Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-6032121-20181107215212/@comment-188432-20181107235841

Look, let's be honest. This all 100% speculation. I'm not aware of any sort of cloning process being discussed in any story.

Going from model to model could have happened any number of ways, as anyone versed in rescuing data from one hard drive to another will attest.

It's complicated, I think, by what the K9 series from Australia shows us, so the M2 "regeneration" is worth exploring, rather than just skipping over as a "done deal".

But did the K9 Mark II built by the Fourth Doctor have the memories of Mark I, making him a sort of clone? I think the best answer is that there are a few points where the MI and MII may have had reasonably similar memories, but we'll probably never know if the MII actually started as a clone.

Nevertheless, the end of The Invasion of Time, where the MII's box is revealed is the point at which there's probably the highest chance of cloning.

One can imagine — though, again, it was never said — that the Doctor hooks the new model into the TARDIS console, downloads the OS, the settings, and the data from the Great Gallifreyan Cloud, and what emerges is basically just the MI at the point he leaves with Leela.

But we don't know any of that.

It's also possible that certain events in Gallifrey could be construed as MI and MII synching up.

So maybe at a much later date, the talks John Leeson has with himself in that audio series can be read as the two units catching up fully. For sure, they synch up over certain events happening in those audios. But I don't think we ever get anything as clear as, "Hey, let's 100% synch up now."

We've also gotta remember that K9 was always a kinda hobby project, a bespoke computer. Backup functionality could well have been rudimentary, since mass production was never a goal.

That's why I think the Mark I to Mark 2 "regeneration" for the AUS kids' show is instructive to look at. It's pretty bad what happens to the unit. Sure there's an upgrade that lets him fly. But it's shown to be a reboot and virtually complete memory wipe. As that series goes, there's a kind of implied (or maybe even directly-stated) "veil" which prevents the more modern unit from quite remembering what happened to the Mark I. Of course, this is because there are behind-the-scenes copyright issues standing in the way of the M2 remembering the BBC adventures of the MI, but it is at least fairly explicit that the M2 doesn't remember the MI's life very much. So I think we can definitely say the M2 doesn't know anything about the MII, and that it's entirely possible there's no particular mechanism for passing on memories after a reconstructive event.

Getting back to the MI/MII question, I think the implications of all this is that they're probably not exact clones. They could be, but on balance there seems, to me, more which argues against that. And for sure, there are rather more narrative points at which they must have unequal memories than there are ones where they're synched up.

I mean, by the time you get to State of Decay, the MII and MI are definitely no longer clones of each other.

So the answer generally is "no".

And did Mark III have the memories of either Mark I or Mark II? He seems to care a lot about the Doctor in School Reunion (and vice-versa) in a way that suggests to me that he did, considering that otherwise, we don't know of any Doctor/Mark III adventures before he was gifted to Sarah Jane. Yeah, the implication of not only the Doctor Who Annual 1982 stories with Adric that SarahJaneFan mentioned, but also the very earliest Fourth Doctor comic stories in DWM, is that the Fourth Doctor is travelling with the Mark III.

That K9 must be making new memories distinct from the recently-departed MII, so, again, it's hard to see how they'd have the same memories. But could the MIII start with some of the memories of the MII? Sure, but I'm pretty sure it's undocumented.

If only there were a story where someone asked the MIII/IV about tennis, we might have a better grip on things ...