I couldn't help thinking that the issues raised (apart from the obvious, regarding cloning someone to be a replacement) weren't limited to them. The whole problem of facing death, being unable to get a deferral, even if you feel you should get one, in order to spend a few more precious years with the person you love, if only you could prove it -- I cannot help feel that that applies to us as well. He kept bringing up universal problems, but by giving them less time (thereby compressing it, perhaps, and giving it more intensity) and placing them under the overhanging point of someone choosing that they should die, he gave them a different tenor.

Of course this raising of universal issues in turn only served to highlight that they are humans. Which makes it all worse.