re: I have a question about The Prestige

The part that confused me a little was who was the clone and who was the original. The scene where Angier was first testing it in his theater, he puts the gun nearby, starts the machine, and waits for his clone to show up......then shoots him. He installed a trap door for the "original" to fall down and be drowned. So it stands to reason that if you were stepping on the platform, you knew you were drowning. Well, the scene at the end with Fallon, Angier talks about the courage it took to the do the trip, not knowing whether you'd end up in the tank or off in the background. Guess that's a long and winded debate about the consciousness of clone, but I assumed that every night you did the trick, you were going to die an agonizing death.