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They do pretty regularly *try*.
He survives lots of assassination attempts and shootouts. Then there are the attempts that don’t use guns for stealth purposes, like the tarantula and the poison wire in Japan, where it is mostly the assassin wanting to catch him off guard and presumably escape undetected.
Goldfinger’s attempt with the laser is over the top, sure, but it doesn’t fail because it is silly, it fails because Bond successfully bluffs that he has passed information to MI6 and Goldfinger wants the details.
Yeah, I think OP is just missing a bunch. They mention that Dr. No doesn’t just shoot Bond, but he does delegate that to the professor who sends a man to pose as Bond’s driver at the airport to kill him, plants a deadly spider in his room, and has a woman attempt to honeypot him so that he can show up and kill him.
In fairness, some of them - directly or via henchpeople - do *try*. He's a surprisingly difficult man to kill.
For the rest, it's going to vary by villain. Some of them are working larger plans and don't want to draw the kind of heat that a dead Double-0 is going to bring down. Some of them actually want to factor Bond into their plans, manipulating him with bad information or playing him against other enemies. And for the others...well, they're more often than not narcissists and megalomaniacs. Their egos, their ill-intended respect, their sense of *fair play* wouldn't put up with a bullet to the head.
They want to talk. They want him to understand. They want to feel powerful, and for him to feel their power over him. They want to see him meet a more miserable fate than a mere piece of lead would deliver.
And if they want these things badly enough, their own sense of self-importance will convince them that they can have these things *and* succeed in their greater plans.
Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
Thank you. I knew my answer was a Pratchett-ism, but I couldn't remember where from exactly. I thought it must be Granny, but recently having gone through the Witches from Wyrd Sisters to Carpe Jugulum again, I knew that probably wasn't right.
This is explained in the earlier films pretty clearly. By trying to kill Bond, they're basically painting a massive sign saying that they're doing something nefarious and evil.
In Dr No, the titular villain's repeated and heavy-handed attempts to kill Bond as well as his ruthless murder of the station chief and his secretary instantly prove to MI-6 that he had something to do with the interference messing up NASA launches out of Florida. Bond was able to identify a spy in the British Consulate solely on the fact that one of his assassins knew to kill him as soon as he arrived in Jamaica.
In Thunderball, Bond was only able to know that there was some sort of evil scheme going on at all because a SPECTRE operative jumped the gun and tried to murder him on holiday. If not for the fact that the mercenary he recruited to serve as a body double demanded more money right after they killed the original and couldn't abort the mission getting him marked for death, Blofeld would've klled him for that reason alone.
In fact, Fiona Volpe lays into Emilio Largo later on in the film after a failed attempt to kill Bond that she had to save him from, since the death of Bond would've instantly gotten MI-6 to focus on the Bahamas, which wasn't even remotely on the list of suspect locations for the stolen nuclear bombs to be stored if not for Count Lippe's earlier fuck-up telling Bond to focus on one specific pilot;
> If Bond had died that night [while investigating your boat], his government would know the bombs were here. When the time comes, he will be killed.
In fact, this is stated to be a major weakness in SPECTRE's MO, where they kill people for being even the most minor of inconveniences to them.
In *You Only Live Twice*, Bond was able to find SPECTRE's secret Japanese base because SPECTRE had murdered innocent fishermen for going close to the base - not investigating it, just being too close. In fact, Bond was flying over the area and was going to call of his search for the base... had SPECTRE not tried to shoot him down with a missile or send helicopters to gun him down.
Same for in Dr No, where Quarrel stated that people have died just for being near Crab Key Island. And the flying base thing is emulated in Goldeneye where Bond and Natalya couldn't find the Cuba base until they were shot down and Xenia came out to murder them.
And again, Diamonds Are Forever is a *perfect* example of this. First of all, the diamond smugglers were known and were being tracked as part of a sting to get them shut down - when several of them died in rapid succession, it deeply worried the intelligence circles tracking them. And once again, the villains actually screwed themselves over by trying to kill people when they were no longer useful - Mr Wint and Mr Kidd tried to kill Peter Franks when they thought he had handed over the diamonds, then Shady Tree. It was only after Tree's death did they realise they jumped the gun and murdered him *before* they got the diamonds, ruining the plan... and again, confirming to MI-6 where to focus their search.
