People have been telling James Bond he’s past his best for the last 20 years. I bet he’s sick of it.

"A sexist, misogynist dinosaur – a relic of the Cold War" is how M describes Bond at the beginning of GoldenEye. More recently, Skyfall and SPECTRE continued to ponder the value of a man with a gun in an age of technological warfare. You don’t have to dig all that deep to strike upon the subtext: just how relevant is 007 to the modern blockbuster?

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Well, according to the box office, he’s never been more popular. Skyfall took over $1 billion at the global box office, while SPECTRE, despite a gargantuan budget of $245 million, is close to $800 million. But in the wake of SPECTRE – a film that’s divided critical and popular opinion – I’m more unsure than ever before where one of cinema’s longest-running series will go next.

I think there’s good reason to believe SPECTRE marks the end of Craig’s tenure. So where do we go next? To answer that question, I think, involves thinking closely about two problems which for so long have simultaneously powered and plagued the Bond franchise.

The Problem of Continuity

The first is the slippery matter of continuity. Undoubtedly one of Bond’s greatest strengths over the last 53 years has been its laidback approach to continuity. You don’t have to scrutinise the timeline all that closely to come across weird inconsistencies, but none of them ever get in the way because the franchise, unlike Marvel or Star Wars, doesn’t really care about connecting the dots.

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“ Bond's relaxed approach to continuity has been integral to its longevity.

Bond’s blithe indifference to such matters allows for amusing speculation. At its most extreme, this results in wild theories like the Many Bonds Interpretation. This ingenious fan theory proposes thatJames Bond isn’t a specific man but a code name which, like the titles of M or Q, is inherited by every new 007 agent. Connery to Craig: they’ve all been Bond, and it goes someway to overcoming niggling inconsistencies like why Dame Judi Dench is still M in Daniel Craig's rebooted run. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but it’s a fun way to create a sense of continuity in a series which has very little.

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There’s no better example of this than the most heartbreaking moment in all of Bond: the death of his wife, Tracy (Diana Rigg). If you’ve not seen On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, you might even be surprised that Bond was married, so little did it impact later films. At the end of the movie, the newlyweds drive-off in an Aston Martin – what else could it have been? – to start their new life together. They discuss the future, the prospect of children, but as Bond plucks a flower for his bride from one of the garlands dressing the wedding car, an assassin – driven by Blofeld – shoots Tracy. Bond cradles his dying wife, and says to a policeman who is too late to help: “It’s alright. It’s quite alright really. She’s just having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry, you see. We have all the time in the world.”

It’s even more heartbreaking than it sounds, yet by the next film – Diamonds Are Forever – Tracy is all but forgotten. Bond has to be returned to a place where he can be Bond again: sleep with beautiful women, tour the globe, drive fast cars. The franchise demands it. This tragedy, therefore, has to be ignored because it threatens the very ground upon which Bond stands.

Bond cradles Tracey.

Yet the series has always wanted to maintain some sort of continuity, however shaky. Subsequent instalments weirdly allude to Tracy’s death. Roger Moore's Bond visits her grave in the pre-title sequence of For Your Eye's Only. In 1989’s Licence to Kill, Felix Leiter mentions Bond was married a long time ago – yeah, 1969! And, perhaps most bafflingly of all, there are even allusions to Tracy in Brosnan’s The World Is Not Enough (30 years after Tracy's onscreen death).

Craig’s era attempted to change this. The events of one film were no longer jettisoned: the death of Vesper Lynd, unlike Tracy’s, cast an enduring shadow across four movies. But it’s only a partial success. Craig’s Bond has a greater psychological depth than any of his predecessors, but as Craig's run went on the series found itself crashing upon the same old problem: they needed to get Bond back to a place where he could get on with the business of being Bond. It’s one of the many reasons Quantum of Solace feels so off after Casino Royale.

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The death of Vesper and slowly unearthing SPECTRE as the source of all his pain sounds like a great dramatic arc to tell across four movies – it’s the kind of continuity-driven storytelling the character has never really enjoyed. It’s one of the reasons Craig’s run seemed so refreshing on occasions, but having just re-watched all four of Craig's films in short succession, it’s striking how much of this doesn’t feel planned at all.

“ Bond now exists in a climate where blockbusters are built upon universes.

In fact, for the events of SPECTRE to work at all, Quantum of Solace has to be retconned almost into non-existence. The death of Vesper, too, carries far more weight than I suspect it was originally designed to carry. Go back to Casino Royale, and rewatch what should be the defining moment of Craig’s Bond – the betrayal and death of Vesper Lynd – and it’s confusing as hell. Why does Vesper withdraw that money? Who’s the man with eyepatch? It’s all over the place. Also, while we’re on the subject of Vesper’s betrayal, do you remember Bond confronts Vesper’s duplicitous lover Yusef in Quantum of Solace? No, me neither.

I’m not trying to give Casino Royale a hard time – it’s a film I really like – but I’m trying to illustrate just how many loose threads there are, especially for a run which tried to give the character an ongoing storyline. Bond now exists in a climate where blockbusters are built upon universes, characters are given arcs that last decades and have been planned by groups of writers and directors working in unison. Craig's Bond tried to tell a story across four movies, but it was done on the move and, as a consequence, is only partly successful when taken as a whole.