EDA104 - Immortal Beloved

This episode's guest star is Ian MacNeice, best-known as Winston Churchill to Matt Smith's Doctor. He plays Zeus in a pseudo-Ancient Greek culture where a ship of human colonists have been using a combination of cloning and mind transfer to gain immortality.

The Doctor and Lucie land the TARDIS just in time to stop star-crossed lovers from diving off a cliff together. Then they discover the lovers are clones of the colony's leaders, raised until maturity when their minds are swapped with their dying older selves. But the mind transfer machine, which the Doctor says has been outlawed, is breaking down, and Zeus wants the Doctor to fix it.

This is where the EDA really finds its feet. The philisophical implications of cloning are pushed into uncomfortable new territory as the clones are raised like their originators' children, and even develop similar personalities and romantic interests, until they are forced to swap their health and youth for the dying bodies of their so-called parents.

A clever story with several good performances and plenty of conflicting interests makes this the second-best episode of series 1, just behind the two-part finale, Human Resources.