Jumping-off point: this Cracked article.
Under this theory, each actor played a different secret agent, but each of these different secret agents used the code-name "James Bond,"
which explains the little differences between them like the fact that Roger
Moore, unlike any of his colleagues, can disarm a nuclear bomb, or that Timothy Dalton would rather set his enemies on fire while Pierce Brosnan preferred punning them to death. Some details seem to fit: “Sean Connery”
retired after being forced to work with the self-evidently insane Tiger Tanaka
in You Only Live Twice ("Yes, Mr. Bond, now you need to go undercover as Japanese. No, I will not give you any accent coaching, only a horribly insulting makeup job"), only for his
replacement to resign out of grief as soon as his wife was killed, prompting "Sean" to come out of retirement for one more go before they could hire Simon Templar's Eyebrows; “Roger
Moore” was finally given his pension and chucked out, and “Timothy Dalton” went
rogue. One only hopes that "Pierce Brosnan" is still locked up in that North Korean prison and that all of Die Another Day only took place in his head.
But this theory falls apart quickly. “Roger Moore” meets a former classmate in The Spy Who Loved Me who addresses him
as “James Bond.” So “Roger Moore” was
going by that name back when he was at university, when “Sean Connery” or
perhaps even his unseen predecessor would have been using it. Was “Roger Moore” using the alias in school
for some reason, before handing it off to “Sean Connery” and then taking it
back years later? “Pierce Brosnan” blew
up a chemical plant circa in the intro to GoldenEye,
which takes place nine years before the main action. We can assume from the cars and fashions (one
only needs to look at the early Moore films to see that Bond will wear whatever is vaguely in style when the
film was made) and the fact that it came out in 1995 that the main action of GoldenEye is set in 1995, which means
that “Pierce Brosnan” blew up the chemical plant in 1986. Are we supposed to believe that “Pierce
Brosnan” grabbed the James Bond alias for one mission and one mission only
before handing it off to “Timothy Dalton?” How come
“Timothy Dalton” continues using the James Bond alias after he’s gone rogue? How come “George Lazenby” recognizes a bunch
of souvenirs from the adventures of “Sean Connery?” And the big one: what about Tracy?
Tracy Bond, wedded and dead-ed in the span of about two minutes at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, doesn’t even merit a mention in Diamonds Are Forever (because Diamonds Are Forever is a very
stupid film). She isn’t mentioned by
name in The Spy Who Loved Me, but Anya
brings up that Bond was married “only once” and that his wife was killed. It’s a sensitive subject enough for Roger
Moore’s Bond. In For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore visits and leaves flowers at a
grave that reads “Teresa Bond, 1943-1969, Beloved Wife of James Bond, We have
all the time in the World.” So Moore’s
and Lazenby’s Bonds married women with the same first name, who used the same
phrase, and who died in the same year.
I’m no statistician, but the odds of that happening to two secret agents
using the same cover name seems pretty damn low. (Yes, Lazenby’s Tracy was murdered in
Portugal while Moore’s is buried in London.
As her next of kin, he no doubt had her buried close to his home
turf.) And please don't tell me that he's only doing it to maintain his cover; Lazenby and Moore don't look anything alike, so that wouldn't fool anyone.
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| Definitely the same guy. |
Between this and the souvenirs,
I’m going to have to conclude that Connery, Lazenby and Moore are all the same
Bond, and that Moore’s ability to disarm a nuclear bomb where Connery can’t
comes from having read up on the subject after the events at Fort Knox.
On to Timothy Dalton’s Bond. In Licence to Kill, Felix Leiter tells the short-lived Mrs. Leiter that Bond was married once, “but that was a long time ago.” Dalton’s Bond wordlessly lets us know that it’s still a sensitive subject for him, twenty of our years later. And if Dalton’s performance in that scene doesn’t convince you, take a look at Bond’s reaction when Felix Leiter becomes the second secret agent in the franchise to lose his wife on his wedding day. Holy unrelenting fury, Batman, Licence to Kill sees Bond embark on an extremely personal vendetta.
As for Brosnan, in addition to that bit with the chemical plant I mentioned above, we meet an old flame of his in Tomorrow Never Dies, hinting that he, too, was Bond before he was 007. And when Elektra King asks him in The World is Not Enough if he's ever lost anyone he cared about, there's a notable pause - underplayed by Brosnan, and I'm just going to leave it at that.
So unless we're supposed to believe that there were two "James Bonds" active during the closing phase of the Cold War, we kind of have to assume that Dalton and Brosnan are the same guy. Now the only weird bit is the fact that Dalton's Bond knows General Pushkin pretty well, whereas Moore kept tangling with General Gogol, but that was down more to actor Walter Gotell's illness preventing him from having much more than a cameo in The Living Daylights. Then we just ignore Bros-Bond's inability to disarm a nuclear bomb by pointing out that the one in The World is Not Enough is obviously very different from the ones in The Spy Who Loved Me and Octopussy.
Craig pretty much can't be the same Bond as Connery-Brosnan, right? I mean, it's after 9/11 and he's just starting out, so he can't be a relic of the Cold War. Okay, you got me there. That one just doesn't work. He must just happen to have the same name and number as the guy who's rotting in a North Korean jail.
So then how did Connery-Brosnan stay so young (Roger Mortis aside) and keep changing his face? Well, obviously, James Bond is a Time Lord.
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| Well, yes. |
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| Obviously a Time Lord thing. |
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