Kill James Bond! - Episode 1: Dr No
Episode Date: February 24, 2021Alice (@AliceAvizandum), Abi (@PhilosophyTube) and Devon (@Devon_OnEarth) dive into the James Bond cinematic universe with the first film, DR NO. No it isn't the old Casino Royale stop talking about t...he old Casino Royale stop it  The first premium episode is already available on our Patreon
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Hello and welcome to the first episode of Kill James Bond, a podcast in which us three
pursue noted tuxedo spy dickhead James Bond Sr. through 24 films, innumerable other prophecies,
and because, like, I wanted to mention why we're doing this, right?
James Bond is a fucking arsehole, man.
And every other podcast about James Bond is about how cool he is,
like, how the aesthetic has got...
No, no, that's not what we're doing.
The podcast that we're doing here, this is about how much of a prick James Bond is.
We are an anti-Bond podcast is we are an anti-bond podcast
that's right and we are going to introduce ourselves so without further ado the name's
caldwell kelly alice caldwell kelly the name's thorn abigail thorn And I'm Devon.
What else do we know about this Chinese gentleman?
Nothing much, except his name.
Dr. No. I like it I like it
we've got production values this time
and we are going
to be going through
we're going to be pursuing James Bond
through the chronological films
which means we're starting with be pursuing james bond through the chronological films which means
we're starting with the first one dr no not the fucking bullshit comedy casino royale
we're starting out with the first serious one yes and that is dr no how did we all
briefly how do we all feel about this movie, having seen it for this?
Well, Dev, am I right in thinking it was the first time you've seen a Bond film?
Yeah, well, not the first time I've seen a Bond film.
I'd only seen Skyfall before, so everything that I was seeing I was comparing to the later Daniel Craig Bonds.
And it's remarkable just how different it is.
Yeah, this is such an like early 60s movie and i figure what i'll do is i'll like i'll take us through it i'll give us the the
synopsis and then just jump in uh because like i'm i'm now occupying the showrunner role for the
first time which means you guys get to be the tangent idiots.
Perfect.
Yeah, we do.
You get to pull the thing off track. So I hope you're very excited for that.
The role I was born to play.
Well, actually, Dev, it's funny that you should mention the roles that we were born to play,
because one of the reasons I was so interested in doing a podcast about James Bond, well,
the two reasons, one political and one personal.
The political one is that I have this hypothesis that James Bond is quite like Doctor Who
in that frequently it's almost good.
However, unlike Doctor Who,
when James Bond is bad, it's bad for interesting reasons.
Doctor Who is bad because they write it on Friday
and film it on Monday and have a budget of 10 pence.ames bond has all the money and talent in the world behind it but it somehow
manages to suck almost every time and often often in ways that reflect interesting things about the
society that made it well what's really funny what's really funny is that dr no is different
from a lot of the other bond movies in that this was the last one, the only one, in which they had no budget whatsoever.
It was an absolute shoestring.
From what I found out, they paid the main woman $6,000, like, maximum, to be in this.
Ooh.
In 1962, that's not going to be a lot of money.
Yeah.
62, that's not going to be a lot of money.
Yeah.
Well, and the other reason and why it occurred to me when you said the roles we were born to play, Dev,
is the biggest note that I've made in my notes here
is just the word hauntology in big capital letters.
Because, well, Alice and I, I think, had quite similar upbringings
in that we both went to private schools.
We were both military cadets.
I actually went to a university from which MI6 recruits.
And I know people at my old university who definitely did not join MI6.
That definitely did not happen.
You get to do the cool thing where you say, yeah, I work for the Foreign Office, despite having no diplomatic skills.
I won't name anybody, just in case they're all- it's just in case a bunch of terrorists are sitting around a table somewhere listening to this podcast, and all of a sudden they're gonna turn to one guy and go, wait, what?
Doctor No- Doctor No is hauntology, because it's- well, let me take you through the beginning, right? And the beginning made me think I was dissociating.
Because it's the first Bond movie, I mean, excuse me,
it's the only Bond movie until, like, one of the late Brosden ones
that doesn't have a live-action title sequence.
