Doctor Who: Series 24, Episodes 9-11 – “Delta and the Bannermen” (1987)

I love when Doctor Who does more with its time-and-space-travel premise than just using it as a means to arrive at the setting for a given story. As such, “Delta and the Bannermen” offers up a really fun scenario for its jumping-off point before bringing in some classic Who action and peril.

The Seventh Doctor and Mel tag along on an intergalactic time-traveling holiday, an alien bus bound for 1950s Earth. However, they soon discover that one of their fellow passengers, Delta, is an alien queen on the run from soldiers who are hell bent on wiping out her people.

This serials uses a similar “alien tourists to Earth” premise that “Voyage of the Damned” picks up many years and several regenerations later, but that episode focuses mainly on the crisis aboard their ship. This one takes full advantage of the idea of a bunch of aliens (cloaked to appear human) showing up on Earth in a rickety old ship, seeing the sights, and mingling with the humans in entertaining ways. This also means that we have good/neutral aliens in the tourists and Delta, as well as bad aliens in the Bannermen who are after her. So often, the aliens in Earth-based stories are all bad, aliens bent on invasion or destruction or exploitation of humanity. Having two separate groups with different aims provides a wider range of interactions with the human characters.

There are a lot of oneshot characters to enjoy here. Delta, the fugitive alien queen on the run with precious cargo, is something of an archetype, but she’s still rootable, and I enjoy the humans who get to know her and join our heroes in helping her. There’s also Murray, the well-meaning but slightly-ramshackle bus driver/tour guide, along with a couple of CIA agents thrown into the mix for additional complications.

I understand why Peri is often thought of as Six’s “main” companion,” and Ace is Seven’s, but I sometimes feel Mel gets lost in the shuffle between the two, and she really shouldn’t. I find her bright, perky personality endearing, and she’s always tenacious in her efforts to help people. Here, despite her fun holiday as usual being hijacked by some dangerous alien crisis (you’d think companions would learn to expect this,) she pulls herself together and does everything she can to protect Delta and the tourists from the Bannermen. The Doctor, meanwhile, gets up to his typical scheming and technological knowhow while also riding a motorbike and being cajoled into dancing at a 1950s sock hop. What’s not to like about that?