BOND XVI
James Bond is broken. Not damaged, not tired, not in need of a gentle refresh or a clever casting choice, but structurally broken in a way that cannot be repaired by nostalgia, provocation, or denial. This is not Amazon’s fault, though Amazon now owns the consequences. Nor is it the audience’s fault, despite the familiar culture-war shorthand that gets dragged out every time a legacy franchise falters. Bond is broken because the world that made him legible no longer exists, and the world that replaced it refuses to hold still long enough to be turned into myth.
For most of its life, James Bond functioned as a stabilizing fantasy. He belonged to a universe in which power blocs were durable, institutions were coherent, and the moral grammar of the West was broadly agreed upon, even when it was hypocritical. Bond did not merely defeat villains; he reassured audiences that someone, somewhere, competent and ruthless and impeccably dressed, was managing the chaos on their behalf. Espionage, in this fantasy, had a hierarchy. There was a top of the food chain. Bond lived there.
That fantasy depended on historical conditions that are now as distant as they are alien. The roots of World War II, which once gave Bond’s moral universe its gravity, are no longer lived memory but abstraction, closer to myth than experience. Cold War Bond, once the franchise’s beating heart, is today mired in behaviors and assumptions that would not merely offend modern audiences but render the character unplayable without parody or apology. The casual misogyny, the racial caricatures, the institutional arrogance that once read as swagger would now land Bond either in prison or out of theaters entirely. The franchise knows this. It learned it the hard way.
The seventies would have killed Bond outright if transplanted unaltered into the present. The late Brosnan era very nearly did, drowning the character in catastrophic CGI choices that aged with almost malicious speed. Surfing in the Arctic, invisible cars, digital excess untethered from consequence—those decisions didn’t just look silly; they broke the audience’s trust. They turned Bond into a superhero at the precise moment when audiences were beginning to crave friction, weight, and reality. The cheese platter was left out in the Louisiana bayou, and the smell lingered for years.
Daniel Craig’s arrival was not merely a recasting; it was an emergency intervention. Casino Royale worked because it forced Bond to grow up instantly. The film stripped away ornamental excess and replaced it with physicality, consequence, and emotional cost. Craig’s Bond bled, failed, suffered, and adapted. The casting was exhilarating, the acting grounded, the styling sharp without being absurd, the action legible and brutal, the technology plausible. The storytelling understood something crucial: that in a post–Cold War, post-9/11 world, the fantasy could only survive if it acknowledged fragility. For a time, the franchise remembered this lesson.
And then, inexplicably, it forgot it.
No Time To Die did not merely conclude Craig’s era; it sabotaged the runway for whatever was meant to follow. Killing Bond was not, in itself, the problem. What mattered was how and why it was done. The decision closed narrative doors, collapsed timelines, and dared the next creative team to explain the unexplainable. Whether this was an act of creative defiance, a deliberate kick aimed at Amazon’s shins, or simply a misreading of the franchise’s future-proofing needs almost doesn’t matter. The result is the same: a prolonged hiatus, a vacuum, a polarized and frustrated audience, and a property that now feels radioactive to touch.
But vacuums, in culture as in physics, exert force. They pull ideas toward them. And what has been left behind is not just a problem but a massive, uncomfortable opportunity.
The real issue facing James Bond today is not casting, not gender politics, not whether the franchise is sufficiently “woke” or insufficiently traditional. Those debates are surface noise. The deeper problem is that the real world has become too volatile to be cleanly absorbed into blockbuster mythmaking. Bond once thrived because the geopolitical map was stable enough to be stylized. That stability is gone.
Spectre was written in 2015, before Trump, before COVID, before the unmasking of institutional brittleness across the West. After that came a pandemic that froze the planet, a shock to democratic confidence, and a series of convulsions that made the idea of a smoothly functioning intelligence order feel quaint. Then came No Time To Die, a film released into confusion, unsure whether it belonged to the past or the future. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Energy insecurity returned. Authoritarian drift accelerated. Then Trump returned, not as an anomaly but as a symptom.
The United Kingdom itself, Bond’s narrative anchor, is no longer a stable stage. It is poorer, more brittle, more authoritarian in instinct, and deeply uncertain about its future role. The EU is no longer a friendly extension of British identity. NATO, once Bond’s unspoken moral backdrop, cannot be assumed permanent. These are not speculative anxieties; they are live variables.
This creates an almost impossible creative problem. A Bond film shot in London today could premiere into a radically altered city tomorrow. Scenes intended to signal continuity or strength could become conceptually untenable before opening weekend. Blockbuster franchises do not thrive when they are forced to improvise jazz with real-world collapse. They thrive when they offer the illusion of access to a hidden order that still works.
