Barbara Broccoli and Eon Productions have done the market research and they know that people don't like shadowy government agencies anymore.

They know that it's not the 60s and people don't trust these things.

So they know that they have to like pay lip service to this stuff.

They have to be like, okay, yes, MI6 created the evil, like, biological

bomb that's going to destroy the world. Yes, they're not perfect, but, but you still need them.

And similarly, the Felix Leiter character, who I quite liked, actually, I think he's a,

he's a really good character and very solidly played his whole thing is that he's like you know

like bond who's retired from m i 6 he's an he's an ex-c ia guy uh and he's he's pissed off uh with

the bureaucrats but in his case they're the bureaucrats over at cia and so this speaks to how

weird and ambiguous uh these films are politically because it's kind of like, oh yeah, the CIA is bad here.

They're the malefactor.

Same with MI6.

But also, the protagonists are just like rogue agents from those very agencies or whatever

who are operating, you know, with even less oversight.

It speaks to the ambiguity of these films.

It also speaks to the fact that they are above all else.

Commercial productions. So they have to be kind of as broad as possible, and the broadness produces a lot of amusing and coherence.

Isn't it funny that Daniel Craig, I think, spent just as much time as a rogue agent in these movies as he spent as a real agent, as a licensed agent.

He's constantly going rogue.

And in fact, you know, the series started with him in Casino Royale in Quantum of Solace, just sort of like becoming an agent and then going rogue and then becoming an agent.

And then all of a sudden, we've had a series of movies where he's retiring one after another.

What we haven't seen are just him as Roger Moore.

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