Headscratchers / Clone High

• How can Gandhi have ADD if the original didn't?
  • Rule of Funny?
  • Who says Gandhi didn't? I'm sure they didn't exactly have the best diagnostic psychiatrist in Late 1800s India.
    • Also maybe this takes place in an Alternate Timeline where the historical Gandhi had ADD. Fictional world, own rules.
  • Something went wrong in the cloning?
  • He's said himself that the pressure of being a famous peacemaker reincarnate (Or cloned, or whatever...) has kinda screwed with him. The original might have had a light case, combined with cloning mutations, and the pressure might have magnified it.
  • Diathesis-Stress Model. Look it up.
  • Clones aren't exact copies of their "originals." It's as if a child is born, but the cloned person is both his/her parents. He/she may look and act a lot like the original, but they are a different person entirely.
  • And then we get into the whole Nature/Nurture debate, not to mention that the causes of ADD/ADHD aren't well known...
  • I prefer to think that the personalities of the clones are carry-overs of their original counter-parts majorly tweaked by knowing who they once were. Take this for example: Gandhi has A.D.D. because the original Gandhi was a patient, pacifist peace-maker. Naturally, because Gandhi can't live up to his original self, his personality gave into aspects of A.D.D. to counter his former life's restraint and passive nature.
• How did the government get the DNA from Ghengis Khan, Gandhi, Cleopatra, etc?
  • Time travel, their history is different, or people saved their DNA in the same fashion that people save celebrity locks of hair?
  • Or it could be the DNA of people who looked like the historical rendition of him. They're passing them off as the real things. Possibly explaining the Just Bugs Me above.
    • And would explain how they cloned Jesus.
    • Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they indeed DID clone Hitler.
    • Wait, they DID! Check the episode "Tears of a Clone".
  • How did they get the DNA from Joan of Arc? How do you collect DNA of someone who was burned (very meticulously) to ashes? Ashes, which were then scattered into Seine.
    • Maybe in this universe, they found out that one of those gross religious body part relics was real? Like, maybe her teeth or something survived the fire and were preserved?
• Were the clones aware that they were part of a plan to take over the world? Did they care?
  • I'm pretty sure they were never made aware. The most they ever seemed to be aware of was that they were clones.
  • On that topic, why use clones of famous historical figures to take over the world? I could see how Genghis Khan or Hitler could be useful, but Elvis? Vincent van Gogh? Gandhi? GESH had the right idea with the genetically engineered school of tiny Aryan soldiers if world domination was the goal. Then again, it could have been Scudsworth's suggestion, considering his ulterior motives.
    • Scudworth's idea involved turning the high school into a historical figure themed amusement park. It may be that the board of shadowy figures intended to use the famous leaders and strategists minds to shape some kind of perfect scheme together.
    • Well, sure, but... Gandhi. Not the person I'd clone for world domination.
    • Maybe they play a lot of Civ? Gandhi sure loves his nukes.
• Why would you just pick random historical figures to make an army? Why not just make clones out of a single person?
  • GESH was already doing that. The Secret Board of Shadowy Figures has its hands in a lot of pies, so to speak.
  • My guess is that they ended up like Vault-Tec from Fallout, a few legitimate projects that snowballed into insanity. Originally, it was probably just trying to perfect human cloning, then they thought "why not clone extraordinary people?" Eventually, they just started grabbing any famous DNA they could get their hands on because it'd be cool and then had to try and justify their work.
  • They plan to take over the world, right? Why wouldn't they need to have politicians, military officials, scientists, inventors, artists (or all types), and philosophers to build a functioning society?
• Isn't it really weird on the government's part to, y'know, allow the clones to run out in the open world, get put into foster families, and overall live normal lives as teens like nothing is wrong? It would make a lot more sense for a massive government project like cloning historical figures and training them to be super-soldiers to be kept classified from the public and completely under the wraps, but here they are allowing them to expose themselves to the world, which would risk exposing the government's plan because no doubt someone saw the clone of Hitler and wondered why on Earth someone would want to clone him. Not to mention the sheer fact that the clones are far from being fit for the military (Genghis Khan is as dumb as a brick, Cleo and JFK only care about popularity and sex, Abe is a lanky pathetic dweeb, Joan is angst-ridden, and Gandhi is, well, Gandhi) which can easily be attributed to the environments they grew up, pressure of living up to their cloneparents, and overall typical teen problems when they really would've been much better fit for soldier-work had they been trained from an early age for it. Yes, it definitely wouldn't be humane to keep them locked up in prisons away from the outside world, throw them in a perpetual boot camp, and train them as Child Soldiers, but Scudworth and the Secret Board of Shadowy Figures have been shown to not necessarily be the most moral of people, and you can't really expect yourself to overthrow the Earth in the friendliest way possible.
  • Perhaps whoever's in charge of the cloning project is either really incompetent or secretly trying to sabotage the government's plans.
• Why do some clones actually look like teenagers, while others look like old men? Really, it’s hard to buy Thomas Edison’s clone being 16 when he has grey hair and wrinkles, or Moses’ when he has a long grey beard. If it’s to make them more identifiable, they could’ve just been teachers like Eleanor Roosevelt.
  • It's possible that the cloning process gave the older-looking teenage clones defective genes that caused them to age faster.
• Why, oh why, did they have to kill Toots in season two? He was a disabled, black, elderly single father, and one of the few foster parents who actually had a decent relationship with his clone child. If anything, they could have just toned down the blind jokes to make him fit the new tone of the series, instead of raising implications by killing him offscreen and handing Joan off to a new character.
  • He WAS old and Joan was frozen for 20 years. Idk if they killed him off because of the blind jokes being distasteful or because pairing Joan up to be Candide's foster kid likely tied into the latter's plan to make the clones world leaders.
    • Indeed, it's implied that Candide had him killed for that very reason.
• Okay, so the meta reason Ghandi didn't survive in the revived era is pretty well known. But what's the in universe reason he wasn't defrosted? They reference him being in the freezer several times, so everyone knows he's still there, but Candice just...doesn't want to unfreeze him? It's not like he's the most deplorable cloens around with the Bleacher Creatures existing. I thought they were intending to make an actual mystery out of this, but there doesn't seem to be even an attempt at an in universe explanation.
• Why is Cleo's foster mother (and very, very briefly seen one of JFK's foster dads) the same age as everyone else? Well, it's obviously because cartoon. But does anyone else feel like there was some lost potential with the twenty year time skip in the stuff like this? It seems like a complete non issue after the first two episodes. Cleo's foster mother being just as much as a train wreck but now also twenty years older would have been great for the jokes they were going there. Both her patheticness and Cleo's own callousness.