Headscratchers / No Time to Die

Norway

• Madeleine and her mother are French. Why are they living in Norway?
  • It's very likely that it's just a home Mr. White owned that he stashed his wife and child at. We know he had a home in Austria and one in Lake Cuomo as well.

Why Matera?

• Vesper died in Venice, in North-East Italy. Matera isn't remotely close◊, so why would she be buried there? (outside of the obvious cinematic appeal of such a beautiful old city)
  • It looked like a family tomb/crypt, possibly she was interred alongside her parents.
  • Specifically her maternal family, as only the last name before Vesper's has the surname Lynd.

Why not now?

• In his first meeting with M, Bond berates him for Project Heracles before storming off. Why didn't he tell M about Logan Ash's betrayal? It's the least he could do for Leiter.
  • Bond, at this point, isn't sure he can fully trust M, and wants to find out more before sharing any of his own information.

What's the plan?

• What is Safin's evil plan after taking out SPECTRE? He just lounges around his ugly garden and babysits Mathilde.
  • Trolling Madeleine. His life's work.
  • He apparently wanted to murder millions of random people so he could play God.
  • Safin didn't have a specific 'evil plan' he was about to implement immediately. His entire goal in this movie was to acquire the Heracles weapon and modify it to suit his purposes. Presumably, in the near-future, he would use it to cause chaos across the globe, either by deploying it himself, or by selling it to other organizations and forces who would use it for their purposes.
  • When you control something like Heracles, you can afford to sit and idle by in power and control. If you want someone dead, you merely have to create a chain of touch between individuals. If he were to threaten you or the ones you loved, you would be faced with the same choice as Bond - avoid all contact with people lest they die. Anyone could be your potential assassin and most of them would be unwittingly one. If nothing else, he could create a deep sense of paranoia and distrust, ruling because he is safe and could provide safety. Or, if he was more aggressive, he could simply imbue all of his minions with it and kill entire swaths of people in one go as a sort of artificial pandemic (and we know how that goes).
    • He is definitely planning on killing millions as soon as possible- that is made clear in the movie as he already has a kill list of DNA samples. He just doesn't explain "how" or "why" beyond vague details.
  • He doesn't explain it. It is definitely a weakness of the movie. We know why he wants revenge on Spectre but we don't know why he is planning on killing millions or who his precise targets are, although he vaguely implies that he is bad people (and their families) as he compares himself to Bond but on a bigger scale.
  • He said he was expecting clients. Either he was using them to raise money for his next phase, or he was just waiting for them to start various genocidal wars for their own reasons.
  • Maybe this was the reason no Bond villain has been able to kill Bond - they always explain their plans. Safin doesn't explain his plan, and so he finally succeeds at killing James Bond.

Departure

• Why did Nomi leave on the boat with Madeline and Mathilde? As a 00, shouldn't she join Bond as he fills Mooks with lead?
  • To defend Madeline and Mathilde in case someone tries to attack them on the water.
  • One of the official mission objectives was getting Madeline and Mathilde to safety. Nomi was carrying out that part of the mission.
• Followup: why did Nomi leave on the boat instead of Bond? Madeline and Mathilde are clearly more attached to him than her and Nomi can clearly hold her own in a fight.
  • Bond, being Bond, unilaterally took the decision that he had to "finish it", which left Nomi on rescue duty.
    • And Nomi, M, and the rest of MI6 complied with this because...why? Especially when previous scenes established her as someone who wouldn't listen to him.
    • Nomi has by this point learned to trust Bond's experience. He is the senior agent and has the best chance of accomplishing the primary mission of destroying Heracles. Nomi is willing to accomplish the secondary mission of rescuing Madeline and Mathilde.
• Followup 2: why couldn't have Nomi returned with the boat to help Bond after seeing Madeline and Mathilde to safety? She was useless on the docks.
  • She needed to stay with them to ensure their safety.
  • But then why couldn't she drop them off with other field agents in on the operation? There were definitely support members on board with Q on the plane that suggested this wasn't a totally covert operation. In addition, if the plan was to destroy Hercules, surely they would've designated a safe zone for when Bond et al. to go to afterwards?
    • Q and most of the rest of the support was on a plane. No doubt Nomi, Madeline, and Mathilde were eventually picked up by the navy, but they couldn't get anyone else into position before Safin's distributors got there.
• Why did Madeline not tell Bond/Nomi that Safin had an insurance policy with the virus for her and Mathilde? In fact, Nomi going instead of Bond gives Safin no leverage at all and would've foiled his plan pretty quickly.
  • So, I agree that Nomi could’ve stayed, but this isn’t really true. The point of Heracles is that you can never get the Nanobots off of you, hence Bond still has the same bots that were used to kill Blofeld. One major reason that James HAS to let himself die at the end is the simple fact that even if he never physically touched his wife or daughter again ANYONE he does touch could start a chain that eventually leads to them being infected. The world is a big place, but there will always be the chance that someone he met right after leaving the island will A)eventually come into contact with his family or B)come into contact with another person that will come into contact with his family. Or so on. The final plan to kill Bond’s family works regardless of who he uses it against. It’s just specifically more painful if it’s Bond himself who casuals their deaths.

