Magnum Mania!

Should MPI have brought back Jeff Mackay as Jim Bonnick/Father Jim Hiller/Joe Travis/Noel Thompson/Trany Oliva or used him as a relative of Mac?

Was the new character as effective as the Mac character? Was it a mistake altogether? Was it just too stupid to consider?

I rather ebjoyed the Jim Bonnic character. All those years of TM conning Mac came back to haunt him with Bonnic who more often than not was conning the guys. What goes around comes around. Mac's revenge?

I never liked the Jim Bonnic character or the way that Jeff McKay's return was handled...until N1095A put me on to the "anti-Mac" idea. Now I feel better about it, although having him be Mac's "anti-Mac" brother would have worked, too. There's just no way that Mac could have survived Ivan's bomb. That would not have worked for me at all. So my only remaining complaint about Jeff McKay's return is that Thomas called him "Mac". He wasn't Mac...at all! And it just felt wrong for Thomas to be willing to call him that.

I agree on the part about TM calling him Mac. However it was a way to keep Mac's memory going. For me it also reinforced the idea that if only by poetic justice, Mac was getting revenge on TM. Of course knowing Mac, it was revenge in a light-hearted, joking sort of way, and not an angry sort of way.

I know...I know...

I would blend it as Mac's brother who happens to be a slimy con artist.

HOWEVER, You might be able to pull a "Mac never really died" angle if you did the body double like in "Ms. Jones"... would be kind of dumb... but could happen.

it was silly to have an exact look a like be a non-relative. The episode he was introduced seemed to leave us hanging for a while as we watched Magnum try to deduce the Mac resurrection........but the payoff was a downer of sorts as Mac was not alive, and having him be some street urchin con man seemed to lessen the significance of McKay being back.

The only time I found it useful was Infinity and Jelly Doughnuts when he grabs the mustache of the Mac ghost thinking it is Bonnic. Other than that..........they went through a bunch of silliness to bring him back.

I guess you could say that an exact double that was non-related to Mac was jumping the shark.

The easiest solution would've been for the Navy to ship Mac away on temporary duty. They could've brought him back after the series failed, but I have the luxury of knowing that they didn't.

That would have been a great solution IKnowWhatYoureThinking. But it would have RUINED Did You See the Sunrise!

Personally I didn't mind it. After all, they'd killed the "real" Mac off, then realised they wanted to bring him back into the show after 'Tales of the Gold Monkey' was cancelled after one season, so they had kind of painted themself into a corner.

By the point in the series that 'Mac's Back' came about, we had seen some pretty strange and far out plots, so it didn't come off too badly. I think any earlier in the series, though, and it would have failed.

I personally like both Macs, and 'Mac's Back' doesn't fall far behind 'Home From The Sea' as my all-time favourite episode.