10 Doctor Who Fan Theories That Became Fact

Heaven Sent is one of those episodes that leaves audiences with just the right amount of ambiguity.

The Twelfth Doctor is trapped inside a confession dial by the Time Lords, caught in a loop, dying over and over and over again, and ‘respawning’ after each death. It's a gripping idea that made for an all-timer episode, but something that isn't made clear is whether or not the ‘real’ Doctor was the first one to die, making every subsequent version of him a clone of the original.

Given the lack of information on how the teleport machine actually works, fans have theorised that this is the case, while the Doctor’s comment that he is "Burning the old me to make a new one", would seem to indicate that each version of the Doctor should indeed be considered a new, different version of the character, rather than the original being teleported and reconstructed.

When writer Steven Moffat joined Twitter for a watchalong of the episode, this topic was bound to come up, and sure enough, it did. In response, Moffat confirmed the clone theory by referring back to a similar event from a 1964 William Hartnell serial. He said:

"[The Doctor] first teleported in The Keys of Marinus – he’s been a copy since then – deal with it, kid."

The Keys of Marinus sees the First Doctor and his companions use travel dials to teleport around. It’s up for debate whether or not this creates a clone of the Doctor or just moves the original, but the fact that Moffat didn’t deny the Heaven Sent theory indicates that in his opinion at least, the Doctor has been a copy since Series 9 – if not decades earlier.

Like Russell T Davies making his own childhood head canon official, we could even view this as Moffat deliberately making the Doctor a clone in Heaven Sent due to his belief that The Keys of Marinus had done exactly that decades prior!