Surprisingly, it’s possible to take “I Cloned My Pet 2” seriously for almost its entire length. Right up until the moment when one pet owner consults a medium to find out her dead dog’s opinion on whether she should clone him.


The show, Monday on TLC, is a follow-up to an installment broadcast in January. Three cases occupy the hour: a Florida couple, Edgar and Nina Otto, who had their Labrador retriever cloned; a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon, Dr. George Semel, who wants his Chihuahua back; and a Los Angeles woman named Myra who was so fond of a basenji named Kabuki that she saved his blankets and such in hermetically sealed bags.


The cloning is done by a South Korean laboratory and, we’re told, usually costs $50,000 to $100,000. (The Ottos, whose dog Lancelot was cloned in 2008 in a widely publicized case, won an auction for the service with a $155,000 bid.) The show is annoyingly vague on what exactly the pet owner gets. Is it an eerie reanimation of the earlier animal, or a dog that merely looks like the progenitor, or something in between?


“Yes, it is the same dog,” Ms. Otto says definitively. “Yes, it is the same personality. Yes, we got more than we ever bargained for, and we were thrilled to death.” But later Mr. Otto confides: “Maybe we’ve set ourselves up wanting it to be the same dog, and it probably is not the same dog. Just leave us alone in our beliefs; we’ll be happier.”


The show tries to make these stories more about the pet owners than about the cloning. Neither of the two owners who are still contemplating the procedure seems to have thought through how it might be paid for, which makes you wonder how much of the motivation was simply to get on television.


Dr. Semel, whose pet was killed by a Rottweiler, tries some silly gimmicks to raise money, including having a dreadful song about cloning recorded, hoping for a viral hit. And Myra, whose last name is not given, has a boyfriend issue in addition to the financial one: Would the return of Kabuki, who died of cancer, interfere with a new relationship she has begun?


The medium is able to extract some definitive and remarkably articulate input from the departed Kabuki, telling Myra, “He’s a pretty deep dog over there on the other side.”


I Cloned My Pet 2


TLC, Monday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.


Produced by CicadaBellwether for TLC.