“Doctor Who” Season 15 Prepares a Mel Bush Mystery

About the.

“Leave the girl, it’s the man I want.”

Constantinople. Coruscant. Rome. Colin Baker – they were all looted. When Doctor Who was renewed by the BBC for Season 24 on the condition that Baker was fired. Baker later demonstrated his range and skill in the role for Big Finish audios, but in 1986 he was made a scapegoat. The Sixth Doctor regenerated in the first scene of Season 24, in the opening credits sequence of Time and the Rani. This meant that Bonnie Langford would appear alongside a new Doctor and we would not see her meet the Sixth Doctor.

With a new writer looking to take the show in a different direction, the character of Mel – who, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly tightly defined – had fallen out of favor, and Langford fulfilled her contract without any character development, playing the role as the script demanded. Fans didn’t like the character and couldn’t always separate the actress from the role. Bonnie Langford had been hired to play a computer programmer and fitness fanatic from Pease Pottage who we never saw in Pease Pottage or doing computer programming, in the style of someone played by Bonnie Langford in the 1980s. Which, it has to be said, she did. So it seems unfair to criticize her for doing exactly what she was hired to do.

Several writers (most notably Gary Russell and Craig Hinton) attempted to tell Mel’s backstory in various spin-off media. These stories, in some cases decades apart, contradict each other. Backstories include:

• At the age of 18 months, Mel accidentally killed her two-year-old sister Anabel. Mel repressed the memory of the death, while her family decided to simply hide all photos of Anabel and never speak of it again.
• After leaving school, Mel got a job at a nature reserve in Scotland and, after being attacked by an owl, stayed in the office most of the time and discovered her affinity for computers.
• Mel was kidnapped by Adam Mitchell, the short-lived companion from the first series who worked with the Master in the 1980s before being rescued by the first eleven Doctors and a shapeshifter in the form of a penguin.
• While Mel and the Doctor were visiting the planet Oxyveguramosa, the Master kidnapped her and brought her to the Doctor’s trial so that she could testify (as described in parts 13 – 14 of The trial of a Time Lord) whereupon the past version of the Doctor (from Mel’s perspective) took Mel back to Pease Pottage so that the version of the Doctor on Oxyveguramosa could pick her up, and then another version of Mel and a third version of the Doctor turn around and – just watch, listen The wrong doctors if you don’t follow this, okay?

While Mel met the Doctor on television in 1987 at the end of Dragon Fireto go on adventures with the intergalactic conman Sabalom Glitz. And why not. She then returned for a cameo appearance in The power of the doctor, and then in 2023 The giggle She confirmed how she had returned to Earth and that she was an orphan with no ties.

Mel said she was an orphan, but Davies’ comment that her family line is a big secret suggests we’ll find out who her parents were (and whether they dramatically hinted at something significant). We may see three Doctor Who Series in a row in which a character meets his long lost mother figure.