You may be looking for Mel from an alternate timeline.

Melanie Jane "Mel" Bush, BSc (Hons) was a computer programmer and companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors.

She hailed from Pease Pottage, West Sussex, at the turn of the 21st century. (PROSE: Business Unusual; AUDIO: Catch-1782, The One Doctor, The Juggernauts) Although she was present for the Doctor's sixth regeneration, she did not witness it, as she was unconscious at the time after being exposed to a latent radiation which only knocked her out, but was fatal to Time Lords. As a result, the presence of a new incarnation of the Doctor confused her and made it hard to adjust to the differences in his appearance and personality.

She had a temporally complex relationship with the Doctor. She met the Doctor in an order different than he met her, as Charley Pollard and River Song later would. Eventually, however, their timelines synchronised, and she had a more-or-less linear relationship to the Doctor, starting in the later period of his sixth incarnation. Her temporal relationship to the Seventh Doctor was considerably more straightforward and linear.

Biography Edit

Because Mel's timeline was confused with respect to the Doctor, it was difficult to state with authority the order in which events happened to her.

Before the Doctor Edit

Melanie Bush was born to Alan and Christine Bush on 22 July 1964. She had an older sister named Anabel, whose death she accidentally caused when Anabel was three years old. Mel's original home was at 8 Gosling Street in Croxdale. After her sister Anabel's death, her parents moved south to separate themselves from the tragedy. (PROSE: Spiral Scratch)

As a child, Mel took dancing lessons from a woman named Miss Fairs. She enjoyed the music of ABBA and the Bee Gees. (PROSE: Business Unusual)

At the age of eight, Mel committed the names of 150 different species of dinosaur to memory. (AUDIO: The Wrong Doctors)

Mel had read the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes by the age of nine. (AUDIO: Unregenerate!)

She and her parents once walked through deep snow to their village hall whilst carrying all the props and costumes for a show for pensioners. (AUDIO: The One Doctor)

While at primary school, she made a replica of Mount Vesuvius out of papier mâché. She would later witness its eruption on 24 August 79 and the consequent destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii. (AUDIO: The Fires of Vulcan)

Melanie had a keen interest in science from a very young age. Her uncle, Dr John Hallam, was deeply influential to this childhood obsession, and she credited him with her later academic success at a London university. In 2003, Hallam told his colleague, Professor David Munro, that Mel was "very gifted" with computers. (AUDIO: Catch-1782) As a consequence of her education, she was adept in the human computer languages of BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN. (AUDIO: The Juggernauts)

At the time of her initial encounter with the Sixth Doctor, she was working at a summer job with Brighton Information Technologies, a prerequisite for a full-time job with ACL Services, Ltd.

Her home address as an adult was 36 Downview Crescent in Pease Pottage. (PROSE: Business Unusual) She regularly used this address as a backdoor when writing code. For instance, she used it to override programming on the Juggernauts. (AUDIO: The Juggernauts)

Though a young career woman at the time that she travelled with the Doctor, she once told Evelyn Smythe that she had never been in love. (AUDIO: Thicker Than Water)

She took some combat training in the Pease Pottage community hall. (AUDIO: Terror of the Sontarans)

Mel dated Stuart Dale for more than two years in university. After they graduated, he got a job as an engineer in the Middle East. They had a long-distance relationship for some time before they broke up. (AUDIO: The Blood Furnace)

A confused timeline Edit

Meeting the Sixth Doctor Edit


Mel as she appeared when the Doctor first met her, during the Sixth Doctor's trial by the Time Lords. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)

According to some accounts, Mel first met the Sixth Doctor in Brighton, 1989 at the age of twenty-five. However, as a consequence of the Doctor's trial prosecuted by the Valeyard, he already knew her. To him, their first meeting was when she was pulled from her timestream by the Master and made to testify on the Doctor's behalf. For an indeterminate time — from the moment she met him in Brighton until the younger Sixth Doctor returned her to the side of an older Sixth Doctor on the planet Oxyveguramosa — he had to pretend that he had originally met her in Brighton. (PROSE: Business Unusual, Time of Your Life) Others, however, indicated that their first encounter had been in 1986. (PROSE: Head Games, AUDIO: We Are The Daleks) At the time, the younger Doctor considered her to be invisible and ineffectual. (AUDIO: The Wrong Doctors) It was only after she was returned to his future self that their timelines synchronised, and he could speak with her in a more open way.

