I’m sorry you haven’t gotten acquainted with Parade’s End because I think we’re still talking about the same things. PE is also very much about a slightly outdated man being reforged in violence (in PE’s case, Tietjens as a soldier in WWI as well as at war with his wife and his whole way of life, until he realizes that in a dishonorable world, he has no need to go on being an honorable man). What emerges is stronger and more complex and also more honest, but neither man is the man he was in that other age, those men who typified that age’s needs.
The pretty Connery Bond; the fat ox of the morally-upright-to-spite-himself Tietjens: it’s their funeral and the funeral of the age that needed them. Resurrected, the Skyfallen Bond and the Tietjens who dances with Valentine, they are more timely, but they are different because they do know they live in another era now.
And I’m not going to bring Sherlock-after-the-hiatus speculation into it, nor say anything about the angst of an uncertain future. It’s late at night and these are too easy.
TL;DR: Parade’s End is about endings. Skyfall is about rebirth—the rebirth of Bond in the sense of him pulling himself together, his rebirth as a weapon for MI6 in a new world, and—most interesting to me and I swear to god the real reason I’m even writing this much on the subject—the rebirth of Bond as a franchise, where we have watched the development of and been handed a revitalized, more complex character who can survive in modern pop culture.
And that is way more critical analysis than even the deepest James Bond plot has ever really earned. ^_^
Aha, I catch you now. ^_^ Yeah, in that sense it sounds like it is the same thing.
Sherlock, I think, is likely to turn out to be something else altogether. Unless, of course, you’re talking about the fandom and its own baptism of fire. ^_^
Capturing interest: Wherein PA thinks too much about James Bond.