It's all highly 60s animated.
You've got some mad fucking flashing dots.
You have a change of song to a calypso song
part way through jarring transition about midway through and and the first shot the first live
action shot that you see in james bond is three jamaican men pretending to be blind in order to
shoot a guy with a silenced pistol yes it's
very very weird as an opening it's there's some very odd editing choices right throughout this
there's a lot of bad jump cuts there's almost no establishing shots ever i'm not sure whether
that's because they had to switch onto a different kind of film to shoot outdoors and the lighting
didn't work because all the indoor stuff is 35 millimeter but yeah i don't know why that is
but it's some very unusual editing going on and so we start with not james bond it takes us a long
time to meet james on we start with these villains these these three jamaicans on jamaica who murder
ruthlessly murder uh the station chief of mi7 because it's not mi6 it's not yeah very badly they overdub it
very obviously to say it's mi7 mi7 yeah and so this this guy john strangways which fantastic
name by the way is engaged in sort of hauntological pursuits, right? He's literally at his club, the Queen's Club,
with a bunch of other white friends,
this retired general from the Indian Army and a professor,
and they're all playing bridge.
And then he has to go and take a phone call from MI7,
and he gets clapped.
He gets assassinated in such a haphazard way
that the three guys pretending to be blind might as well have just not even bothered with that.
They just sort of look past him and then rotate and just shoot him.
In broad daylight, too.
AI sent to hostile suddenly, and they veer out and they shoot him with a silenced pistol.
It's so good. Not only that, though, not only that, but they then kill his secretary.
The unforgivable crime, because spies had to have secretaries back then.
And so, they break into his house, and while his secretary is on the radio, which is this
enormous sort of wood-panelled contra you're going come in london
london come in london this is jamaica jamaica she gets she gets also got with the brightest red
red paint oh yeah it's strawberry jam it's beautiful yeah i love this fun fact about
this is our inciting fun fact about that. She got that job to play the secretary because she owned that house they were filming in.
Yes, she's not an actress.
I thought she did a passable job.
It's such a classic shoestring budget thing to do.
Just like, fuck, you own the space.
I guess you're an employee of ours now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so this is our inciting incident, is murder most foul. And we see this travel all the way up the chain through a series of, like, poorly overdubbed bits of footage of, like, radio signals intercept sectors and stuff.
And then, finally, we get to James Bond, who is in the club at Les Ambassadeurs.
Yeah, not just any club, but the casino at Les Ambassadeurs, which was then
an extremely famous high-stakes casino.
So it's quite a clever bit of
character establishment, because the first thing
we learn about James Bond is that he's a gambler.
He's a gambler?
He moves in these circles.
Incidentally, the first time we hear his
name spoken, the guy mispronounces it.
Check this out.
I'm looking for Mr. James Bond.
Mr. James Bond.
Hello, I'm
looking for Mr. James Bond.
The problem is that
everyone in Britain at that time had
mouthfuls of cotton 24-7.
That is true, and there's
a lot of that in this movie, because that's part of
the hauntology, is that this is absolutely a dying seconds of empire thing.
And so, every single British person that we speak to who isn't Bond, who is the only person
to have any kind of a regional accent, talks exactly like that, Mr. Bond.
And so we join him in the club club where he gets to do the famous
bond james bond thing which i'm not gonna i don't dignify with having a drop for
and we hate him we don't want to we don't want to dignify that no he's he's playing he's playing
high stakes shaman defer a game for dickheads a game that has no skill involved again it's a
character establishing moment it's purely a game of luck. I think mainly that the main attribute that we learn about Bond is that he's lucky.
Admire your tenacity, Miss Trench.
And she says, I admire your luck, Mr. Bond.
And then, of course, he immediately tries his luck.
And this is the other fun thing about Doctor No.
Is that it's still in the age of Bond where you could have every woman on screen look as if they constantly want to fuck James Bond. Well, in fact, when Sylvia Trench appeared on screen, I started a timer just to see how long it
would be before they fucked.
Nine minutes
and ten seconds, if anyone was wondering.
It's about that in-universe as well.