Although the Doctor had initially attempted to avoid meeting Mel out of "fear" that travelling with her would be a sign that he was on the path to becoming the Valeyard, travelling instead with such diverse companions as Angela Jennings, Grant Markham, Frobisher and Evelyn Smythe in order to avoid his destiny, by the time his travels with Evelyn had ended, he was eager to prolong the inevitable no longer. (AUDIO: The Wrong Doctors) By the time circumstances led him to Pease Pottage, he was once again afraid of the results of beginning his travels with Mel, but after she helped him defeat a Usurian plot and a new Nestene invasion, he bowed to destiny and accepted her as his companion. (PROSE: Business Unusual)

With respect to companions Edit

Mel's chronological placement with respect to other companions was also unusual: technically, she both pre-dated and post-dated the vast majority of the Sixth Doctor's companions. During their first encounter, Evelyn Smythe – or as she was then, Rossiter — referred to Bush as her "replacement". (AUDIO: Thicker Than Water) Though it disagreed on many aspects of Mel and Evelyn's first meeting, another account also agreed that the bulk of Mel's travels with the Doctor were after Evelyn's. (PROSE: Instruments of Darkness) The view that Mel was simply the Sixth Doctor's final companion is, however, a rather simple one. From the Doctor's viewpoint, he first learned of Mel during his trial, met her for the first time at its conclusion, took her back to the point in her travels with his future self she had reached, met for the first time and travelled with several other companions including Evelyn, Charlotte Pollard, Philippa Jackson and Constance Clarke, as well as others who he re-encountered such as Frobisher and Peri Brown, reunited with Mel in Brighton and began travelling with her, and reunited with Evelyn alongside Mel on Világ and/or Earth.

Mel's placement with respect to Frobisher, however, is even murkier than that of the Sixth Doctor's other multi-period companions. The Doctor first met Frobisher during his early adventures with Peri, while was on hiatus back in the United States, although she later resumed her travels whilst Frobisher was onboard (COMIC: Kane's Story) and continued to travel with the Doctor after his first departure. (TV: The Mysterious Planet) Equally clearly was the fact that Frobisher later travelled with the Doctor after his trial by the Time Lords; he knew, for instance, of Peri's marriage to Yrcanos, (COMIC: The Age of Chaos) and his first encounter with Sabalom Glitz was the Doctor's second. (PROSE: Impractical) However, Frobisher also briefly continued his journeys with the Seventh Doctor, (COMIC: A Cold Day in Hell!) indicating he travelled with the Doctor twice before Mel started travelling with him, and had a trip after her.

Travelling with the Sixth Doctor Edit



Mel and the Sixth Doctor's timelines were not, however, asynchronous merely due to the unusual way in which they met. Even after their respective timelines seemed to come into harmony, Mel was often parted from the Sixth Doctor. At least twice, she was stranded for months away from him, even though very little time passed for him. When carried back in time to 1781 by a freak accident, the Doctor was unable to retrieve her until six months later in 1782. (AUDIO: Catch-1782) Later, she was accidentally left on Lethe and the Doctor was delayed for an additional three months. (AUDIO: The Juggernauts) On both occasions, she became fully a resident of the era in which she found herself while waiting for the Doctor's uncertain return.

When the Doctor was at a loose end about where to visit, he found some tickets in a storage box for a visit the tower of Kalsos. Soon after arriving, she was almost killed when one of the tower's floors collapsed. She was rescued by Barlow Teveler who informed her that the tower was to be demolished. She was partially trapped when the tower fully collapsed but was healed by the time they got to Ridius IV. She was annoyed that Trellak had imprisoned the Doctor. She was upset when one of the soldiers shot an innocent man. Seeing how the populace of Riduius was emaciated, she wanted to help. Remembering a poem from Earth, Mel helped Helgert Teveler to remember the seed banks on Earth. She kept making promises on the Doctor's behalf for which the Doctor chastised her. She noticed that the Doctor wasn't acting like his usual self. Upon landing on Earth, she became concerned when he disappeared. She was then accosted by CRT-JCE-006 because she didn't have an immigration visa. She worked out that the robot was sent by the Doctor to inform her of his plans. (AUDIO: The Seeds of War)


The Doctor avoided the Lakertyan System and took her to Zastros 9. Soon after escaping the rebels on that planet, they journeyed on, but the TARDIS console started to smoke, and the Doctor was replaced by the Valeyard but she didn't notice. The Valeyard took her to Plestinious as he had an errand to run. She met with Lorelas who told her that she doesn't know the Doctor properly. Genesta pointed out the Doctor to her and said she didn't know who he was. She noticed that the Valeyard was placing something into the TARDIS console.

