In hindsight it shouldn’t have been surprising to see Moffat rolling out tropes he’s used before - the archive of the dead (from “Dark Water”), the last-minute-time-travel visits (from “Let’s Kill Hitler”), and of course the threat that’s not evil, just misunderstood (take your pick).
I don’t know if the retcon sexism was a reaction to the criticisms Moffat used to get (“see! look how far we’ve come since the Sixties!”), some sort of lead-in to the regeneration, or what, but Capaldi’s reactions sold those moments to me just fine. I’ve never been fond of the First Doctor in the first place, and David Bradley’s resemblance to him physically and vocally wasn’t much closer than Hurndall’s in “The Five Doctors” had been, but I have to admit that I started buying the performance by the time the opening credits were finished.
Of course my girlfriend had no idea who Rusty was, and I for one would not have minded seeing him relegated to the same introduced-and-forgotten Dalek scrap heap as the so-called “Skittles” quintet from “ Victory of the Daleks.” She did recognize the name “Lethbridge-Stewart,” but although she’s seen a few Hartnell episodes, I still had to explain that the First Doctor was not typically, as shown here, a routinely misogynistic creep. That any of this just-OK coda worked at all for people who haven’t been watching the Twelfth Doctor’s era was kind of a relief. She laughed at the jokes and we both cried at the end, during the Christmas armistice scene and when Jodie Whittaker appeared. The second time I was sitting in the theater with my girlfriend, a non-fan / casual fan at the most.
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