Roundabout. Yeah, but Bond
excuses himself
from this hideous
damask wallpapered casino
and goes to
his boomer ass
extremely spacious flat and
finds her there wearing one of his shirts
and playing golf, which is
an interesting case of
perception. In the original
script, she was supposed to be naked.
Wow.
Yeah, and so Bond
gets this line where he's like, no, I have to
leave immediately to do spy stuff.
Because he goes to see M first.
Ah, you're right, yeah, I forget, this is the thing, right?
It's so tempting to make Bond more responsible than he is.
But like, no, what he actually does is he gets pulled out of the casino to go to work.
Yeah, as Dr. No later says, you're nothing but a stupid policeman.
A stupid policeman.
You are just a stupid policeman.
So he goes to see M.
Mm-hmm.
He's been summoned.
Which is why he's first introduced in the fucking tuxedo, is because he's just
been gambling on work time, essentially.
Yeah, this is just what he does on a Friday night, he just goes and blows tens is because he's just been gambling on work time, essentially.
Yeah, this is just what he does on a Friday night.
He just goes and blows tens of thousands of pounds in Les Ambassadeurs.
He meets Moneypenny for the first time,
and they hadn't really sort of fixed the Moneypenny character yet.
So, like, later Moneypenny is more like,
oh, well, you are going to flirt with me,
but I'm going to pretend like I don't like it.
Whereas this Moneypenny is just like, why aren't you fucking me right now?
Well, at least she is established to clearly be into it. She's pretty much the only woman James
Bond's in the entire series who is established to like, you know, consensually want James Bond
to flirt with her, which is kind of nice. She's also the only female member of the cast who is not
overdubbed.
We trust her.
Everyone else is overdubbed.
Most of the other roles are overdubbed by the same
woman. It is the same voice
the whole way through. That was what I was thinking.
I was losing my mind. This is where
you get the origin of the sexy
Bond lady voice. I was losing my mind.
It's sort of faint saintly exotic
a little bit breathy and it's no it's just one woman who they got to do it because they didn't
they hired they hired one sound editor most movies have at least two they had one and this this is
what they they got them to do which is why there are a lot of shots of people talking and their
lips don't move as we as we see later on there's another female character who is played by a white woman in yellow face yes i was
gonna make a lot of that going on i love the redundancy of hiring a white actress putting
her in yellow face and then getting a white woman to dub just to make sure that nobody foreign is
allowed anywhere near this film i mean there were multiple
foreign like there were multiple asian women cast in it but they just were never allowed to fuck
bond obviously no of course not because that would be that would be dangerous and repulsive to the
viewers of 1962 anyway so he goes to meet his boss m who is this sort of fatherly figure
incidental detail i always really liked the fact that m has this sort of fatherly figure incidental detail i always really liked
the fact that m has this sort of cool double door designed to his office where both of the doors are
like covered in leather right i thought this was this incredible piece of like world building i
thought it captured a real aesthetic the reason why they did that is because it was cheaper it's
made of plastic because they couldn't afford a real
door oh i thought it was like a soundproofing thing or it's to stop people shooting through
the door later they kind of worked to that but no in doctor no they originated it just because
down they had some plastic sheathing and no door so they just built a door and covered it with this so it didn't look
too bad and m introduces bond to well firstly he like passive aggressively like takes his gun off
him it was like what is this a gun for oh no he goes like what is this a woman's gun because the
guy takes it he's like what are you gay or something in a woman's handbag it's like yo this guy's got a
gay gun yeah he does when when they bring in q he's like this. It's like, yo, this guy's got a gay gun. Yeah, he does.
When they bring in Q, he's like, this is a gun
for girls, Bond. Bond, what are you,
a pussy, Bond? Not even Q yet.
It's just like a guy. His name was
Major Boothroyd. Major
Boothroyd. Named for a guy
who wrote to Ian Fleming when he was
writing the Bond novels, complaining
about the gun that Bond
used and complaining that he should use
a water instead of a breast because it was
a gun for women and homosexuals.
Again, hauntology
because as soon as he said the word Beretta
I remembered that I
unsuccessfully in university tried to date
the heiress to Beretta.