Upon encountering the Valeyard one last time, the Sixth Doctor gave up his own life to reverse the damage he caused to the Time Lord species after the Valeyard implanted Nathemus into his mind to modify the course of history. He altered his personal future by leading his past self unwittingly into the path of a deadly radiation source near the Lakertyan System to break loose of the Nathemus with which the Valeyard had infected him. The radiation was emanating from the laser fire issued out of the Rani's TARDIS. This radiation did nothing more than cause Mel to lose consciousness because it was harmless to humans, but it was deadly to Time Lords, causing the Doctor to regenerate into his seventh incarnation and throwing off the Nathemus' influence on the Doctor before the Valeyard could take his mind. (AUDIO: The Brink of Death, TV: Time and the Rani)

Travelling with the Seventh Doctor Edit

Mel's timeline with respect to the Seventh Doctor was, by contrast, far more orderly than that with respect to the Doctor's previous incarnation — though it, too, was heavily affected by a variety of temporal anomalies.



At the very start of the Seventh Doctor's life, when the TARDIS was forced to land on Lakertya, the Rani abducted him and induced amnesia by injecting a drug in him, using this opportunity to pose as Mel and trick him into helping to produce a Time Manipulator. After waking, Mel who was left behind, was jarred and frightened. She encountered the monstrous Tetraps and also the Rani's traps set on the planet's surface. Finally, she reunited with the familiar yet unrecognisable man who was now in her Doctor's place. She was informed of how he had regenerated and realised it was really the Doctor.



With Mel's help, the Doctor overcame his amnesia and left the Rani's plans in ruins, liberating the Lakertyans from hers and the Tetraps' oppression. Assured by the new Doctor that he would grow on her, they continued travelling together. (TV: Time and the Rani)

The Doctor left her in 2007 for a bit, where Mel became annoyed at the celebrity culture before the TARDIS came to pick her up. She found the TARDIS empty save for a message to follow Louis to try and find where the Doctor was being kept. Having located Louis, she followed him to an old mental hospital, only to find it a fake building. With the help of her Cabbie, they managed to get inside but discovered that the interior of the building was in fact located in the asteroid belt. She met with the Doctor again but he was acting unusual, having had a TARDIS consciousness placed inside his mind. She was later interrogated by Rigan to discover what she knew about the Celestial Intervention Agency plans. Using her compassion she showed the error of the plans to the newly regenerated Louis who helped her to stop the CIA's work. She then suggested that the TARDIS mind that was placed in Shokhra be placed in the mainframe of the building. (AUDIO: Unregenerate!)

At some point during her travels with the Seventh Doctor, they visited the planet Nocturne. (AUDIO: Nocturne)

She and the Doctor once visited Ancient Greece. While in Athens, she corrected Euclid's geometry, much to his annoyance. (AUDIO: Mask of Tragedy)

In search of Leptonite Crystals, Mel and the Doctor travelled to Puxatornee landing in a slum. Soon after they were captured as terrorist by a local Slithergee patrol. She was then interrogated by Professor Capra before being saved by Reed and Stuart. When Reed and Stuart wanted to go back in time to rewrite history she was used as a hostage to get the Doctor to do it. She was appalled at Stuart murdering Bailey. When visiting the new timeline she was intrigued that they already knew who she was when she was captured by Potter. After being freed by Reed and Stuart, they forced the Doctor and Mel to take them back to before they initially left. They then went back in time and got captured to maintain the timeline saying they were Slithergee spies and escaped before this timeline's Mel and the Doctor turned up. This version Mel and the Doctor landed here for Leptonite crystals and were immediately captured by Lt. Reed and Lt. Stuart for being spies and interrogated. They were then rescued by the original timelines Stuart and Reed and decided to visit professor Capra's time machine. She was caught in the time field of the machine and taken back in time. She was with Stuart when he stopped the assassination of Bailey. This created the timeline that the original Mel and the Doctor were from, and which Lt. Stuart and Lt. Bailey didn't like so forced the Doctor and Mel to take them back to where they started to stop Capra's experiment. Back on the day they arrived, the Doctor maintained the timeline into saying they were terrorist. They then left before the original Mel and the Doctor arrived. (AUDIO: Flip-Flop)

