** this review contains spoilers **
We all have the vices of our virtues, and medical doctors tend to objectify human beings. Slowly, they may be making the world a de facto unpaid study.
Skye Weston (Elizabeth Perkins) backtracks in the watchable 1997 TV-movie Cloned (dvd out-of-print but available). She and husband
Rick (Bradley Whitford) lost their son a year ago. As they debate trying again, she glimpses her boy in a shopping district.
(The moment of uncanny echoes Duplicates, a 1992
TV-movie with Gregory Harrison and Kim Greist). A smart professional, Skye sleuths, finding
evidence of multiple women with identical sons. She posts to the (primitive) Internet for
help, and when she finds a slew of responses, it remains chilling, despite dial-up
graphics.
Cloned was an NBC film but could pass for Lifetime. As Cascades Gothic, its plot is less involved than a typical X-Files, which may alienate fans. Still, the movie's frank with the horror of a woman betrayed when most vulnerable, as well as the difficulty in preventing (the return of) human commodification. Cloned was made by veterans of TV-movies, not speculative fiction; perhaps they confused sci-fi with comic book storytelling. If so, their muckraker lacks the scope and visual interest of the latter.
Still, it's grounded by an impressive Perkins, a star of the era (Big, The Flintstones). Her Skye is stuck in “Anger” stage, though she's not just a scorned mother: the rage issues, we feel, go back. She snaps to See-the-manager mode, her comments more offensive than necessary, as Rick contains the damage. She's actually refreshing, and the film's passive community doesn’t deserve better. Cloned wasn't a pilot (going by Fraser Sherman's Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan), but this Skye may've supported another transit.
Not all's dire: Enrico Colantoni (Just Shoot Me, Veronica Mars) is amusing as security guard Rinker, the cheerfully-evil hired-muscle. (Note the production felt compelled to also cast a good bald man, a federal agent.) Roger Cross, following Ernie Hudson and Joe Morton as “black sci-fi guy," is another security guard, Tina Lifford a white-coated tech, and Scott Paulin the bottom-line shark.
Cloned followed buzz about Dolly the cloned sheep, named for Dolly Parton, as modern priests appropriated celebrity to sell vexatious fertility. Similarly, the villains in Cloned aren’t mad scientists but aggressive capitalists. In a scene evoking the same year's Alien: Resurrection, it’s revealed cloning is practice for the real business, growing replacement organs (the alarm-cycle broadens to The Island of Dr. Moreau/1996, Dirty Pretty Things/2002, and Repo Men/2010). When the sellout fertility expert, Dr. Kozak (Alan Rosenberg), claims ends justify means, Skye fires back his own words: “First, do no harm.”