Bonnie Langford has recalled filming her last scene in The Reality War, the latest episode of Doctor Who which featured a reshot ending.

The actress, who plays on-off companion, Mel Bush, who primarily accompanied the Sixth and Seventh Doctors (respectively played by Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy), returned during the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) era, then again opposite Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor. But her most recent scene, in the Series 15 finale, had to be filmed around a year after the rest of the episode.

She said:

“It was quite different to how we had filmed it. We’d filmed it the year before, and I had to pop back and do some extra filming, which I couldn’t do with everybody else, which I was really disappointed about – I was in America at the time.”

This isn’t a great shock, of course — she appeared on a screen, so was clearly an insert, unable to physically interact with the Doctor and his companions, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), nor her UNIT peers.

The ending of The Reality War had to be re-filmed after Gatwa made the decision to leave Doctor Who, rumoured to be because he’s had to turn down a lot of work while waiting for the decision over the show’s future. It’s sad that she never got to say goodbye to the Fifteenth Doctor.

We hope we see Mel again at least; we wouldn’t want a long-standing companion’s last episode to be one that met with such a bad reaction, or for her last scene to be filmed remotely. We reckon showrunner, Russell T Davies, might just bring her back for his next episode anyway…