The following post contains SPOILERS for Skyfall.

At Bloomberg, novelist and Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter reveals a theory he has about the last James Bond film, Skyfall. It’s mostly unsupported by the final movie, but it draws some connections that are still really intriguing and worth discussing.

Carter believes there was more to the story of the film’s villain, Raoul Silva (played by Javier Bardem), than ultimately made it to the screen. The character’s name is an anagram—“a rival soul”— and Carter is convinced the curiously worded note Silva sends Bond’s boss M (Judi Dench) at one point, “THINK ON YOUR SINS,” is (or was originally intended as) one as well. Focusing on some inconsistencies in the storyline (Why was Silva so obsessed with revenge against M? And why, if he was so obsessed with revenge, didn’t he just kill her?), Carter finally broke the anagram: “THINK ON YOUR SINS” became “YOUR SON ISN’T IN HK,” which would make Silva—Duh duh duhhhhhhh!—M’s son:

“Adopted, possibly, but undeniably her son. (Why adopted? Because otherwise we can make no sense of M’s comment to Bond that orphans make the best recruits. Yes, Bond was an orphan, but the poignancy and faraway gaze as M says the words tell us she is thinking of somebody else.) Once we see that Silva is her son, the steeliness with which she sacrifices agents at the beginning of the film (including, we believe, Bond himself) becomes more fundamental to her character. She has been steely because that is how she survives the memory of what she has done. Without the knowledge that she let her own son rot in prison for the sake of the Secret Intelligence Service, her death at the film’s end seems more contrivance than tragedy.”

Again, Carter is drawing connections here that the movie itself doesn’t make; it doesn’t claim Silva’s note is an anagram, or link him and M in this way. It’s probably also worth noting that Bond films aren’t always the most consistently or coherently plotted, and if M’s death seems like a contrivance, it could just be exactly that.

Bond’s enemies have a habit of doing random, dumb stuff (like, say, choosing the most Rube Goldbergian plan for world domination when an easier path is almost always available). This might be more clumsy writing than ingenious conspiracy. Still, as Room 237-style conspiracy theories go, this is actually a pretty good one. It wouldn’t shock me to learn that earlier drafts of the screenplay made an explicit connection between the characters which was then cut from later drafts for the sake of brevity or coherence.

No word yet from the Skyfall team about whether Carter found something they deliberately put in the film. Frankly, if this Silva/M connection was never true at all, and Carter just invented it, maybe the producers should bring him to consult on the next Bond movie. The guy has some great ideas.