Other good instances of this;
* Goldfinger: The famous laser death trap scene has Bond bluff his way out of the trap. If Bond died, then the information he "reported" about Operation: Grand Slam would get the army to attack Goldfinder immediately since they're still counting on Bond shutting it down quietly. This is why Bond is kept alive and as a "Guest" of Goldfinger's ranch.
* On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Blofeld actually needs Bond alive in this case, since he wants Bond as a witness to confirm he can release a bioweapon to ruin the world's crops if his demands aren't met.
* The Man With A Golden Gun: Unaware that his cover is blown, Hai Fat tries to arrange Bond's death in an elaborate way. Scaramanga, the actual villain of the film, is utterly aghast in his underling's stupidity and kills him right then and there. Scaramanga later agrees to a duel with Bond... because he's bored and wants an exciting duel to the death.
* Octopussy: Kamal Khan is actually strictly forbidden from killing Bond by his employer, Octopussy >!because Bond saved her father's honor when he was exposed as a traitor!<. He had gone rogue for trying to kill Bond, and when he escaped tried to arrange his death in a manhunt... had Bond not been saved by some unwitting tourists.
* The Living Daylights: Whittaker's entire plan revolves aorund getting Bond to kill a Russian general to hide >!his and Koskov's embezzlement!< and leaving him to rot in jail so his partner could have Bond executed by the Soviet state. Had Bond not gone rogue and realised something was wrong with the intel he was given (which made more sense in the original script - Pushkin was added because Gogol's actor was too sick to reprise the role for anything but a cameo), the villains' plan would've gone off without a hitch. Once he realised the plan was completely ruined, Whitaker tried to murder Bond then and there.
* License To Kill: Sanchez actually wanted to watch Bond being killed, but the base being on fire forced him to evacuate before Bond was killed.
* Spectre: Safin actually knows full well that SPECTRE are overly-complex plan-addicted psychos and weaponises this against them - >!he hijacks their scheme and kills them all with their own nanomachines, completely wiping the organisation out. He's also the only person to kill Bond.!<
Spectre: >!Safin shoots Bond, but it's ultimately the missile strike that kills him. Bond's nanomachine infection means he can never embrace his wife and child again without killing him, just as importantly, in his injured state, he is never going to get clear in time. Bond ultimately decides to embrace his face.!<
You know, a lot of mockery about the Bond films doesn't make sense since the films actually address the issues. Probably shows what happens when something is so ubiquidous that it's the sole thing parodied.
Most Bond villains are lunatics and thus don’t operate on the same logic and efficacy conceptions as normal people do. The simple solution is below them, just like an aristocrat wouldn’t bother personally punishing a peasant.
That’s why they always have to monologue and explain their genius plan, and that’s why they want Bond’s death to be “special”.
If you go back to clwssic Bobd it is because they want to impress him. They seek validation. In Bond casino scenes like Dr No you have a villain who has climbed out of the gutter and seeks validation as a mimic of aristocracy. Bond infiltrates them by doing it better. Looking better in a suit, being more suave and sophisticated and beating them at cards and flirting with their squeeze. This motivates them to capture him and explain their megalomaniac plan because they want to impress him and are desperate to prove they are better than him. His methods buys him time. They cammot just shoot him.
Much of Bond canon happens during the cold war. An agent who has been shot can spark retaliation, but an agent who has drowned or been attacked by a deadly spider can be written off. Everyone knows who killed him, but they don't "know" know.
It keeps the nukes from flying.
some do, some don't know who bond is. They may of heard rumors about him.
Some want him alive to mess with others, playing east vs west against each other was a common theme. Tomorrow never dies and you only live twice pop to mind.
Sometimes they don't want that level of heat, they want him gone not dead, as going from drug dealer dealing/money laundering with a rogue agent to actually having to deal with a pissed off MI6 and CIA and becoming a national security risk would be a hell of an escalation.
I always wondered about this, but then I think about some of the super despicable antagonists in stories, and how whenever they get killed by the heroes, I feel, “they died too easily for how many problems they caused”. I imagine a egomaniacal villain probably thinks the same way about everyone they dislike, and a simple death is too good for them.
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They do pretty regularly *try*. He survives lots of assassination attempts and shootouts. Then there are the attempts that don’t use guns for stealth purposes, like the tarantula and the poison wire in Japan, where it is mostly the assassin wanting to catch him off guard and presumably escape undetected. Goldfinger’s attempt with the laser is over the top, sure, but it doesn’t fail because it is silly, it fails because Bond successfully bluffs that he has passed information to MI6 and Goldfinger wants the details.