Letting the tyke go

• Why did Safin let Mathilde go? Did he have a sudden attack of conscience or did he just want to stop carrying her?
  • He knew that Bond would destroy the lab and find her; the red vial of Heracles was part of the plan, not just an insurance.
  • Maybe he was going to spare her or use her further as a human shield, but then she bit his hand and he decided he didn't need to bother with her anymore, because Heracles would eventually find her.
  • We could just as easily ask why did he save Madeline all those years ago and then seemingly never contact her again over, at least, a 20 year period. For whatever reason he seems fine with Wanting to possess both of Bond’s loved ones, but also just letting them walk away. Though at this point he also has the Heracles solution with their DNA as targets that he can use against Bond. So, arguably he’s just planning to kill them anyway as a screw you to Bond.
  • Safin isn't exactly sane.
  • Simple combat pragmatism. Carrying a child around is cumbersome, plus Mathilde would likely try to free herself, hitting or biting Safin. By letting her go, he's free to do whatever he wants, while Bond has now to find and secure a 5-year-old girl in addition to his other plans.

From jail

• So how exactly is Blofeld controlling SPECTRE from his prison cell? Lots of time is spent setting up this mystery and then we just never find out.
  • Some kind of bionic eye; that's why his right eye socket is empty when Bond meets him.
    • Which apparently could broadcast and receive hours of reasonably high-quality video. Without a charger or external power source.
  • His seemingly psychotic ramblings in his cell were in fact his communications.
• The real question is how it got past MI6 that Blofeld was running an entire organization for five years while in their custody, all because they thought he was crazy and talking to himself.
  • We don't know how effective SPECTRE was after Blofeld was imprisoned, so this might be him trying to trigger MI6. Not to mention that maybe he was just communicating to his lieutenants (e.g. Number 2) and they were doing the brunt of the work.

Bond and Blofeld

• When Bond visits his erstwhile nemesis and foster-brother in prison, why does he address him as "Blofeld"? He knew him as Franz Oberhauser long before he changed his identity, and even addressed him as "Franz" in Spectre.
  • Bond calling Blofeld any name other than "Blofeld" (or perhaps "Ernst") would be confusing to anyone who hadn't seen Spectre, and even to viewers who have seen it and might have forgotten the bit about Blofeld's back-story.
  • Plus, Bond might just be acknowledging that Franz Oberhauser, as Bond knew him, is dead, and only Blofeld remains.

Bloody murder

• After Bond gives Blofeld an unfriendly hug and accidentally kills him, why wasn't he arrested? Shouldn't it warrant an investigation?
  • It was quiet clear that Bond wasn't the cause of Blofeld's death, but rather, the nanobots were (M and Q know what Heracles does). Moreover, Bond isn't an 'ordinary' law enforcement officer but an elite agent of the British Secret Service working during a crisis situation - "normal" procedure wouldn't apply in this case.
  • If nothing else, 00 status and/or the respect thereof of his career. Given the 'licence' to kill, that also kind of implies that any killing he does is inherently protected by that status. If nothing else, there might be some kind of investigation into this sort of situation but it's unlikely to be anything like a normal investigation especially in a crisis.
  • I don't think anyone outside of M's inner circle knew that Blofeld is still alive and kept in the cell; such a prisoner would be a very well-kept secret.

First contact

• If the Obruchev-modified Heracles was programmed to be able to kill SPECTRE agents and their families... why didn't it kill Madeleine? Bond was exposed to it in Cuba, so as Mr White's daughter, she should have died as a result of the contact when Bond caught the Blofeld variant from her...?
  • Mr. White has been dead for five years, so the Heracles would not have been programmed with his DNA.
  • Obruchev programmed the virus released at the party to kill current members of Spectre, not agents who died five years ago. He had to have genetic profiles of all of the targets to do it.

