The Other Adventures of Daniel Craig’s James Bond
What did 007 do between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall?
I recently watched a fun video debunking the fan theory that James Bond is a codename all used by 007 agents, pointing out the instances of loose continuity in the films meant to convey Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan were all playing the same man.
Presenter Calvin Dyson points out Skyfall flirted with the idea that Bond’s previous cinematic adventures took place after the Daniel Craig version’s origin story, as seen in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (both set in 2006). It’s a notion the lamentable video game tie-in 007 Legends explored with missions depicting updated versions of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Moonraker, Licence to Kill and Die Another Day, and was put paid to when Spectre introduced an entirely new version of Bond’s archfoe, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
So what exactly did Daniel Craig’s James Bond get up to between his 2006 origin story, and his 2012 arc as an agent approaching retirement in Skyfall and Spectre? Fortunately we have two may-as-well-be-canon examples in the 2010 ActiVision video games Blood Stone, and GoldenEye, itself an update of the video game adaptation of Pierce Brosnan’s first film. That implies the previous non-Blofeld related films took place in the new continuity, and perhaps even the earliest ones— Dr. No and From Russia With Love — where SPECTRE was involved but MI6 remained unaware of their existence.
So the post-2006 movie canon would look like this:
- Casino Royale
- Quantum of Solace
- Dr. No
- From Russia With Love
- Goldfinger
- Live and Let Die
And then the subsequent ones, give or take For Your Eyes Only, with its copyright avoiding version of Blofeld, and a Bond who was visibly feeling his age before Roger Moore was replaced — certainly the gravestone seen in the film would belong to Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, not Diana Rigg’s Tracy Bond.
There’s another, stronger, possibility that the Craig Bond’s offscreen missions were modernised takes on Ian Fleming’s original books: after all, his debut was an adaptation of the very first Bond novel. The pre-Skyfall/Spectre timeline would resemble this instead:
- Casino Royale
- Quantum of Solace
- Live and Let Die
- Moonraker
- Diamonds Are Forever
- From Russia With Love
- Dr. No
- Goldfinger
Hopefully when Craig’s Bond finally returns for his swansong No Time to Die, we’ll get some fun nods to his recent past like the Aston Martin DB5’s ejector seat in Skyfall — otherwise, despite having been the most prolific Bond after Moore and Connery, his version will remain the most curiously quiet take on the legendary spy.