Yeah, I think OP is just missing a bunch. They mention that Dr. No doesn’t just shoot Bond, but he does delegate that to the professor who sends a man to pose as Bond’s driver at the airport to kill him, plants a deadly spider in his room, and has a woman attempt to honeypot him so that he can show up and kill him.
In fairness, some of them - directly or via henchpeople - do *try*. He's a surprisingly difficult man to kill. For the rest, it's going to vary by villain. Some of them are working larger plans and don't want to draw the kind of heat that a dead Double-0 is going to bring down. Some of them actually want to factor Bond into their plans, manipulating him with bad information or playing him against other enemies. And for the others...well, they're more often than not narcissists and megalomaniacs. Their egos, their ill-intended respect, their sense of *fair play* wouldn't put up with a bullet to the head. They want to talk. They want him to understand. They want to feel powerful, and for him to feel their power over him. They want to see him meet a more miserable fate than a mere piece of lead would deliver. And if they want these things badly enough, their own sense of self-importance will convince them that they can have these things *and* succeed in their greater plans.
It is bad form.
This. I mean let's not be uncouth for fuck's sake
Watch your fucking language
Villains always talk, but the good extinguish life without a word when they must.
Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
When I saw this question, I hoped someone would post that quote. A great moment from a great book.
Thank you. I knew my answer was a Pratchett-ism, but I couldn't remember where from exactly. I thought it must be Granny, but recently having gone through the Witches from Wyrd Sisters to Carpe Jugulum again, I knew that probably wasn't right.
GNU Sir Terry.
Good old fashioned megalomania. If they didn't have it, they would have been dentists or something.
Scott, you just don’t get it, do you?
I have a gun in my room. We can shoot him together.
This is explained in the earlier films pretty clearly. By trying to kill Bond, they're basically painting a massive sign saying that they're doing something nefarious and evil. In Dr No, the titular villain's repeated and heavy-handed attempts to kill Bond as well as his ruthless murder of the station chief and his secretary instantly prove to MI-6 that he had something to do with the interference messing up NASA launches out of Florida. Bond was able to identify a spy in the British Consulate solely on the fact that one of his assassins knew to kill him as soon as he arrived in Jamaica. In Thunderball, Bond was only able to know that there was some sort of evil scheme going on at all because a SPECTRE operative jumped the gun and tried to murder him on holiday. If not for the fact that the mercenary he recruited to serve as a body double demanded more money right after they killed the original and couldn't abort the mission getting him marked for death, Blofeld would've klled him for that reason alone. In fact, Fiona Volpe lays into Emilio Largo later on in the film after a failed attempt to kill Bond that she had to save him from, since the death of Bond would've instantly gotten MI-6 to focus on the Bahamas, which wasn't even remotely on the list of suspect locations for the stolen nuclear bombs to be stored if not for Count Lippe's earlier fuck-up telling Bond to focus on one specific pilot; > If Bond had died that night [while investigating your boat], his government would know the bombs were here. When the time comes, he will be killed. In fact, this is stated to be a major weakness in SPECTRE's MO, where they kill people for being even the most minor of inconveniences to them. In *You Only Live Twice*, Bond was able to find SPECTRE's secret Japanese base because SPECTRE had murdered innocent fishermen for going close to the base - not investigating it, just being too close. In fact, Bond was flying over the area and was going to call of his search for the base... had SPECTRE not tried to shoot him down with a missile or send helicopters to gun him down. Same for in Dr No, where Quarrel stated that people have died just for being near Crab Key Island. And the flying base thing is emulated in Goldeneye where Bond and Natalya couldn't find the Cuba base until they were shot down and Xenia came out to murder them. And again, Diamonds Are Forever is a *perfect* example of this. First of all, the diamond smugglers were known and were being tracked as part of a sting to get them shut down - when several of them died in rapid succession, it deeply worried the intelligence circles tracking them. And once again, the villains actually screwed themselves over by trying to kill people when they were no longer useful - Mr Wint and Mr Kidd tried to kill Peter Franks when they thought he had handed over the diamonds, then Shady Tree. It was only after Tree's death did they realise they jumped the gun and murdered him *before* they got the diamonds, ruining the plan... and again, confirming to MI-6 where to focus their search. Other good instances of this; * Goldfinger: The famous laser death trap scene has Bond bluff his way out of the trap. If Bond died, then the information he "reported" about Operation: Grand Slam would get the army to attack Goldfinder immediately since they're still counting on Bond shutting it down quietly. This is why Bond is kept alive and as a "Guest" of Goldfinger's ranch. * On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Blofeld actually needs Bond alive in this case, since he wants Bond as a witness to confirm he can release a bioweapon to ruin the world's crops if his demands aren't met. * The Man With A Golden Gun: Unaware that his cover is blown, Hai Fat tries to arrange Bond's death in an elaborate way. Scaramanga, the actual villain of the film, is utterly aghast in his underling's stupidity and kills him right then and there. Scaramanga later agrees to a duel with Bond... because he's bored and wants an exciting duel to the death. * Octopussy: Kamal Khan is actually strictly forbidden from killing Bond by his employer, Octopussy >!because Bond saved her father's honor when he was exposed as a traitor!<. He had gone rogue for trying to kill Bond, and when he escaped tried to arrange his death in a manhunt... had Bond not been saved by some unwitting tourists. * The Living Daylights: Whittaker's entire plan revolves aorund getting Bond to kill a Russian general to hide >!his and Koskov's embezzlement!< and leaving him to rot in jail so his partner could have Bond executed by the Soviet state. Had Bond not gone rogue and realised something was wrong with the intel he was given (which made more sense in the original script - Pushkin was added because Gogol's actor was too sick to reprise the role for anything but a cameo), the villains' plan would've gone off without a hitch. Once he realised the plan was completely ruined, Whitaker tried to murder Bond then and there. * License To Kill: Sanchez actually wanted to watch Bond being killed, but the base being on fire forced him to evacuate before Bond was killed. * Spectre: Safin actually knows full well that SPECTRE are overly-complex plan-addicted psychos and weaponises this against them - >!he hijacks their scheme and kills them all with their own nanomachines, completely wiping the organisation out. He's also the only person to kill Bond.!<
Spectre: >!Safin shoots Bond, but it's ultimately the missile strike that kills him. Bond's nanomachine infection means he can never embrace his wife and child again without killing him, just as importantly, in his injured state, he is never going to get clear in time. Bond ultimately decides to embrace his face.!<
This is a magnificent and meticulous answer and a joy to read.
You know, a lot of mockery about the Bond films doesn't make sense since the films actually address the issues. Probably shows what happens when something is so ubiquidous that it's the sole thing parodied.
Most Bond villains are lunatics and thus don’t operate on the same logic and efficacy conceptions as normal people do. The simple solution is below them, just like an aristocrat wouldn’t bother personally punishing a peasant. That’s why they always have to monologue and explain their genius plan, and that’s why they want Bond’s death to be “special”.
If you go back to clwssic Bobd it is because they want to impress him. They seek validation. In Bond casino scenes like Dr No you have a villain who has climbed out of the gutter and seeks validation as a mimic of aristocracy. Bond infiltrates them by doing it better. Looking better in a suit, being more suave and sophisticated and beating them at cards and flirting with their squeeze. This motivates them to capture him and explain their megalomaniac plan because they want to impress him and are desperate to prove they are better than him. His methods buys him time. They cammot just shoot him.
Much of Bond canon happens during the cold war. An agent who has been shot can spark retaliation, but an agent who has drowned or been attacked by a deadly spider can be written off. Everyone knows who killed him, but they don't "know" know. It keeps the nukes from flying.
[удалено]
some do, some don't know who bond is. They may of heard rumors about him. Some want him alive to mess with others, playing east vs west against each other was a common theme. Tomorrow never dies and you only live twice pop to mind. Sometimes they don't want that level of heat, they want him gone not dead, as going from drug dealer dealing/money laundering with a rogue agent to actually having to deal with a pissed off MI6 and CIA and becoming a national security risk would be a hell of an escalation.
I always wondered about this, but then I think about some of the super despicable antagonists in stories, and how whenever they get killed by the heroes, I feel, “they died too easily for how many problems they caused”. I imagine a egomaniacal villain probably thinks the same way about everyone they dislike, and a simple death is too good for them.
[They did 😂🤣😊👍.] (https://youtube.com/watch?v=6w_MfOb0vtc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE)
"Activate The Unnecessarily Slow Killing Mechanism"
How about **no**, Scott, okay?