They managed to escape an exploding ship, landing on Dark Space 8 just before the Intergalactic Song Contest. She was mistaken for a pilot. When exploring the space station she met Nicky Newman, who was pleased that she didn't know who he was. There was a series of murders and she and the Doctor decided to investigate. She started accusing people of murder left, right and centre, from Angvia, Golos, to the Scientific Officer Ivor Fassbinder even the neutral arbiter Geri, who Mel attacked. After the Doctor revealed the murderer she realised that the solution was too easy, which led them to find the bomb that Loozly had planted in Newman. She stopped him just in time for the Doctor to win the contest. (AUDIO: Bang-Bang-a-Boom!)

Mel and the Doctor landed in Pompeii 79 AD, the day before Vesuvius erupted. She went to get some clothes with Aglae and realised she was a prostitute. When the Doctor told her that the TARDIS would be buried in the ash until 1980 she was determined to find a way to stop it. Eumachia had her arrested for theft but the Doctor helped her to escape. She left the city but was caught. She eventually found the TARDIS and allowed the Doctor to realise a way to both escape Pompeii and for the TARDIS to be found buried in the future. (AUDIO: The Fires of Vulcan)

She got annoyed with the Doctor after he went off after he was acting strangely when they landed on the Needle. She was trapped outside shortly after arriving and fell into Draun's hover car. In the underworld, she was given the drug Slow by Draun and experienced the being that was causing harm. She later visited Vi Yulquen who found it exciting that Mel was unchipped. The Doctor then used her programming skills to reprogram Whitenoise and stop the Red infection. (AUDIO: Red)

The Doctor and Mel once visited Dido. On another occasion, they encountered weretarantulas on Vyga 3. (AUDIO: Maker of Demons)

They once visited Llanfer Ceiriog. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark)

Departure Edit



Mel chose to leave the Doctor at a place and time radically different from her origin, without being enticed by a romantic relationship. Unlike most companions, she left the Doctor, but remained an adventurer. Trading one travelling companion for another, she departed the Doctor's side on Iceworld, in search of new adventures with the galactic confidence trickster Sabalom Glitz, pausing only to hint to him that their newfound friend Ace would appreciate his intervention. (TV: Dragonfire)

Travels with the Doctor and Ace Edit

Mel Ace and the Doctor


After travelling with Glitz, Mel ended up on the run from his criminal associates. She was reunited with the Seventh Doctor and Ace on Ricosta, learning that Glitz had tried to compensate for his debts by selling Mel's possible futures to the Speravores. After preventing the Speravores devouring the planet's population, Mel joined the Doctor and Ace on their travels. (AUDIO: A Life of Crime) They accidentally visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War, (AUDIO: Fiesta of the Damned) the planet Prosper, (AUDIO: Maker of Demons) Parking, (AUDIO: The High Price of Parking) and Liverpool. (AUDIO: The Blood Furnace) Visiting the old Silurian capital city in 2085, Mel found herself helping the Doctor implement a plan to essentially let the Silurians re-establish themselves on Earth, preventing their initial efforts to provoke a war between China and America in favour of remaining in stasis until Earth was devastated by solar flares and began to regenerate itself. (AUDIO: The Silurian Candidate)