The Bourne franchise understood this for a time. It succeeded because it assertively embedded itself in real locations, real institutions, real histories. It made audiences feel as though they were glimpsing behind a curtain. When Bourne drifted into abstraction and fantasy, when the sense of revealed truth evaporated, revenues followed. Bond faces the same precipice.
If Bond ties himself too closely to explicit geopolitics, the story will offend, be banned, or collapse under its own specificity. If he avoids geopolitics altogether, he becomes a tuxedoed superhero, another franchise drowning in nanobots and spectacle. The moment invisible cars or implausible technological miracles appear, Bond ceases to be espionage and becomes costume drama with guns.
The problem is not that Bond cannot survive realism. It is that realism itself no longer behaves.
Which leaves only one viable path forward.
You cheat, but you cheat honestly.
The solution is narrative occlusion, and it is brutally difficult to do well. Not magic. Not multiverses. Not cloning. No transhumanism, no alien technology, no metaphysical scaffolding. The world remains entirely plausible. The technology remains entirely possible. What changes is the audience’s relationship to certainty.
The new Bond story begins with a flashback, but not a clean one. We see scenes that appear to come from Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre. But something is off. The angles are wrong. The timing is misaligned. Dialogue overlaps where it shouldn’t. A sniper shot is seen from too far away. A poisoning in Montenegro nearly kills Bond, but the details do not quite match memory. These are not alternate realities. They are records.
What is revealed, slowly and without exposition, is that MI6 has long operated a training program using near-seamless field recordings from elite operatives. Bond himself became a case study, his movements, reflexes, and decisions used to train others. A junior SAS agent trained with him. Assisted him, once or twice, at the margins. Learned not from legend but from proximity. Their lives were already intertwined, even if the films never told us so.
This is not a conspiracy. There is no grand villain explaining the plan. There are only symptoms: budget cuts, institutional stress, human exhaustion, competing priorities, and decay. Mallory is decent but cornered. Moneypenny is worn down. Q is in personal crisis. MI6 is not evil. It is malfunctioning.
A semi-independent department has quietly gone rogue, not to overthrow the state, but because they do not like where things are going. No speeches. No manifestos. Just professional alarm. They operate in a haze of partial information, conflicting screens, and incompatible interpretations. We never get full answers. We get fragments. Which is precisely how intelligence works now.
Craig’s Bond died on the Faroe Islands. That much is true. But there was more to the story. It involved geopolitics, Russia, and a near-disaster in 2021 or 2022 that almost went catastrophically wrong. Our new protagonist was there, not far away. He saw the explosion in the distance. That is all we know. The movie we get is … true? Probably? Or is it this romantic embellishment served up to the Prime Minister?
Then the present begins. Ukraine. NATO missiles. Russian sabotage. Corporate consultancies and think tanks preparing for geopolitical collapse as a business opportunity. Spectre no longer exists as an organization. It exists as an ecosystem. Legal, respectable, embedded in risk management and “continuity planning.”
The new Bond is not a reboot. He does not replace Craig. He inherits his training. Years of mentorship. Muscle memory shaped by myth. He acts decisively, without hesitation, as part of a team. And in doing so, he breaks protocol. Not because MI6 is corrupt, but because institutions move slower than collapse.
Mallory cannot protect him.
One hour into the film, he commits an act of rebellion. He signs a document. He signs the name James Bond. Not as a reveal, but as an act of exile. Bond becomes a tool the state no longer controls.
Cue Theme Music
This works not because it is clever, but because it is honest. It future-proofs the franchise by refusing to pin truth to a single timeline. It avoids explicit villains while remaining politically charged. It restores glamour as camouflage, not indulgence. It allows Bond to remain British without pretending Britain is stable – or the Axiomatic Good Guys. It makes the fantasy viable again by accepting that clarity is no longer available. And if you then really insist, you can mix in Luther (yes, he was recruited by MI6), the day of the Jackal (no she didnt die, she became 007), or even crossover a Bourne made younger with CGI. Not my first choices, but you can make a succession of one big cinema event every 3-5 years, and if you play it right weave the storyline in with a bunch of TV series (and make sure you make ZERO mistakes). Vulgar, but money talks, right?
James Bond cannot explain the world anymore. He can only move through it faster than it collapses. That is not a betrayal of the franchise. It is its only remaining evolution.
If Amazon wants Bond to matter again, not as nostalgia but as a living, dangerous, profitable myth, this is the path. Not reassurance. Not spectacle. Relentless.
Occlusion, a world where we know longer what is real.
And a man who signs his own legend when the system fails.
