Reception and Cultural Impact
McCoy is someone to whom Kirk unburdens himself and is a foil to Spock. He is Kirk's "friend, personal bartender, confidant, counselor, and priest". Urban said McCoy has a "sense of irascibility with real passion for life and doing the right thing", and that "Spock's logic and McCoy's moral standing gave Kirk the benefit of having three brains instead of just one." Jennifer Porter and Darcee McLaren wrote that McCoy is an "unintentional" example of how "irrational prejudices and fixations, wishful thinking and emotional reasoning, denial and repression, and unresolved neurotic disturbances" compromise "scientific rationality" in Star Trek.
Kelley said that his greatest thrill at Star Trek conventions was the number of people who told him they entered the medical profession because of the McCoy character.
In regards to the 2009 film, The Guardian called Urban's performance of McCoy an "unqualified success", and The New York Times called the character "wild eyed and funny". Slate.com said Urban came closer than the other actors to impersonating a character's original depiction.
Read more about this topic: Leonard McCoy
Famous quotes containing the words reception, cultural and/or impact:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)