I know this is being discussed in the Hari's uploaded consciousness thread, but I thought I'd separate it out....
I can't make any sense of the replacement Cleons pointed out by Brother Dawn. Exactly how does this work? So, they grow Cleons that are each a certain year old from, what? Age 1 to Age 90? and freeze dry each of those 90 Cleons? So that, just in case a Cleon accidentally dies or proves to be a failure they can replace him, no matter the age?
Am I understanding that's how this works?
If I've got it right, then there's this warehouse of Cleons and they can just implant the right memories and mind into the one they need. SO, Problem with Brother Dawn? No problem. Erase damaged Brother Dawn, Roll out Brother Dawn age 17, download the saved mind into him and he's ready to go. No interruption in service.
Now, someone said that these can't be as good as the "grown from birth" types...but that makes no sense. If you're going to replace Brother Dawn with freeze-dried Brother Dawn then he has to be AS GOOD as one grown from birth. OTHERWISE you're going to end up with an inferior Brother Day on the throne and running the Empire! 😱 I presume that whoever created this wacky plan made darn sure that this freeze-dried replacement would be as good as the grown-from-birth sort. I mean, you already got rid of the "grown from birth" Brother Dawn because he wasn't satisfactory. You don't want a problem with the him once he becomes all-powerful Brother Day and is giving orders to, say, firebomb planets.
Which brings us to the question...Why in the world are are the Cleons bothering to bring up future emperors from birth? You could skip all those years of raising a kid, and risking that he'll go wrong or die in an accident, and just bring out the freeze-dried one. Age, whatever, ready to be and do whatever Brother Dawn does when he's of an age to share rulership (does he do anything?).
I mean, if the aim is to have the exact same Cleons over and over again, as close to the original as possible, why risk variants? Just use the freeze-dried ones.
Can anyone explain why they need to do the whole life cycle thing with the baby and the nanny and the life lessons all that when they've got at least 90 Cleons waiting to be used in the Imperial Warehouse?
I think you know the answer ... it's all a hokey construct and doesn't take into account that ppl learn, even at the age of 90, despite knowing that they're in their final decade of life.
The whole preserved Emperor is about maintaining some sort of ages 40 to 70 optimization strategy so that the thoughts and ideologies of the Emperor of those decades stay constant forever.
I would imagine that even Cleon the 1st saw that this was a mediocre idea versus giving him artificial organs, cybernetic implants, and a massive multi-parallel servers, in some super cloud formation, to keep his consciousness going so that he could learn and grow forever.
In other words, the present Cleon would in fact be a type of 400 year old man who's seen it all, much like Ito.
But of course, this is a "JJ Abrams" type of show and thus, anything goes even if it doesn't make sense.