Bringing back McCoy - good or bad move?

[Dame Roger]

Now first of all I'd like to say that I'm a huge Sylvester McCoy fan. He's one of my favourite Doctors, and to see him back on screen as the Doctor again in this was brilliant. However, was it really a wise decision?

This was supposed to be a relaunch of the show, selling it to not only the old fans but to new viewers, both in the UK and US, who had never seen it before. So was it really a good move to start the movie with a lengthy (and very confusing for the uninitiated) info-dump about the history of the show, the concept of regeneration and all sorts of details about the Master and the Daleks, then have the character who appears to be the hero killed off almost immediately? The first thing a new viewer would see is the Doctor get killed in a rather petty and unheroic way, which hardly seems to best way to introduce the character.

Imagine, for all those new fans whose first Doctor Who story was Rose, if that episode had started in the same way. Five minutes of exposition at the start, then ten minutes with a rather interesting-looking lead character played by Paul McGann who then gets run over by a bus, meaning that we don't even see Christopher Eccleston until the episode is nearly a third of the way through. You may disagree (and yes, I'd have loved to see McGann again too!), but I think that would've lost the impact somewhat, not to mention cutting down rather badly on the amount of time left to have any kind of decent storyline.

So would the movie had worked better if, like Rose, we'd just seen the new Doctor at the start and not spent a large part of the run-time in seeing off the old Doctor? Much as I would have missed a last look at Sylv, I can't help but think it might have done.

[Nyki]

I'm with you on all counts here.  It was great to see Sylvester again, but it meant the story was about a third gone before we even saw McGann, and then we had to watch him getting used to being who he was.  That works fine in a story that started with the regeneration, but this didn't.  As the Dame says, Rose was an infinitely better way to relaunch the show.

[Oh-Wise-One]

I think the biggest positive (or negative depending on how you look at it), is that it tied Eight into canon. Without McCoy it would be too easy to disregard the whole thing which I think would be a shame because Paul Mcgann is brilliant in both this and his audios, but having SM there rooted it somewhat. I do think they perhaps spent a bit too much time focused on him though

[Peri-Peri]

I pretty much agree with everything the Dame has said. I love Sylvester and I think for the most part he was included to help the existing fans transition, but I can totally understand why a new viewer would be confused by it all, especially given how long it seems to be until Eight it properly introduced. It very well may have worked better if it had been more like Rose, but at the same time I think perhaps it would have got the same reception regardless because Paul Mcgann is one of the least disliked things about it all and people frustrations with it all tend to lie elsewhere