So again, hauntology.
A highly abby story.
I went to Aberystwyth.
I went to Aberystwyth. I went to the University of Glasgow, I was informed that it was as good. No, anyway.
So M takes his gun, replaces it with the Walther, and introduces him to the lowest stakes plot in the entire franchise. It's so good! And that plot is, somebody is gonna make the Americans' moon rockets fall over.
That's it. Rocket fall down, Bond!
Rocket... Mr. Bond, are you aware that rocket fall down?
We're gonna get a lot of good data out of that though that's the thing it's it it's like
never it's never explained why anyone should give a shit least of all the british being like
bond they're gonna drop the rocket they're gonna knock spacex's new uh moon mission over
you've gotta go kill some jamaicans mr bond it could be inferred that they if they manage to
topple the rocket successfully then they might do the same to missiles i suppose but no i don't
think anyone explicitly makes that no nobody nobody bothers to do that it's not even clear
whether it's like a manned rocket of course this is 1962 so we are we are pre-moon landing yeah
that's right well we haven't landed on the moon yet,
so the Americans are about to launch another rocket
to go around the moon with someone on it,
and some of their recent rockets have gone a little bit squiffy,
and so they send Bond to Jamaica to say,
well, why are these rockets missing?
It couldn't be because launching a rocket's quite hard.
It must be because a sinister man in yellowface
with fake hands is doing it.
Foreign interference.
Mm-hmm. Yes. And so Bond stops off. hard it must be because no sinister man in yellow face for fake hands is doing it yes and so bond
bond bond stops off he's told like get out get on the plane immediately you have three hours and
he's like yeah i'm gonna stop off for pussy which he does he goes home that's right finds sylvia
trench wearing one of his shirts and playing golf which again is wild fuck fucks her, gets on the plane. Ever established how she got in?
No.
She's broken.
He doesn't like, have any kind of security or anything.
Doesn't even lock his door, yeah.
And we get a classic Bond scene, much imitated over the years, of
Bond arrives in an airport, and everyone in that airport is following him.
It's very Naked naked gun isn't it
yes it's all it's missing is guy looks through eye holes cut and i thought we were gonna get
that because they introduced a guy holding a massive newspaper and i was like yes yes yes
let's go let's go but they they didn't go for the eye holes, they just had him stand nearby in an extremely conspicuous way.
And everyone is extremely suspicious-looking in different ways, except for his extremely friendly and extremely sweaty driver.
Who is like, yeah, no, I've been sent by Government House, because Jamaica is still a British colony.
been sent by by government house because jamaica is still a british colony government house has has sent me a swarthy man to carry your bags and drive you to the thing you have just walked off
a plane with a loaded gun which no one took off you and by the way five martinis deep
you haven't slept because we've established that you've been up up all night getting pussy
um also as when boothby
gives him the gun in the previous scene boothby loads the gun gives it to bond bond looks at it
and then just puts it away he performs no kind of safety check at all so bond has just got off a
plane drunk sex addled with a gun and this swarthy man is like hey welcome to jamaica this this movie
absolutely says fuck trigger discipline
every time bond picks up a gun the first thing he does is put his finger on the trigger and the
second thing he does is put his other hand over the top of the barrel like manipulated around
it fucking rules but like he meets this swarthy man who's like yeah yeah, no, I'm your chauffeur, places a phone call
in a phone box and immediately blows that guy's cover as an assassin.
And then, in what is a perfect Bond moment, he knows that this guy cannot be trusted.
He knows he's there to try and kill him, gets in the back of his car anyway, just as a flex.
Yeah, again, what we know about bond is that he's
lucky that's pretty much all we know at this stage he's he's lucky and he fucks a lot and he's he's
very very very stupid just a stupid policeman i'm gonna get so much use out of that drop
did you one thing i'd note and this is completely uninteresting to pick up but the point
where he's he's giving the phone call he also gets like a word inserted halfway through his sentence
it's like so he he's he's going like um very good i'll see you later but like they insert the word
the halfway through because he's clearly like mangled the pronunciation once and they instead of over dubbing the whole line they just read up one word right in the middle of it and it's so jarring to
listen to so bond gets in this guy's car and there's a car chase this first car chase in bond
and it's like this this packet is following them so bond makes the guy get off the road, and then beats him up.
