Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-6032121-20181107215212/@comment-6032121-20181108105521

Thanks for the in-depth answer!

I think the use of the word "regeneration" to talk about Mark I —> Mark 2 is pretty significative of the authorial intent that it still be the K9, going from one face and personality to another rather like the Doctor. Mark 2's “veil” was the result of copyright constraints, and largely comparable to a robotic version of Eight's post-regeneration amnesia, I believe.

But concerning Mark III — yeah, yeah, I know, for us all media have equal weight, and I'm not disputing the validity of the comics. But I think it's important not to get carried away and remember that in most cases the production team of the RTD series really didn't try to sync up to prose and comics. I doubt they even knew about K9 Mark III being in those early Fourth Doctor comics. So that would make

And I never proposed that they would all be "synched up" — the same mind across all bodies; rather, I wondered if each new one got the memory of the others before beginning to diverge… making Mark II and Mark 2 kind of like the Eleventh Doctor vs. the Metacrisis Tenth, if you will.

The best way to get a firm answer would be to see if K9 Mark II ever refers to the actions of Mark I in the first person, or Mark III to the actions of Mark II.

Regardless, I think we really ought to clarify all this on the K9 page. The popular perception is that K9 is just one robot across several regenerations, no different from the TARDIS, and throwing in Mark 2 in the same list as Mark III as if they were equally distinct is just confusing matter. A sentence towards the beginning ("though some models of K9 were 'regenerations' of a previous model, whether all K9s could be considered a single continuous individual was heavily disputed"? something like that) could help.