Headscratchers / The Living Daylights

• I can't get Necros' death out of my head! He and Bond were hanging on a floating net full of opium bags in the rear of an airplane. Necros was holding Bond's boot and didn't let go. Thus, Bond cut his shoelaces and sent Necros flying. Why couldn't Necros just have grabbed the freaking NET (which at that point was very grabable, as most of the bags were thrown out) when he saw what was happening? I just didn't see that swift dispatch of Necros coming. And before you say something like "under velocity that high, he should be glad to hold on to his shoe", keep in mind Bond was holding both him and Necros singlehandedly, while cutting the lace, plus compare to, for instance, the Octopussy plane fight, where both Bond and The Dragon were climbing the pretty smooth surface of the roof of an airplane and both were doing just fine. I really don't understand this scene, even though it looks hilarious the way Necros is still holding onto the boot after being cut loose (like some sort of trophy he just won).
  • Dangling thousands of feet in the air by a shoelace isn't exactly wondrous on one's ability to think straight. I wager his thought process had gone to survival mode which meant instinctively hanging on for dear life even though, as is said, going for the danging nets would have been the better choice. As a practical matter, going for the net would have also necessitated letting at least one hand go of Bond's boot, another mental hurdle to get over in the few seconds Necros would have had to do so.
• Bond's alternative escape plan for Koskov implied, among other things, having Q himself with other MI6 agents and an aircraft in Austria. I get this was the occasion to try the pipeline capsule between Czechoslovakia and Austria, but I'm pretty sure it needed M's approval and a few days of preparation. So, Saunders was basically ordered to prepare a plan that wouldn't be followed anyway?
  • The pipeline was a backup. They had to have something in place in case someone tried something especially when to them they thought no one knew about it.
  • The pipeline was also experimental ("You're the first"). They were likely not planning on using it unless it became absolutely necessary, or were only planning on doing a test run; Bond just changed the gameplan.
  • Q and the pipeline were probably not planned (though Q was likely there for the back-up in case it was used), but the jets and other agents were almost certainly part of the plan all along; they were always intending to get Koskov across the border somehow and were always intending to get him out of Austria as quickly as possible, and would always need a way to do so, so they had the jets waiting on standby. The fact that Koskov emerged from the pipeline rather than the border crossing as planned was a bit of a change in the plan, but only a relatively minor one.
• What do they mean when they say they are putting Koskov in the "diplomatic bag"? Is it some kind of Deadly Euphemism?
  • Yes. It is illegal, against international law, to put living people in diplomatic bags. Corpses can be legally repatriated in them, however. Of course, sometimes all nations break that law and ship living people in them covertly, however, those people are generally going to end up as special guests at a black site somewhere for interrogation and disposal. Either way, Koskov is not going to be having a fun time and his future is liable to be quite short.
• Necros is said to have killed two men and put two in the hospital while raiding the safehouse, but he is shown strangling a cook, knocking a butler out with a frying pan (after burning his face on a stove during a struggle), and sending three agents flying with grenades. For the later-mentioned to be accurate, one of the five must not have been injured badly enough to be hospitalised, but which one was it? Was one of the men Necros threw grenades at only knocked unconscious and not hurt more seriously? Was the strangled cook only incapacitated and not killed? It seems hard to believe the butler wouldn't require hospitalisation, with his burns and a probable concussion.
  • Seems likely that the grenade probably knocked one out (which doesn't just, or rather exclusively, mean unconscious necessarily, one can be still conscious but the shock from a concussive impact to other parts of the body e.g. the organs in the torso can put you out of action for a few moments or minutes while your body adjusts to that, this being a shockwave impact or perhaps debris from the explosion in this case). A garrot wire (even in the form of a headphone cable) is designed to strangulate the trachea and quite possibly also cut into it so no there won't be unconsciousness but rather a more serious (and permanent) incapacitation from that.
• Did Bond commit an act of war against the USSR by aiding, as a British agent, the Mujahideen in their struggle in the Soviet-Afghan war? He fired an assault rifle (can't remember if it killed anyone), dropped one of their agents to his death from the plane, bombed a bridge to deny the Soviets the ability to chase and assault his allies (killing Soviets in armoured vehicles in the process), and destroyed one of their cargo planes (perhaps he didn't mean to, given the engines completely stalled out after apparently leaking fuel, but he definitely intended to destroy the opium shipment). Wouldn't this be viewed as a highly provocative act that could lead to WW3, should his identity as an MI6 agent working for the United Kingdom ever leak to the Soviets? Because it's generally (if quietly) acknowledged both in fiction and in the real life conflicts that said fiction was based on that, for example, the USA and USSR both had special forces doing clandestine things in each other's proxy conflicts during the Cold War (Soviet-Afghan conflict and Vietnam war, respectively) but they certainly couldn't risk said forces being exposed by the other side, especially not in acts of open warfare.
  • Can the Russians prove that a British secret agent, active and all, blew up their base? For all they know, Bond could be a hired mercenary acting on his own. Then there's the Koskov mess Russians have on their hands—his actions could put the USSR in hot water if revealed. (He was operating on his own, but he was still a Russian diplomat.) And, of course, it's the late eighties - around 1981, no Soviet Bloc country would dare to revolt against Big Brother (the martial law in Poland is still a highly contested issue - the threat of Russian invasion if the Communist government won't do something with the Solidarity thing was very real). Around 1987, their military was in such disarray that a German student could fly undetected all the way to Moscow in a small aircraft and no one was able to do anything about him, and then the Revolutions of 1989 happened and the Russians didn't do much (they tried in the Baltic states but it was more for show). The threat of war and annihilation was getting less and less real after 1985 and the election of Gorbachev.
  • It is a messy situation, and the Soviet presence there is being led by a rogue element. Note that elements within the Russian military and espionage community are covertly assisting Bond in rooting out that rogue element too. Nobody is going to start a world war over a minor facet of rebellion that the Soviet government would rather not exist themselves. It takes a lot more than that to start a war. If anything they are grateful that Bond did their own dirty work for them.
• One thing I do wonder about is the Hercules airplane that the opium is getting loaded onto is the same airplane that transported Bond and Kara to Afghanistan as the numbers are the same. But what happened to the passenger hold from the time the plane landed in Afghanistan to the time the Russian army was loading the opium onto said plane?

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