Last time around I just joked that James Bond was a Time Lord, complete with a screengrab from one of the worst episodes of Nu Who ever simply because it happened to be the one in which Timothy Dalton played a Time Lord. Let's be more serious this time.
The facts:
Roger Moore is 3 years older than Sean Connery who is 9 years older than George Lazenby who is 5/7 years older than Timothy Dalton* who is 9/7 years older than Pierce Brosnan who is 15 years older than Daniel Craig. Roger Moore is 41 years older than Daniel Craig. Clearly, they cannot all be the same man.
*Wikipedia can't determine whether Dalton was born in 44 or 46. Given what I know of the actor and his desire for privacy, this does not surprise me.
Casino Royale establishes that the Craig Bond became a 00 agent after the Cold War ended, but four of the other Bonds have had missions explicitly dated to the Cold War: Connery in From Russia With Love, Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy, Dalton in The Living Daylights, and Brosnan in the precredits of GoldenEye. Therefore the Craig Bond cannot be the same fella as the Connery, Moore, Dalton or Brosnan Bonds. Craig!Bond's character arc in Casino Royale - starts off young and aggressive and energetic and a bit of a pup, actually, and matures via the drawn-out-over-several-hours process of falling in love with a woman who then goes and dies on him - is virtually identical to Lazenby!Bond's back in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, to the point where I can't imagine why the same man would need to go through the same arc twice. (In the novels, the Bond/Tracy romance in OHMSS is basically treated as a midlife crisis, but Lazenby was 29 and the script was duly amended. At least, I assume that's what happened.)
So Craig!Bond is a different man from the others. Good start.
The largest age gap between the consecutive Bonds is either 17 or 19 years between Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. Although Dalton's almost the right age to have married Tracy in 1969 (as her grave in For Your Eyes Only establishes - he would have been either 22 or 24, and Lazenby was 29, and Dalton was actually considered for the role but ruled out on the grounds he was too young), there's just no way to square either the age difference or the 180-degree shift in characterization. So as much as Licence to Kill wants to be a sort of sequel to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, unless you want to drop a large chunk of the Roger Moore era from canon, Bond's reaction to Della Leiter's death on her wedding day is just one massive coincidence.
How much of the Moore era would you have to drop in order to keep Dalton in the Connery-Lazenby-Moore line? Basically everything but the first two films. Remember: Roger Moore's Bond is an asshole in his first two films. Just watch that scene with Andrea Anders in the hotel room in Golden Gun. You're then looking at a 6-year age drop, which isn't significant. But then you're getting into dropping individual films out of continuity, which opens up a whole new can of worms - how can Bond and Blofeld meet each other for the first time in both You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service? And, for that matter, how can a janitor in OHMSS whistle the theme to Goldfinger unless it exists as a movie within the universe of that film?
Nnngh. Head hurts. Because in addition to the janitor whistling "Goldfinger," OHMSS also contains a scene where LazenBond recognizes mementos from Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball. It's starting to seem like no matter how you cut it, some films have to be dropped from continuity.
And then there's the Brosnan issue. It's difficult to remember now, Casino Royale having been more successful on that front, but GoldenEye was meant to be a reboot of sorts, taking what they needed and discarding the rest. During the Brosnan era the prevailing theory was that Bonds Connery through Dalton were one character and, extremely obscure references to Bond's dead wife aside, the BrosBond was somebody new.
Basically nobody holds to this anymore. That said, it is worth noting that the references to the late Mrs. Bond are obscure enough in all the films except For Your Eyes Only that they could just all have had a truly unfortunate romance in their pasts. There's basically no way to pretend that the woman buried under a grave marked Teresa Bond 1943-1969, Beloved wife of James Bond, We Have All the Time in the World isn't the same woman who appeared on-screen in a 1969 film which used the song "We Have All the Time in the World" rather prominently. Aside from the fact that she died in Portugal but is buried in England. Oh well.
So the first theory, and the one that causes the least problems, in addition to not all the actors playing the same character, each individual actor wasn't always playing the same character. You get something like this:
Bond 1: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, Licence to Kill. This Bond is a human being who occasionally has emotions and is occasionally a right bastard for the sake of getting a mission done. He's the one who married Tracy, so it makes sense that he'd visit her grave (you'll just have to squint as far as the age is concerned, although it's possible that FYEO actually takes place at the end of this Bond's career, and the Dalton films happened earlier) and get rightly P.O.'ed when the same thing happens to Felix Leiter.
Bond 2: Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill. This Bond did not really exist. He appeared in several films inside the James Bond universe, featuring plots far too outlandish to be real. This is why "Goldfinger" is whistled in OHMSS and "Nobody Does it Better" is a musical lock in For Your Eyes Only. The franchise was mercifully put to bed in 1985.
Bond 3: Brosnan. Except that only the first 12 minutes of Die Another Day happened. Everything else was just a fever dream brought on by torture in a North Korean prison. He's still there.
Bond 4: Craig.
But if you don't like this idea, then all I've got for you is that Connery-Lazenby-Moore have to be the same person, Dalton-Brosnan probably are the same second Bond (the Cold War ending mellowed him), and Craig's his own guy.
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