And the thing that I want to, like, note from this, as he beats this guy for information,
is that across this movie, James Bond has two moves.
Like in a combat sense, he can judo throw a guy, or he can punch a guy in the face with
a right hook, and that's all he does.
And once you watch this movie, it's impossible to see it as like anything else other than bond presses a button bond presses
b you made this observation in the group chat earlier before i re-watched the movie just before
recording and you're completely right sean connery famously only had light attack and heavy attack that's all he had
he never learned any specials
and gun obviously
but Bond does heavy attack heavy attack
light attack on this guy
and he's like oh yeah okay
I was sent to kill you
I'm sweating so much right now
by the way
I am slick I don't know how you're holding me
he's a completely moistened man are you scottish how are
you not just like melted scotsman on jamaica yeah and bond does the thing tell me who you work for
and the guy fucking kills himself with a cyanide capsule in a cigarette he like talks Bond into letting him have a cigarette
and then he bites down on it
and fucking dies
Bond makes this hilarious face as well
he's like oh shit
oh shit
oh I probably shouldn't have done that one
yeah and he talks Bond into it with the sentence
let me have a cigarette
which is so badly dubbed too
yeah I see no problem here.
And so Bond just drives this dead-ass man to government house.
In a convertible with just a corpse in the back.
Yeah, he's just in the back.
And he leaves him in the care of the Jamaican police.
And once again, everybody has this accent.
Everybody is from the foreign office.
Everybody is very dignified.
All of the policemen are wearing shorts and long socks,
because that's just how the British Empire was.
It's very bad.
An empire of dads.
Yeah, an empire of dads.
And he pumps the dads for information.
He finds out about this bridge fall, and he goes to Strangway's house and finds this photo of him with a local
Jamaican man.
And of course, because Bond is...
You are just a stupid policeman.
Immediately the most suspicious thing in the house.
And so he's like, I gotta find to find this guy and this guy turns out
to be named
Quarrel, and I'm gonna be very angry about the treatment of quarrel
I'm gonna put a marker down here
Dr. No is gonna be the most racist bond movie at least until we get to live and let die
because Really? I strongly believe so movie at least until we get to Live and Let Die. Because...
Really?
I strongly believe so.
Oh no, I think this is gonna be...
No, because...
This at least manages to be racist against more than one group of people.
That is true.
So he meets Quarrel,
who kind of brushes him off.
He follows Quarrel
to a bar, and then he tries to kind of like
get him in private and it's very weird because the way this is filmed and the way this is written
it's impossible to a modern observer not to read it as quarrel wants to suck this guy off
like yeah it's just give us some privacy will? Because I gotta go talk to this guy who I keep looking at in a really weird way.
And so they get him in some privacy, and then Quarrel just pulls a switchblade on Bond from
across a room. Not sure what he's intending to do with this.
Bond is standing next to the door, so he could just walk out of the door.
He could just leave, but then, Quarrel's friend is standing next to the door, so he could just walk out of the door. He could just leave, but
then, Quarrel's friend, the owner
of the bar, whose name I believe is
Pussfella. Yeah, his name is Pussfella,
and I wrote that down in 72.4
in my notes. I didn't realise that!
This motherfucker called Pussfella.
Yeah, and Pussfella
rules because unlike Bond, he has a
grapple attack. He just grabs
Bond by both arms. He grabs bond by both arms by both arms then
quarrel says ain't no use you struggling puss fella wrassles alligators and i'm like yeah man
let's go there are no alligators in jamaica but all right
hey if there are puss fella's gonna find him and he's gonna rattle and I want you to know, he's the reason
why there are no fucking
allocators in Jamaica
shout out to Pussfella
he's unlocked the grapple attack
and so Bond
then like easily defeats
both of them by doing the heavy
attack by doing a single shoot of the throw
he just smashes heavy attack
he knocks them into a massive pile
of empty cardboard boxes
yeah
but then he gets stuck up
with a Walther
PPK which as we've had established
is a real man's gun
it's a gun that the CIA like and we meet for the first
time felix lighter who has the weirdest fucking american accent i have ever heard he sounds like
a kennedy on quail who tells him that he's from the cia and they're on the same side
they're also there to find out why do rockets
fall down? Why rocket
fall down, Mr. Bond?