Bond vs Safin

• When Bond does his fakeout groveling and shoots Safin's guard he also seemingly shoots Safin, who seems to react as if shot. But he shows no reaction or injury when fleeing with Mathilde. What happened?
  • Bond shot at his guards before aiming at Safin so he had plenty of time to activate the trap door. By the time Bond started firing at him all he had to do was duck his head a bit and let gravity do its thing. It only looks like he got shot for how fast-paced the scene is.

Safin's Pre-Title Limp

• Before he even gets shot by Madeleine, Safin shows signs of injuries, noticeably limping his way to Swann's lakehouse. It's implied it's a result from his poisoning but it's all gone later in the film?
  • A friend who watched the movie simply thought that perhaps he was simply exasperated & exhausted by the journey to the lakehouse, especially since it was winter. He was dressed to kill but there's no indication that he was a soldier and had the endurance to go through the snow seamlessly. Considering that Bond visits there later by car, it could've been a significant distance by foot.
  • That flashback was a long time before the events of the film, so perhaps he managed to fix the limp?
  • When part of his mask is shot off, the facial scarring is far more intense, presumably because the poisoning he survived happened more recently. Since the scarring faded over the 20 years it takes to get to the main plot, there may have been other side effects, like nerve damage, etc, that faded over time. Considering Madeleine seemed to shoot him with most of a full clip, he was probably wearing some body armor as well which would have been very heavy.

Poison Island

• It's mentioned that Safin's island belonged to his family for years, but he seems to only just be restoring/returning to it by the film's climax. But it also has a high-tech lab ready, despite other features clearly being mid-construction. Safin clearly has access to money and henchmen and equipment so it's not as if he couldn't use it as a base sooner.
  • The other features such as the paintings were probably lower-priority, since he would want to get his operations up and running as soon as possible.
  • Maybe Safin stole Spectre's resources and manpower after murdering them in Cuba.
  • When Q and Bond discuss the island they note it is seeing a flurry of activity in the last few days, and suggest he took it back from Spectre. They were using it for poison for years, just not for Heracles.

Quarantine

• Injuries aside, I don't see why Bond needed a Dying Moment of Awesome just because he has been infected. He could still see Madeline and Mathilde while behind a secure cell (something MI6 can afford and Q can build for him) while a treatment/antidote to the agent can be synthesized.
  • One of the points of using nanobots as an assassination weapon is that they can be easily transferred to other people, as is shown by what happened to Blofeld. If Bond had contact with anyone after being infected the chances are very good that the nanobots would eventually find their way from Bond to Madeline or Mathilde somehow.
  • Why take the chance and risk the lives of the people you love most? Especially when at the moment there’s definitely not a cure. He would be gambling with something he could never get back.

Opening Sequence

• Why does Bond stop in the middle of the chase and just sit there while the car is bombarded with bullets? It's not to lure the villains into an ambush, because he sits there for a very long time while Madeleine screams at him to do something, only staring coldly at her. It's hard to believe that he could be that sadistic as to torment her like that, even if he genuinely believed that she'd betrayed him, or so despondent over her supposed betrayal that he'd try to essentially commit a Murder-Suicide by letting the bad guys kill them.
  • At first, it seemed as if he wanted to see the fear in her eyes to know she was telling the truth, but then...he breaks up with her anyway.
  • Well, you say it’s hard to believe, but we all saw him do that very thing. And he’s clearly not happy with her. Remember, he was fully planning on killing Vesper at the end of Casino Royale before the finale shootout begins. Bond is not a man who takes betrayal lightly and, if anything, the real question is why does he bother to save her at all if he still thinks she betrayed him at the end of this sequence? Because as the other guy above me states, he still broke up with her either way and doesn’t seem to believe she didn’t betray him until he hears it directly from Blofeld. I’d argue that the stop itself is all about him processing the supposed betrayal and deciding what he wants to do about it, and maybe just letting both of them die does cross his mind.
  • Bond is not being sadistic to Madeline. In his mind this is the second time he has been betrayed by a woman he loved. He is trying to decide whether he wants to let Spectre kill them both. Finally he decides to kill the Spectre agents and save Madeline, but never see her again.

