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Warning: This article contains moderate spoilers for Doctor Who: “The Giggle.”
Doctor Who‘s trilogy of 60th anniversary specials ended in suitably gonzo fashion with “The Giggle,” an episode that squeezed in a recap of the past decade of the series as performed by puppets, Neil Patrick Harris dancing to the Spice Girls while playing a classic villain who used to look like Batman’s butler, and — oh, yes — the debut of Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor. Among all that, the episode also found room to reunite the Time Lord with one of his old friends.
Specifically, Bonnie Langford returned to the series to team up with David Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor, Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble, and the forces of U.N.I.T. to defeat Harris’ Toymaker. The Doctor greeted Langford’s character as an old friend and much was made of her extreme intelligence and history as a time and space traveler. But, wait, has the actress been in modern Who before, and what role did she play in the classic series?
Bonnie Langford’s Doctor Who return finally fixes an egregious 1980s oversight
Bonnie Langford — a prolific screen actress as well as an accomplished West End and Broadway performer — plays Melanie Bush in Doctor Who. She first appeared in the series in 1986’s “The Trial of a Time Lord,” an epic 14-part storyline, opposite Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor before sticking around for Sylvester McCoy’s first season as the Seventh Doctor in 1987.
OK, here’s the thing about Mel — she’s tragically perhaps the most underwritten and poorly conceived companion in all of classic Doctor Who. Due to the timey-wimey nature of the “Trial” plot, Mel is actually plucked from the Doctor’s future timestream… but at the end of the story, she simply flies off in the TARDIS with the Time Lord, meaning we never get to find out how they actually meet!
Despite Langford’s spirited portrayal, she was generally only called upon to scream very loudly at poorly made monsters and say things like “Watch out, Doctor!” What little characterization she did receive conflicted with itself — in one episode, we’re told she’s a computer programmer, but this rather sedentary job clashes with her frequent obsession with fitness (she often tries to get the Doctor to exercise and work out more).
In her final story, “Dragonfire,” Mel is suddenly shipped off to make way for new companion Ace (Sophie Aldred), when she decides to go traveling the universe with cosmic conman Sabalom Glitz instead. At least her final scene with McCoy’s Doctor is beautifully written and played and finally makes us believe in a firm friendship between the two characters.
This was the last we saw of Mel, until 2022. In Jodie Whittaker’s final episode, “The Power of the Doctor,” Aldred’s Ace returned and at the end of the special we got to see a former companion support group attended by many familiar faces from the classic series, including a brief cameo from Langford. This was kind of odd as, the last we knew, Mel was still in outer space.
In “The Giggle,” however, Mel’s complicated Doctor Who history is finally made sense of in a way that at long last makes her a much more fully rounded character. We learn that she traveled with Glitz until his death at the age of 101. She then made her way back to Earth only to find that she had no one left to miss her, as her mother had died. Mel’s now a member of U.N.I.T., where she shows off her tech skills. By the end of the episode, Mel has finally found a new family with Donna and the Temple-Nobles.
Bonnie Langford is known to be returning in a recurring role for 2024’s Doctor Who season 14, so we can likely expect much more fleshing out of this traditionally terribly treated character. It’s about time… literally.