November 21, 2021

As you might have noticed, October 2021 saw the long-awaited 25th James Bond film stagger, at last, into theaters, a full 18 months after it was originally slated to premiere. No Time To Die, whose title probably felt less macabre before COVID-19 hit, marks several interesting firsts for the franchise's treatment of women. I'd like to tell you all about them, but be warned:

HERE BE SPOILERS. Turn back if you don't want any!

I mean it! If you haven't seen this movie and you want to, do not click "Read More."

Just don't.

Now that that's out of the way, let us begin at the least obvious departure from the usual Girl Formula that has served Eon Productions so well since 1962. Namely, No Time To Die has just become the...

1) First Bond movie not to introduce any new Bond girls.

Wait, what? There are women in it!

You're right. You can see from the poster that there are 3 ladies featured in this film:

Three women and an Aston Martin, no less.

There's actually even a fourth woman who didn't make the poster. So there are certainly girls featured in this Bond film.

But a Bond girl is not simply a woman who happens to be in the same movie as James Bond. Bond girls have to flirt, kiss, and/or hook up with James Bond to count. The only woman who does those things in this movie is Madeleine (Lea Seydoux), who was previously introduced in Spectre (2015).

What do the other women do, then? 

They do no flirting and no kissing with Bond. One of them is Miss Moneypenny, who mentions the fact that she shot Bond back in Skyfall. The other two are:

a) Paloma (Ana de Armas), a CIA agent who helps Bond on an off-the-books mission in Cuba; 

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

And b) Nomi (Lashana Lynch), an MI6 agent who takes over the 007 designation after Bond goes into retirement.

Nomi (Lashana Lynch), the new 007 (Nicola Dove/DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM)

Both of these women exchange witty banter with Bond, and Nomi does get his attention by pretending to hit on him, but neither one shows real interest in him. Instead, they team up with him to get their jobs done. They do not, therefore, qualify as "girlfriends" by the standards of the DFGRR.

Madeleine does, though, and therefore becomes only the second Bond girl to have a two-movie relationship with him. The first was Sylvia Trench from Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963.)

What, no love for Miss Moneypenny?

I adore Miss Moneypenny. But she and Bond are not, nor have they ever been, in a relationship, a fact that she hangs a lampshade on more than once, such as in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969):

James Bond : Moneypenny, what would I do without you?

Moneypenny : My problem is that you never do anything with me.

And in GoldenEye (1995):

Bond: What would I ever do without you?

Moneypenny: As far as I can remember, James, you've never had me.

Although the current version of Moneypenny might have hooked up with Bond in Skyfall, and despite how cute it is that they've spent 6 decades flirting, we can't count Bond/Moneypenny as a serious romantic relationship. Whereas Bond and Madeleine are, at the start of No Time To Die, living together and planning for the future.

Are you saying James Bond attempts monogamy?

Yes! No Time to Die has the unique honor of being the only movie in which Bond sleeps with just 1 woman, Madeleine. The previous low score for a Bond movie was 2 sex partners, set by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights, which was not coincidentally released at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

More importantly than the strict number of Bond girls, however, is the fact that No Time to Die is the...

2) First Bond movie not to kill any Bond girls.

Madeleine, incredibly, survives her second movie. In fact, she closes the film with the line:

I'm going to tell you a story about a man named Bond, James Bond.

This is remarkable not only because it means a woman had the last word - an event that's vanishingly rare in the DFGRR's experience - but also because Spectre ended with Bond resigning from MI6 to be with Madeleine. And "girl he quits spying to be with" has previously had a 100% fatality rate in this series. Tracy Bond notoriously didn't even make it to the honeymoon suite on her wedding day before getting murdered.

The screenwriters know we remember this, and set it up so that devotees would assume the same is about to happen to Madeleine, by having Bond quote Tracy's death scene to her early on in No Time to Die. "We have all the time in the world," he says, and the audience knows that can't be true.

Which it isn't, only for once, it's not because she's about to die. It's because she's going to be framed as an assassin by his enemies, leading him to dump her.

This sets up a five-year time skip, after which Madeleine proves to have rebuilt her career as a psychiatrist...and also become a mother to a little girl with very blue eyes. That in turn makes this the...

3) First confirmed pregnancy of a Bond girl.

You read that right: James Bond fathers a child in his twenty-fifth movie, with his sixty-ninth [nice] sex partner (and seventy-ninth girlfriend, if you count all the ones he doesn't get a chance to sleep with.)