The Joint Security Service

• Is it explained anywhere what became of the Joint Security Service from Spectre, or are we to assume it was dissolved by virtue of the director being a mole?
  • We can assume it was dissolved since M still has his job. Q might have provided all the necessary evidence that this was a Spectre inside job.

The Nanobots

• How is it medically possible for them to be in your body forever? It's not a virus that can replicate itself. The finite amount of bots that enter your bloodstream will get peed out eventually.
  • Perhaps the nanobots can replicate themselves while in the human body. It would certainly be a more effective weapon that way, and it would explain how there were enough nanbots in the spray in Cuba to all kill all the next of kin at the funerals of the Spectre agents.
  • If some Real Life new tech is to be believed, they might indeed be able to replicate.
• Why would MI6 spend billions on the Heracles Project without coming up with an antidote or some way to disable the bots just in case the weapon falls into the wrong hands, which, oops, is exactly what happens?
  • Project Heracles is still unfinished when Orbuchev is kidnapped by Spectre. Presumably the antidote or other failsafe was next on the project list for development, but the weapon was stolen before they finished it.
  • Even if an antidote existed, it would have been in the same lab. They murdered all the scientists and blew the lab to hell, so it would have been lost.
• Why couldn't Bond just use his EMP watch to disable the bots? Sure it likely would've hurt like hell, but he'd survive without being a risk to Madeleine and Mathilde. I get that the producers wanted a definitive end to the Craig Era, but it seems that common sense was the biggest casualty of all.
  • Bond had already been mortally wounded by Safin before he was poisoned. He knew he wasn’t going to make it back to his family, so he decided to complete his mission: open the blast doors and let the missiles blow the nanobots both on the island and within himself to kingdom come.
  • The EMP is only effective against unshielded electronics. It works on Primo's eye because his bionic eye was unshielded. The nanobots are presumably shielded, since Q doesn't suggest using an EMP to destroy them.
  • Shielded nanobots would be large as little bugs. Not practical and it is not that kind of movie. It is possible that they have components not electronic, or electronic but not metallic... or they are viruses, really.

Precision of the Nanobots

• How can the nanobots scan precisely the whole DNA of the victim before activation?
  • It is more simple to target only some sequences, and they can be common with other individuals... so that it would be simpler and more economical to have genocidal nanobots rather than specific-person killer nanobot.
• In the case of very precise nanobots... how much memory they would need? And which kind of memory support?
• If any bot would have only a part of the information, how do they communicate?
• If the nanobots can communicate, are they a swarm? Can they develop a collective mind?
• Finally: do the nanobots replicate? This is important: if the nanobots replicate, they are a virus. They can change, because of errors in replication. With consequences. They will become out of controls.
• Back to the topic: how much Gigabytes are needed by a single nanobot to work properly?
  • As used in the movie Heracles never targets just a specific person - they target related individuals. That's why all the blood relatives of the Spectre agents who came in contact with the bots at the funerals also died. That would indicate that Heracles is only using a portion of a person's DNA sequence for its target and it is not precise enough to target a single individual.

Too firm declaration of no antidote

• Why do M and Q affirm vehemently that there is no possible antidote? Is it not lethally stupid to liberate a possible biohazard with no idea how to stop it? (And if M is so stupid, why is he in charge?)
  • Development of Heracles was not complete when Spectre stole it from the lab. An antidote was probably next on the list of things to add to the weapon before it could be safely used, though Obruchev obviously didn't care.
• If the nanobots can be directed against DNA, can they be directed against other nanobots? Why no one discuss about the possibility? (Possible Rule of Drama).
  • That assumes the nanobots have DNA. Also, only one person seems to know how to program Heracles in the first place, and he is killed during the movie.

Q's EMP and the Earpieces

• Some suspension of disbelief aside, how does the EMP in the watch Q gives Bond not fry the earpiece radios Bond and Nomi use? Q said he isn't sure of its range, which, fine. Bond's first use is about ~2 feet away from his head, and he holds it right up to the door. But the second time when he kills Primo, it's inches from his head and yet his communications gear still works. How?
  • Electronics can be shielded from EMP effects. The earpieces used by MI6 must be shielded.

Harvesting?

Safin's henchmen are in hazmat suits sweeping....something at his base. Bond remarks it's a harvesting site, but Safin uses nanobots. What are they harvesting and why?

