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I was never a huge fan of James Bond. Don’t get me wrong — the suits were sharp, the cars were ridiculous, and the man could order a drink like it was a doctoral thesis. But the last iteration of Bond? That wasn’t really an MI6 agent anymore. That was basically a Mossad recruitment video with a British accent. Suddenly Bond wasn’t the cool professional spy doing discreet intelligence work. He’d become the geopolitical equivalent of a bloke at a pub who’s had twelve beers and is convinced starting a fight with the entire room is “a strategic move.” And there were two ironies I found genuinely surprising. The first was personal. For decades I assumed if James Bond was ever going to die, it would be from a catastrophic, career-long accumulation of untreated sexually transmitted diseases. I mean, the man treated sexual health the way Victorian explorers treated malaria: an unfortunate but inevitable occupational hazard. But no. The real twist was that once Bond stopped behaving like an MI6 officer and started behaving more like a Mossad operative — blowing things up constantly, ignoring chain of command, and treating international law like a polite suggestion — that’s when he actually died. Which is a hell of a narrative lesson. The moment the franchise turned Bond into a loose-cannon revenge machine rather than a calculated intelligence officer, the story could only end one way: with the hero standing on an island full of missiles, having burned every possible bridge, staring at the consequences of his own recklessness. Boom. End of Bond. It turns out that if your entire strategy becomes “hit everything, everywhere, all at once and assume nobody will eventually hit back harder”, the story doesn’t end with a triumphant theme song. It ends with the closing credits. Which, if we’re being honest, is a slightly uncomfortable metaphor for a certain Middle Eastern state that seems increasingly convinced that the best long-term security doctrine is simply permanent escalation with absolutely everyone within a thousand-kilometre radius. There’s a reason intelligence services traditionally value patience, subtlety and restraint. The job isn’t to win the loudest fight in the room — it’s to survive the next twenty years. But when strategy gets replaced by swagger, paranoia, and the belief that rules only apply to other people, the arc of the story starts to look very familiar. The loose cannon always thinks he’s the hero of the film. Right up until the moment the missiles start falling and the soundtrack cuts out. And as Bond recently demonstrated, when you spend long enough playing the unstoppable rogue who answers to no one, the final act doesn’t usually involve riding off into the sunset. It involves standing on the island you set on fire yourself, realising a bit too late that there’s nowhere left to run. —- FIN —- Roll credits.