Going home Edit

According to one account, Mel travelled with Glitz for about six months before deciding to try to go home. On her way she detoured to the planet Avalone, where she worked at a holiday camp owned by Avalonian Resorts, Inc. Her progress towards Earth stalled and she succumbed to life on Avalone. After two years she chanced another run at Earth. She hacked into computer systems to send a message to Glitz to pick her up. Instead, she was "rescued" by Dr. Who and Jason, who imprisoned her in the Galactic Prison in the Land of Fiction. There, she met another prisoner, the Seventh Doctor. He, however, was a changed and considerably darker man than she had known. He revealed to her that he had manipulated her into leaving him on Iceworld because he knew what was coming (as Time's Champion) and couldn't have her as a companion. Incensed, she avoided his company and refused to travel with him in the TARDIS ever again. Ace, who was also much changed from the person that she had left behind on Iceworld, tried to calm her and explain the reasons why she and the Doctor were so much "harder" than the people she had known. Although the explanation did little to dispel her disillusionment, Mel accepted a ride from Ace. Mel thus returned to Pease Pottage in the 1990s thanks to Ace's time hopper. (PROSE: Head Games)

During their travels together, Mel and Glitz encountered a Galactic Heritage fleet. The experience led Mel to describe the organisation as "a militarised, spacefaring National Trust". (AUDIO: The High Price of Parking)


As of 2010, Melanie worked with Dorothy and A Charitable Earth, providing PCs to schools in Africa. (PROSE: Death of the Doctor)

Undated events Edit



Other realities Edit


At some times she may not have been aware of other realities, but neutral observers could not rectify conflicting information about her life. Mel's relationship with another of the Doctor's companions, Evelyn Smythe, also indicated alternative realities. It was particularly murky whether the Mel who bade farewell to Evelyn Smythe on Világ (AUDIO: Thicker Than Water) was the same Mel who met her on Earth. (PROSE: Instruments of Darkness) As Mel's trip to Carsus made clear, it was possible that neither of these Mels travelled with the Sixth Doctor in the primary universe. (PROSE: Spiral Scratch)

A timeline existed in which Mel never returned home. She got married to Ben Heyworth and lived on the planet Heritage in the 61st century. They tried to conceive a child but she was unable since she had gone through menopause. They went to a local geneticist, Wakeling, for help. Instead of doing so normally, he created a clone of Mel. Furious when she found out, she argued with Wakeling, who accidentally killed her. (PROSE: Heritage) These events turned out to be the doing of the Council of Eight. The Council had eliminated the Doctor's companions from the timeline by causing their deaths. This was corrected when the Doctor's eighth incarnation defeated the Council. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)


Personality Edit




Ace gave Mel the nickname "Donut". (TV: Dragonfire; AUDIO: A Life of Crime, Fiesta of the Damned, The Blood Furnace) On another occasion, Ace referred to her as "the squeaky one". (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark)


An extraordinary mind Edit


A screamer with a steely resolve Edit





Mel screams at Shangri-La (TV: Delta and the Bannermen)



The logic of healthy living Edit

Mel was a health enthusiast and a vegetarian, often encouraging the slightly portly Sixth Doctor to exercise more. (TV: Terror of the Vervoids) Though she remained staunchly vegetarian throughout her travels with the Doctor, (AUDIO: The Fires of Vulcan) her attempts to be the Doctor's de facto nutritionist almost vanished after that incarnation regenerated.


Relationship with the Doctor Edit






However, her proactive lifestyle led her to be bossy to both her Doctors. Not only did she try to reform the Sixth Doctor's health standards, she also demanded and apparently got him to abandon his motley outfit for a time. (AUDIO: Catch-1782) Likewise, she often spurred the Doctor to adventure, as when she insisted they stay on the Hyperion III to explore, against his better judgement, (TV: Terror of the Vervoids) or when she insisted on staying in Pompeii knowing Vesuvius was about to erupt. Her at times boundless optimism could prove the buoy the Doctor needed to survive, as when she insisted that there must be a solution to a temporal paradox that the Doctor believed doomed them to death under the volcanic ash of Vesuvius. (AUDIO: The Fires of Vulcan)

Perhaps because of her highly adventurous nature, she sometimes found it difficult to cope with the mundane. She displayed reluctance at the sight of the rather ordinary Shangri-La holiday camp in Wales in 1959. (TV: Delta and the Bannermen) In his investigation of reports of a series of agent provocateurs known as "the Doctor" who had been involved in numerous unusual incidents, the journalist James Stevens found evidence of the Doctor and Mel's presence in Shangri-La during this incident. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)


Behind the scenes Edit