They're knocking our rockets down.
Bond, I can't figure it out alone.
I need your assistance.
Despite the fact that this mystery is extremely obvious,
Bond, I need your help to figure it out.
Yes.
And this leads them to be aware of an island
off of jamaica called crab key yeah and what and what bond learns is that strangways went to crab
key with quarrel who was very nervous about it yes because quarrel is superstitious and ethnic and thinks there's a dragon living there.
Ghosts.
A repeating thing we'll see
whenever Quarrel is introduced is
that every person of colour
in this movie is portrayed as being
extremely instinct-driven
and base.
And irrational.
It's extremely childlike race.
100%. But before we get into this, we have to have Bond blunder into his second trap of the day,
where he finds out that these samples have been given to this geology professor,
who is this incredibly craggly-faced man who was working as a bush pilot in Jamaica when they found him.
And Bond is just like, yeah, no, I'm just going to talk this guy up, see what he knows.
It's probably going to be a trap, I don't give a shit.
Which he does.
And Dent immediately snitches on him to his boss.
His boss, who is a spooky voice.
Oh, this is an amazing introduction of Dr. No, though.
I really enjoyed this
scene and yeah and again it's because of no budget what happens is dent goes to this all white room
with a single really uncomfortable looking chair in it and a skylight and then dr no
sort of talks him through killing James Bond.
That thing that we love to do.
That thing that we love to do.
Over an intercom.
He gives him a fucking tarantula in a cage.
And he doesn't even tell him what to do with it.
He just says, tonight.
Yeah, and the guy's like, do I eat it?
Or should I use my gun?
No, use the spider.
Yeah.
But this scene is very, very good.
It is a good scene.
I think it's the highlight of the film, actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the actor, I don't know, I can't remember the actor's name who plays Dr. No, but he's Canadian.
Richard Wiseman, I think.
And he does, okay, and he does this, he does a very convincing English accent, or quasi-English accent.
He's got this kind of thing where all of his diction
is right in the front of his mouth,
and he keeps his lips very closed.
He's supposed to be Chinese.
I've no idea why any of that's true.
Why is he a stupid policeman?
But he's very good.
He's supposed to be like Chinese-German mix, I think.
He's neither of those things and doesn't sound like either of them either.
He doesn't look or sound like either of those things.
No, he's just a Canadian man in yellow face,
but that's how they did it in the 60s.
We then get to sort of the
highlight of the movie for me, which is
he lets the tarantula loose
in Bond's room.
Before I get to that, there are a couple of fun details,
which is, this is the only time we see bond really do spy stuff but like the rest of the the rest of the
franchise and what i mean by that is before he goes out right he like takes one of his hairs
and he puts it on the the door so he can see if anyone's been in he um he puts talcum powder on
his briefcase so he can see if anyone's been at the locks and then he comes back
home he he finds all of this stuff disturbed and he's like there's a genuine air of menace it's
like ah everyone on jamaica is trying to kill this man i wrote that down like earlier upon he seems
much more intelligent he he's like laying traps more intelligent but like he's he's also in danger
which you don't really like there's peril in laser movies, sure, but nothing so...
There's a bit where the three quote-unquote blind guys
try to just fucking shoot him across the street with a pistol,
and the only reason it doesn't work is because a car drives past
and the headlights hit them, and they sort of scatter.
But Bond is a lot more vulnerable in this than he ever would be
yeah again it's just that he's lucky that's the that's his only character trait
he's just a jammy git yeah and so and so he he finds this tarantula in his bed in the middle
of the night and you get this sort of exquisite shot of of sean connery just fucking sweating
buckets as this tarantula climbs up him because Because he, in real life, is very afraid- well, was very afraid of spiders.