This is a surprising turn of events no matter how you look at it. To begin with, thanks to the aforementioned rarity of multi-film relationships, until now no girl has survived with Bond long enough for this to happen. On top of that, though, Eon Productions has been extremely reluctant to include children in the Bond franchise, even as background extras, to the point that this movie actually marks the...

3a) First speaking role for a little girl.

. . . and Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet) is only the second child ever to speak to James Bond on-screen. The previous kid, a little Thai boy who tried to sell Bond a souvenir elephant, got unceremoniously chucked into a river by Roger Moore's Bond. (And no, I'm not making that up.)

So that makes it doubly surprising that, upon meeting little Mathilde and realizing she might be his, Bond doesn't throw her anywhere. James immediately starts trying to bond with her. (Pun intended.) He carves an apple into funny shapes, he fights to save her from the villain (who has kidnapped both Madeleine and Mathilde), and he gives her his sweater to keep her warm as she escapes the villain's base in Siberia. All things considered, therefore, in the day-and-a-half over which these events occur, Bond is actually shaping up to be a more-or-less decent father.

Unfortunately for both him and Mathilde, though, Madeleine has one last record to break...

4) First Bond girl to outlive James Bond.

C'mon, you knew we couldn't have a happy ending to this, didn't you? No Bond movie would ever end with him setting up housekeeping with a wife and raising a kid. Long-term relationships are not a part of the Bond universe. That's why Tracy gets shot in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's why we almost never see any Bond girl after the dramatic ending fadeout on her first movie appearance. It's why nobody went back for the dangling plot thread of Kissy Suzuki's implied pregnancy from the novel version of You Only Live Twice, not even when the franchise completely ran out of material to adapt (in approximately 1985).

This is because, as TV Tropes tells us, True Love is Boring. A Bond movie that involved a Mrs. Bond would not involve Bond getting with a succession of Bond girls. It would have to include him having concerns for his own safety. And it might involve him having something in his life that was more fun and/or important than the missions he goes on, the martinis he drinks, the one-liners he snaps at the people he kills, or even (perish the thought) the gadgets he always breaks on first use. And then he couldn't be 007 anymore.

Then why have Madeleine live? Why invent Mathilde?

I'm not sure, but let me make a guess. Daniel Craig's run as Bond (2006-present) has been marked by a lot of unusual events for the franchise. None of the Craig movies used the oft-repeated formula of "crisis arises, Bond is assigned to solve crisis, Q provides gadgets that will solve crisis, crisis is solved." Instead we had "Bond is a rookie" (Casino Royale), "Bond is out for revenge" (Quantum of Solace), "Bond is back from the dead to help M deal with a personal enemy" (Skyfall), and "Bond commits an off-the-books assassination on instructions from his deceased boss, which blows the cover off a very weird villain plot" (Spectre.) So when they were writing No Time to Die, which Craig had already announced would be his last appearance, the writers were most likely looking for plot points that would be a) unprecedented and yet b) not completely destructive of everything we've come to expect from the character over the past 60 years.

So, instead of a romantic happy ending, 007 gets something much more true to his nature: a heroic death. In the final act of No Time to Die, the villain infects him with a genetically-engineered whatchamacallit that will kill anyone with Madeleine's genes - meaning, as the villain puts it, "Yes Madeleine, yes Mathilde." There are missiles already en route to the villain's base, which will destroy the entire stockpile of said whatchamacallit, plus the process for making it. But unfortunately, there's no way to get the virus out of Bond's blood. He therefore sends Madeleine and Mathilde to safety with the new 007, Nomi, and then lets the missiles kill him.

What?! They're not going to let it end like that, are they?

Of course not. I mean, making Bond films is literally all that Eon Productions does, and they don't seem like they want to close up shop. Barbara Broccoli has said they'll start casting the new Bond next year. But she has not said whether that Bond will bear any relation to this Bond, and for the first time in franchise history, there's no canonical reason why he has to be true to the continuity. The next Bond might be older, or younger, or existing in an alternate universe, or less snarky, or more self-destructive a la the Bond from the original books. The new Bond could even be - like the new 007 was - a Black woman.

No way!

Likely? No. But possible? Yes! Barbara Broccoli wanted to do a Black female special-agent spinoff series all the way back in 2002. She was stymied by the fact that Die Another Day, which introduced said Black agent, was a downright awful movie. After all these years, the introduction of Nomi, and assigning her 007 as a code name, can't be anything but a nod towards a willingness to take the franchise where no woman has gone before. 

And no matter what crazy twist they come up with next, I am one girl who'll keep watching Bond, because after 6 decades, he's still cool...and dangerous to women. But also, pretty cool.