Alright. Chalk-dust on sleeves, coal snapping, teacher absolutely done with everyone’s naïveté. Let’s do the two-minute coal-on-map lesson, the way it would actually land.
The teacher slams a map of the North Atlantic down. Not Europe. Not flags. Water. Always water. She draws a fat, ugly X over Scotland—not London, not Washington.
“You keep thinking countries. I’m talking about fucking oceans.”
She scribbles a thick arc from Florida → Eastern Seaboard → Greenland gap → Norway.
“This is the North Atlantic. This is the throat of the world.”
Then a second, angrier X at Faslane / Coulport.
“These aren’t ‘UK bases’. We fucking own this. These are colonies, these have always been fucking colonies. This is OURS. These are NATO’s last guaranteed Atlantic-side continuous-at-sea deterrent pens.”
Coal dust everywhere now.
The crude logic (so simple it hurts)
He draws three things. That’s it.
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A circle around Russia’s northern fleet
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A long arrow into the Atlantic
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A wall that only exists if Scotland stays put
“If Scotland goes independent and tells the nukes to fuck off— this wall vanishes. We get fucking exposed because some fucking peons get it in their fucking unwashed dirty “we own your ass serfs” brains that they think they can determine their own trajectory. Newsflash, thet fucking can’t. We’ll send half the CIA and MOSSAD to their fucking timezone to make fucking clear to these cunts this won’t fucking happen…”
She doesn’t even draw England, because what the fuck is ‘England’ these days, I mean seriously.
Why Scotland matters (not patriotism, not empire)
She taps the Scottish coast.
“Submarines don’t care about flags. Russians are done otherwise. Russians are completely over on the world’s stage. They do not have exports, they do not have production, their oil and minerals are worth jack shit, their land is rotting away in front of them, their population is old, alcoholic, has open Tuberculosis, is sniffing glue, is majorly passive over induced generational trauma. Russia don’t matter, so what do these wodka mainlining mafia losers have left? That’s right – the capacity to blackmail the shit out of the US with fucking nukes. They care about deep water, quiet exits, and geography that can’t be replicated. They wanna be ready do do a decapacitation strike the moment we cant hit back. How they do that? Saturate our fucking eastern seaboard south of Greenland with a wall of nuclear submarines and parkinglot the US before we can launch….”
Scotland gives you:
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immediate access to deep Atlantic water
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proximity to the GIUK gap (Greenland–Iceland–UK choke point)
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launch positions that don’t require transiting hostile or surveilled waters
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time — minutes matter at this scale
The US loses Scotland, the Muricans don’t “relocate bases”. The world rewrites nuclear geometry.
The nuclear bullseye problem (why Scots are right to be angry)
Teacher pauses. Softer now.
“The scots are not wrong, actually.”
He circles Scotland again.
“You park strategic nukes here, you paint a target right on the penetrable section of their kilts. That’s just physics and game theory.”
From a Scottish voter’s POV:
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no direct control over launch authority
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guaranteed first-wave targeting
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zero benefit, infinite downside
So yes — of course independence + denuclearization is a rational desire. And yes — of course it terrifies (and INFURIATES) the swamp of Washington. Both things can be true.
Why the US deep state cannot “just accept it”
Teacher underlines the Atlantic.
“Because the US deterrent posture assumes European forward basing that doesn’t wobble every election cycle.”
Lose Scotland and suddenly:
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subs must deploy from farther away
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patrol patterns become predictable
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response times lengthen
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adversary confidence rises
That last one is the killer. Deterrence isn’t weapons. It’s certainty in your opponent’s mind.
Enter: James Bond (and why Shetland suddenly makes sense)
The teacher smirks, finally.
“Now go rewatch the last Bond.”
Remote islands. North Atlantic storms. Undersea cables. Silent ports. Things that cannot be moved without the world noticing. Bond was never about villains. Bond is about:
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maintaining invisible continuity
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when the map changes but the water doesn’t
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when old empires decay and only geometry remains
Shetland isn’t scenery. It’s a plot device born of strategic panic.
Why this is a fantastic Bond reboot spine
New Bond era thesis:
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No clear good guys
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No cartoon villains
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Just states trying desperately to keep the world boringly stable
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While tectonic politics (independence, multipolarity, denuclearization) grind underneath
Bond isn’t saving Britain. Bond is buying time. And Scotland?
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not traitors
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not villains
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but the fault line where moral legitimacy and strategic necessity collide
That’s modern Bond. That’s actually interesting. The last James Bond was never about some Virus or Vengeance or some Nerdy kid. We only saw one very simplistic, infantile, curated side of the narrative.
Teacher drops the coal.
“Class dismissed. Geography always wins.”
And yeah — gulp — lesson absolutely landed.