• As discussed in other questions, the nanobots would need to have some way of replicating themselves or they would be ineffective as a weapon. The pool appears to be the "raw" unprogrammed nanobots replicating in preparation to be programmed and deployed. That would explain why they attack and dissolve any DNA they find in the pool, like the racist scientist.

Letting Bond see Blofeld

Bond is sprayed with nanobots during the Spectre party. By the time they realize what nanobots are there's probably no way to save targets of the initial launch as those nanobots have already spread. However, Bond was already infected so letting him see Blofeld face to face should have killed Blofeld. Why are people surprised? Why do they suspect Madeline? Safin didn't really need her to cooperate to kill Blofeld but it's understandable he's obsessed with her and wants her to be involved. Was there some sequence change during the production? Was Bond not meant to be exposed to nanobots at this point?

• Safin's plan and motives are not fully fleshed out beyond his plan to revenge himself on Spectre. Anything but arresting Bond and isolating him after his exposure in Cuba was pure Idiot Ball, as M knows how Heracles works, knows Bond was exposed, and has no idea what the villain wanted at that point. For all they know, it had the Prime Minister's DNA encoded in it, and it could have easily jumped from Bond -> M -> PM
• At this point, they knew Bond had been infected with nanobots, but they were the ones meant to kill all of Blofeld's henchnmen. He's infected with the ones that will kill Blofeld after this point, so there's really no point for them to assume he's had a second dose in him.

Why even develop the nanobots?

When M is walking Bond through why they developed Heracles, he talks about how "We used to be able to get into a room with the enemy, we could look him in the eye. Now the enemy is just floating in the ether."

So if the enemy is someone like bin Laden who is hiding in a cave somewhere, or has vanished and never leaves a safehouse, how do you expect to get their DNA to program the weapon? And if you can get close enough to get a DNA sample and confirm it's your target, why can't you send in a Double-0 to get in the room with them and kill them the old-fashioned way?

Q and Moneypenny make an off-hand reference to databases with DNA information being breached, but it seems impossibly unlikely that Blofeld or bin Laden or any supervillain will send off a DNA swab to 23andme or Ancestry because they're curious about their great-grandpa even while they're in hiding and "Floating in the ether."

• Because Mallory realized that the deadliest enemy is actually those hidden within their own ranks. Initially in Skyfall, Mallory didn't believe that the "shadows" exist and didn't see the cloak and dagger aspects of the world, hence why he had a disdain for the first M and her "sentimental" trust in Bond. Of course, the attack led by Silva (along with Max Denbigh/C's infiltration shortly afterward in Spectre and the Nine Eyes plot) made Mallory realize that he can't really trust anyone anymore - especially the people that he works with. Hercules was designed therefore as a safeguard and collected the DNA of MI6 agents and allies, not necessarily their enemies. It was only when it was stolen by Safin that it became a weapon.

Why kill the scientist?

If Obruchev was the one who created the nanobots and the virus for Safin, surely he should be kept alive to reverse-engineer or help develop an antidote/cure? Nomi just killing him out of annoyance feels incredibly reckless, especially when he was practically powerless.

• First of all, Obruchev was never going to do anything to find an antidote/cure for the virus, because he wanted to use his weapon on such a giant scale and enjoys watching people perish when it's in effect. This proves that he is one of the most evil scientists in the 007 series! Obviously, he has zero respect for humanity and wants to see multiple people around the world killed in a vicious and unpleasant manner.
• Second, he had just threatened to murder an entire ethnic group, along with being The Load for nearly the entire time. Worst of all, he might get both of them killed, (as you can see when Nomi had him at gunpoint, he was slowing her down). If the bad guys kill Nomi and get Obruchev, they could use him again. Nomi made a judgment call to deny the enemy resources and improve her chances of actually surviving the mission. On top of that, even before the mission, M ordered Bond and Nomi to kill both Safin and Obruchev! So, precisely speaking, the scientist was going to die one way or another, and once he made the threat to wipe out all West African people, Nomi decided that enough was enough and that it was time for him "to die."

Its just a number

• As pointed out by Honest Trailers it doesn’t make much in-universe sense for everybody to care so much about Nomi having taken up from the 007 callsign. While obviously significant from the audience’s perspective due that number being synonymous with Bond for over 60 years, within this continuity Bond only held the number for at most 10 years. Furthermore, for obvious reasons the fact it’s his number isn’t as famous as it is in real life. This would like getting hung up you received clock in number from the previous employee of the month, not something that should warrant more than an “oh, neat”.

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