Fucking terrified, yeah. And this is then immediately destroyed by- it crawls off of him,
and Bond flails out of the bed, and to an orchestral sting that, like, gives a big,
like, sort of fucking trombone hit every time he does
it, and BEATS a spider to death!
Five hits as well, like, he doesn't mess around.
Five hits, yeah, he doesn't even stamp on it, either, he fucking beats a spider
to death with his hands.
Yeah, yeah, he does. Well, he uses a shoe.
Oh, fuck, is it? Yeah.
The spider's name was Rosie, incidentally.
Aw. Rest in peace to rosie well she
didn't really she didn't really die i know but like still having to crawl on sean connery
she wasn't crawling on sean connery because because he was terrified of spiders they had
a layer of glass layer it's extremely obvious as well because the shadow this spider is casting is like an inch to its left on Sean
but so
Bond now gets to do his
other thing which is he has to go and get some more
pussy and he has to go and get this
pussy from the double reverse
backflip yellow face lady
this fucking woman
this woman
is introduced as Miss Taro and
they treat her being Asian as inherently suspicious
because obviously the only information we have about Dr. No is that he is quote unquote
Chinese, according to a CIA guy.
His only guards we've seen have been Asian.
Bond gets back and he's like, I'm afraid you've been misinformed.
It's just a Canadian man in yellowfish.
He goes to her apartment and it was chinese like fucking bamboo and like red
lights and just to really hammer home she's chinese and she's wearing a fucking she's okay
so he comes to the door on the way there he kills the three blind guys by out driving them on a
fantastic sort of rolling road set where he's swinging the wheel
back and forth and the car isn't moving
kills those guys
and incidentally this is
where we get one of the first things
of Bond just doing a quip when he
murders someone because they're driving
a hearse and it goes off of a cliff
and he's like oh they must have been on their way to a
funeral waggles eyebrows
at screen theatrically for the next 15 minutes and then meanwhile the person he says that to is like do
you want to stay here for the police are you insured no no all right no he's going he's going
he's going because he's got to go and and fuck this allegedly chinese lady he needs it he needs
the pussy and she she's she's wearing a towel and he shows up sort of lightly
interrogates her while having foreplay with her um and then she's somebody's secretary she's the
professor's secretary or something she she's the uh the the principal secretary she's his secretary
and in my favorite detail of the dubbing of this film which really is the standout bond
unzips i mentioned that
they're genuinely like noise and she's wearing a towel there's nothing what do you what are you
on when when he gets her at the door and he takes like want her towel off of her hair that she was using when she goes to to like pick up the phone he puts the towel to his mouth and opens his mouth oh yeah
five times i was like what the fuck are you doing is such a weird thing yeah i want to i want to
emphasize from fucking day one bond was always this creep man yeah yeah yeah a woman's town
yes it's very unusual second but she you first she calls she calls dr no or somebody working
for dr no or the professor and says you know james bond is here what do you want me to do
and so they're like keep them here for a few hours. So it's kind of established. I guess I'll have sex with them.
Yeah, I don't know.
Is this...
It's not kosher.
My notes here just say sexual assault, yellow face.
That's all I've got.
My notes are similar to with Sylvia Trench.
I started a stopwatch the first time we saw Miss Taro.
Okay.
Dev's just got hundreds of stopwatches hanging off him.
Yeah, I'll be doing this.
Eight minutes, 45 seconds.
He works fast.
He's speeding up.
He's accelerating, if anything.
You want to see which Bond, out of all the actors who play Bond,
who's the fastest?
What's the quickest time?
So the current time to beat is eight minutes, 45.
All right, then.
What he does is... It's the quickest time? So the current time to beat is 8 minutes 45 Alright then What he does is He has sex with her
Twice for no real reason
Other than being horny
Has her arrested for nothing
Because she hasn't really done anything
Being suspiciously Asian
Being suspiciously Asian
Oh right before he has her arrested
They bicker about what to have for dinner.
Because he knows that she's just trying to keep him there.
Yeah, she says, I'll cook you a Chinese dinner, the least Chinese looking woman I've ever seen.
Again, just want to reiterate that I am from China.
China, yeah.
Just in case you didn't realize that, James.
