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Doctor Who: Is The Doctor Still The Doctor? Steven Moffat on Key Theme

Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat on the recurring theme of people's consciousness and bodies being copied after death, and if they're the same.

Is Steven Moffat done with Doctor Who after this year's Christmas special, "Joy to the World"? We don't know, and neither does he. It depends on how busy he is and whether he gets invited to write for the series again. One thing he doesn't run out of is ideas, and there's one he's become particularly interested in: the human consciousness and whether it can continue after death.

The concept goes all the way back to Moffat's 2008 two-parter "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead," where the library housed a virtual reality afterlife where Donna and eventually River Song ended up after her death. Recently, in "Boom!" and "Joy to the World," Moffat portrayed people's consciousness uploaded digitally to an AI after their deaths, and the question arose about whether that was still them or a copy.

'With Al everywhere now," Moffat mused to Doctor Who Magazine. "It's mostly about memory. We have no idea what a 'living consciousness' is. No one has come up with a scientific definition for that at all. No one even has a theory, really. So, the only thing of which we are truly and definitely aware is something we cannot explain. If a living consciousness had your exact memory, it would be indistinguishable from you."

Is The Doctor Dead? Are The Current Ones Copies?

"We had a similar jokey argument about whether the Doctor is still the Doctor after "Heaven Sent,"" Moffat said. "If you take the idea that teleportation means that you're not really the same person when you come out the other end, you're just another arrangement of atoms that think they're you. But, of course, the first time the Doctor teleported in the series was in "The Keys of Marinus"! So, if you take the idea that teleportation simply creates a copy of the original, he's not been the 'original' Doctor since 1964. What are any of us, apart from an arrangement of atoms?" he asks. "You're not even an arrangement of the same atoms that you used to be! All atoms are identical. So, if you're arranged from a different set of atoms, with your memories, that's just another you!"

As Moffat pondered that existential question, he concluded that an exact copy of a person with their memories and personality would still be the same person. That includes The Doctor, Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie), and River Song.

"I think they are the originals," he continued. "What do you mean by 'originals'? You are the pattern, not the clay. There are no living atoms — but you are made exclusively of atoms! So, making you out of another set of atoms just means there's another you, then. There was a line we cut from Forest of the Dead where Donna says, 'Am I still the same me?' And the Doctor says, 'You are the fire, not the fuel.' So, the formation matters, but the atoms themselves don't. We've all done this anyway throughout our lives. You used to look different, sound different, and behave differently. The only thing that connects you to your 10-year-old self is a fairly tenuous line of memory. How are you the same as the baby version of yourself? You'd have more in common with the duplicate that I can make in my special human photocopier than you would with the baby version of yourself."

This led to Moffat seeming to hint that he was not done with Doctor Who just yet.

"I'll probably end up developing it even more for Doctor Who because all of my sci-fi ideas go into Doctor Who."

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