Warning: this is not really a meta! this is just me rambling! have a nice day!
So I was reading Blood, Sweat and Bond the other day, and found this:
By the end of Skyfall, Bond is in a really good place,’ [Daniel Craig] says. ‘Ralph comes in as a new M and says that they’ve got a lot of work to do. It feels like a new opportunity to look at things with fresh eyes.’
and of course, because I’m me, I immediately went I HAVE EMOTIONS ABOUT THIS (I have since Skyfall tbh)
By the time we get to the end of Skyfall, MI6 is based in a new building, there’s a new M, there’s a new Q, there’s a new office ally (Eve). Mansfield, a mother figure, who possibly understood him better than anyone else, and Silva, who tried so hard to get under Bond’s skin, are dead. It is, as Tanner said (too early, though, he should have touched wood), “the new MI6.”
Skyfall, the home Bond never really liked, that holds a bunch of… well, let’s say not happy memories, has been wiped off the face of the earth, more or less, and it’s taken with it most of Bond’s childhood, and the evidence that at one point he was powerless and vulnerable. That’s a part of his life Bond couldn’t control, but now almost all evidence that it existed has been destroyed. Similarly, the Aston Martin, which comes from the Casino Royale era of his character (or the Vesper era, whichever you prefer), before he hardened his heart and becomes an automaton (tangent: remember that brilliant article about how good Daniel Craig is at playing a two-dimensional nostalgia tragic figure? no? well here it is [link]), is also gone, along with the reminders of the old Bond that it must have carried.
@prettyarbitrary wrote a meta [link] about this a while ago, here, have a quote:
The point is, as far as Bond’s concerned, I’m pretty sure Skyfall getting wiped off the planet is one of the best things that could ever happen to him. Because that ghost of his old life that haunted him? It’s gone. Before, someone could conceivably go there. See who he was. Walk away with an awareness of him that’d be beyond his control to stamp out. But now it’s only in his head, where he can seal off that door so no one ever goes in there again. That last piece of youth and vulnerability is gone. Now it’s like he sprang full-formed out of a gun barrel to assassinate for Queen and country.
And at the end, that’s what we see. Just before that cut, we have Bond at his most agonizingly human—which is barely recognizable as James Bond at all. That’s… some other guy, also played by Daniel Craig. And after, when that last persistent fragment of his past is dead, along with his house and the woman who made him what he is, we have a cold predator in a bespoke suit. He’s closer to a machine than human, and then we know him instantly. “At the end,“ we say, “it’s like he’d finally become James Bond.”
spoilers: I LOVE THIS INTERPRETATION, OK, I LOVE IT. In fact, @alchemicalalice actually wrote a fic [link] about this, which I love, so I’m going to quote that too:
He shakes Mallory’s hand, and he feels…purged.
It’s a strange sort of cleanliness, and if Bond were given to self-reflection (which he never has been, and never will be now), he would think it maybe unhealthy, or maybe hollow.
And he does feel hollow. There’s a blank space somewhere in his sternum that when he breathes it whistles like a gale through a broken window, but it doesn’t hurt precisely, it just exists.
He needs this, he thinks. If he is to continue, he will need it this way.
[…]
Standing in Mal—in M’s office, he feels stripped down to his bare essentials, and even if his file remains full, it sits light on his shoulders now.
Everyone who has known what lies beyond its censor bars, known him beyond words on a page, have now become words themselves.
(tangent the second: there are only a few Bond fics that have really influenced the way I experience canon, ships etc/that have really fucked me up. I mean, there’s that one with the “I kill home” thing (when will that line set me free), absolutely everything by scioscribe, and this fic and its companion one. like. fucking hell)
I fucking love this whole thing. And I think Spectre, for the most part, handled it pretty well. At least, no one was doubting Bond’s ability to do his job anymore (I mean, not more than you’d expect, seeing as he keeps blowing up things), and there was no “let’s go on and on about M’s death, see her grave, etc” montage which I was half expecting, either. Moneypenny mentions Skyfall, but Bond doesn’t really react – he’s over it, more or less.
HOWEVER. They brought the Aston Martin back. I didn’t have so much of an issue with the Big Bad being someone from Bond’s past, because that was more about Bond’s professional past than his personal past. but I didn’t want that Aston back. To me, it being destroyed was part of the “end of an era” thing that the last bit of Skyfall set up: bringing it back sort of ruins the “clean slate” thing.
Anyway i just have. feelings? idk? does this make any sense at all????
Also, if anyone has links to any other metas, interviews etc about this interpretation of the end of Skyfall, give them to me
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1V4l9Gy