Blowing up Daniel Craig in No Time to Die was pretty distressing for those of us who had enjoyed his tenure as 007, Britain’s pre-eminently visible secret agent – but it also had an undeniable logic. He was the last of his generation still in active service.
The character of James Bond was born in 1953, imagined as both a repurposed Second World War veteran and an early combatant in the Cold War. He took shape as a fantasy, symbolising Britain’s hope of “third power” relevance in a world now dominated by the emergent superpowers of the United States and the USSR.
The early Bond was a civil servant, an office worker with a secret self that – when dispatched to intervene – could make a difference in world events. He preserved the myth of the plucky island nation, holding its own against the great dictators and the superior might of brash young civilisations.
He also embodied a powerful fantasy of competent masculinity. He wasn’t noisy and over-confident like the Americans, nor was he an unthinking cog in the government machine. Rather, he was private, independent-minded, resistant to authority, given to pleasure.
Skip to 2026, and Bond is again being resuscitated – will it be Jack Lowden, Callum Turner, or a rumoured mystery third or even fourth actor in the running for the role – although it’s not clear to what end.
What can Bond, or Britain for that matter, do to avert a global polycrisis powered by a Fleming-esque array of threats – from a resurgent Russia to a neo-fascist America, via the climate emergency and an array of megalomaniac tech bros controlling (or not) an existentially problematic technology we scarcely understand?
Is there any mode of Bond that would be fit for the purpose of engaging these forces?
Bond has developed – but, thanks to artificial intelligence, so too has the Bond villain. He’s learned to accept women in authority, dabbled in domesticity and even given up smoking. But could he spot a deep fake or distinguish an AI-generated email scam from an official communication?
The crime writer Vaseem Khan recently produced the first “Q” spin-off novel, a story in which Bond is only glimpsed in passing. This makes sense. Surely, now, Q-Branch should be doing the heavy lifting, and perhaps our collective fantasy should be that they have adequate resources to counter the ambitions of the tech giants, while somehow not subjecting us to the worst excesses of state surveillance?
It’s a difficult circle to square for a man with seven decades of action behind him. And, let’s face it, who wants to see two hours of a could-be-swaggering Bond in front of a screen, operating a drone?
But if Bond can’t go backwards, and is ill-equipped to go forward, maybe we need to rethink the numbers. Is it James Bond we need, or 007?
Six different white male actors have played James Bond, each reflecting the needs of their moment. But there is nothing fixed or absolute about the magic codename 007. If you can have interchangeable white men in the role, why not change up and fill the space with something different – something that doesn’t represent the demographic that’s currently trying to destroy the world?
James Bond is, above all, a fantasy of competence. He makes us believe that the impossible is possible, that the end of the world can be averted – and when Lashana Lynch was revealed as the new 007 of No Time to Die, things briefly looked just a little more cheerful.
Lynch did serious reassuring competence, and I would have paid good money to see her take on the job full-time. But unless the bookies are well off the mark, it looks like my fantasy of national security is unlikely to come to pass.
Gill Plain is a professor of English literature and popular culture at the University of St Andrews
