body with the very personality and brain power so near and dear to you before the original is dead, there's room for disaster. By the end of the episode, both Fenn the original and copy vie for the man they love. One moment Outerbridge considers even putting the comatose wife to sleep after the copy is essentially identical in almost every way to her. Then towards the end, husband and wife consider "updating" the copy so she is basically someone else. Identity and holding onto it, and the twist on how they all come to a solution (the "a-ha" moment I figured out before it happened) after plenty of contemplation and concern fittingly complements the performances (Fenn playing two characters and giving both slight differences, making them individual despite being "cut from the same cloth" is a pleasure to watch) and takes the provocative/controversial subject of cloning, developing it into a thought-provoking question of how far should science truly go.