Headscratchers / Thunderball

• At the end of the Batman Cold Open, Bond and a woman are about to drive away from the mansion when two thugs come running up, so he activates a spy-car defense: twin water cannons that knock the Mooks off their feet with a high-pressure spray. The twin streams of water last so long, there's no way that a car of that size could've held that much and still had room for an engine.
  • Q Branch, dear boy.
  • Beyond that, they appear to be fixed cannons. They only work at all because the goons are too dumb to step slightly to the side. What other application they'd have is... hard to guess.
    • See the Fridge Brilliance page for a possible answer.
  • Said car is also packing heat in the form of twin .30 caliber machine guns, deployable spike strips, a retractable bulletproof rear plate, plus a set of rotatable license plates for every country in the world and working EJECTOR SEAT. (Plus the complex mechanisms clearly needed for all of these to operate). Oh, and it still can run like a normal Aston Martin.
• Who put the jet pack on the building in the first place?
  • Bond. He used the jet pack to fly to the mansion while his French contact drove in his car. That's how he was waiting in the study before the bad guys got there.
• Why does the spine-stretching machine even have a setting fast enough to kill someone?
  • People come in different sizes and shapes. Presumably, the maximum setting is what's meant for someone built like a World's Strongest Man competitor and the lethality comes from the fact it's being used on someone smaller and less sturdily built.
  • It could also be to kill enemies before they inform their superiors.
    • There was a SPECTRE agent at Scrublands, but they never implied it was a front. There's no reason a regular spa would have a (literal) killing machine.
    • First thing you should know about SPECTRE? They have people everywhere.
• Maybe a dumb question but how would you torture someone with ice cubes?
  • Easily enough. For someone who's tied down, just suddenly put the ice cubes on the most sensitive spots. It doesn't sound like much, but constant teasing that way could drive someone mad.
  • Hold them against the skin steadily and they start to hurt. Press them hard against a person’s erogenous zones and keep them there (implied to be where Largo uses them on Domino) and they’re torture all right.
  • It's possible for ice cubes to stick to you and it can actually be very painful to just rip them off, especially if you manage to draw blood or outright tear flesh.
• Aside from the rapey nature of the scene and the way women might nor have been believed at the time, how could Patricia be responsible if a machine malfunctioned? Additionally, Bond has no visible marks of his near-death experience? Is his story that believable?
  • The facility would probably offer her as a scapegoat, you know "We weren't negligent, it was just one bad employee" and bring up other incidences of "negligence" no matter how small.
  • She could also have had a few screwups and this would give her employers the excuse they've been looking for to fire her.
• How did Bond hold his breath when he was in the pool with the sharks and didn't the sharks come from another source on Largo's property?
  • He is a Navy man and a swimmer after all. One would assume that Bond could hold his breath for (slightly) longer periods than most people.
• So, the whole implication is Domino had no idea until the end that Largo was really an evil prick. That said, he has a pool full of sharks at his mansion, which he even throws someone in at one point. How did he explain this all to Domino? "Oh, those are just my pet sharks, nothing to worry about, dear".
  • It's never said she doesn't know he's some kind of villain. What she didn't know is that he murdered her brother.
  • Also, it's only mentioned once in the film, but Largo is actually a legit collector and dealer of sharks on the side. The tunnel between his personal swimming pool and the shark pool seems to be a supervillainous affectation, though.
  • Why would she want to be his girlfriend if she knows he's evil then? She's a good person, I wouldn't think she'd just be fine with her boyfriend being an evil mobster/terrorist.
    • Two things: A) Largo likely was smart enough not to go full villain mode around her and B) He has money, a fine place to live, and travels around the world in a yacht. Human beings are fickle creatures, after all.
    • She explicitly does not want to be his girlfriend. She said she found him attractive when she first met him, but by the time of the movie she's referring to herself as his niece because it sounds nicer than "mistress" or "kept girl". She feels trapped in an abusive relationship, and she might even know that Largo is murderous, but she doesn't see a way out until she meets Bond, who gives her extra motivation when she learns Largo murdered her brother.
• Who the hell builds a health farm next door to a NATO airbase?
  • Soldiers need R&R, and bases are often located near towns.
• Why did SPECTRE demand their ransom in diamonds of a particular size and color? In the original novel they asked for gold of a specified purity. The thing is, gold is fungible. Once you melt down a gold bar and turn it into something else, its value as gold is not decreased, and it is totally impossible to prove that it was once a specific gold bar. Diamonds are not. Once you give a criminal 200 million in diamonds of a certain color, NATO can then spread the word through Interpol that anyone trying to sell diamonds of that color is likely fencing gems for a terrorist organization. In that instant, SPECTRE's ability to actually get market value for their diamonds disappears. Fencing gems rarely results in the thief getting full value, even when they're not hot, and this action makes an entire subsection of the gem market hot for years. Even if you cut the gems (which will reduce their total value), the color can't be changed, so anyone doing business with those gems will be able to immediately tell that they ultimately came from SPECTRE, and thus there will be much difficulty in selling them unless they are only sold from crooks to crooks, forever. Instead of acquiring a fortune, all Largo is doing is dropping the value of a given type of diamond to zero.
  • If they get a common colour, than it probably won't affect the market that much, because there's no way to tell any specific diamond is stolen. Especially since the governments seem to be sourcing them directly from de Beers, who controlled the entire world supply at the time (and still control the biggest share). Presumably de Beers can manipulate the market. Personally, I suspect the filmmakers also wanted to avoid using gold again since they'd just done Goldfinger the previous year.
  • Perhaps this was early planning for the Laser satellite from Diamonds Are Forever?
    • Or maybe they wanted to hint at the original Fleming novel?

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