He says, first of all, I don't want you getting dishpan hands or fucking rocks.
And then second of all, he drops my favorite line in the movie.
Apropos of fucking nothing.
Bond says, I'm feeling Italian and musical.
What, dude?
You're feeling what feeling Italian and musical. What, dude? You're feeling what?
Italian and musical.
Yeah, find me an Italian restaurant on Jamaica in 1962.
An Italian restaurant on Jamaica that's musical, no less.
I'm feeling Italian and musical.
So he has her arrested, and then he just kind of lays in wait
for Professor Dent
yeah because the spider
had failed so he was like right I'm just gonna
fucking shoot this guy instead
I'm just gonna fucking murk this guy with a gun
he probably should have started with that really
and so Professor Dent
comes in finds the like staged
Bond in the bed
shoots him a lot of times.
Uses the old pillow trick.
Yep, shoots him six
times, and then Bond turns on the
light and is like, aha, I'm behind you the whole
time, and then just murders him.
Like, absolute cold blood.
Gets a quip in, too.
Well, yeah, because the professor goes,
he initially throws down the gun,
and then Bond's like, who are you working for? And he's like, I'm not gonna tell you, and Bond's like, alright, then whatever professor goes, he initially throws down the gun. Goes for the gun. And then Bond's like, who are you working for?
And he's like, I'm not going to tell you.
And Bond's like, all right, then whatever.
And then he goes, basically, he doesn't press him very hard.
He goes for the gun and then he pulls the gun on Bond
and fires it and it's empty.
And Bond says a line from the books.
He says, that's a Smith & Wesson and you've had your six.
It is not a Smith & Wesson.
It's not a revolver.
It actually has seven shots in it, but whatever.
And then Bond just shoots him in cold blood.
Which is phenomenal because he's just proven conclusively that this man now poses him absolutely no threat.
Because he's got no bullets left.
He fucking kills his ass dead.
And then takes the suppressor off of his pistol with his finger on the trigger the whole time.
And just kind of sucks it off for a second right like i'm i think he's supposed to be blowing the like the the gas out
of it but it really does just come across like he's just doing a bit and so like we've established
crab key dr no doing nefarious shit to make Rocket fall down.
So we have to go there, but Quarrel
doesn't want to go, because of g-g-g-g-ghosts.
Quarrel doesn't want to go, because...
It just occurred to me that had Dr. No just not murdered
Strangways at the start, none of this would have happened.
Absolutely no reason to do that.
Dr. No could have just done nothing.
Yeah.
But like, Quarrel is like,
I don't want to go there during daylight because there's
a dragon, and then these two fucking white boys-
Sneering imperialist motherfuckers. He goes like, heh. Native superstition.
Yeah. And there's so much of this.
Don't start that.
They make him go to- take him to the island anyway, Bond lands on the island, finds pussy.
Immediately.
It just arrives for him on the beach.
Mmm, the famous, famous shot of Ursula Andress.
Famous, famous shot.
Of Ursula Andress, Honey Rider.
Lord almighty.
Yeah, she comes out in a fucking, like, in a bikini, bond shows up uh she pulls a knife on him which at least like
you get she has the right idea about him but he he dissuades her and then dr no's army of
henchmen show up and sort of machine gun the beach and force them to run and hide i do want to say
i want to i want to take a moment to know and I think I might even be noting the same thing that you are here, Alice. Is it the hench fit?
No, it's not.
It's not. It's when the henchmen
come round the corner
of the island in their machine gun boat.
It's established that they need to hide.
So Bond takes
Honey Rider's hand and they go to run
and Bond turns to Quarrel and says
fetch my shoes.
Fetch my fucking shoes. This MF cannot stop giving orders to Quarrel and says fetch my shoes I know I wrote full caps
this MF cannot stop giving orders
to Quarrel
I'm like
there's an imminent threat
that you don't need your shoes
to hide from a machine gun James
but he just says fetch my shoes
and then he says you hide over there
and I'll hide over here with pussy
I mean honey rider
might as well be called pussy to be fair she is let's say You hide over there, and I'll hide over here with pussy. I mean, Honey Rider.
Might as well be called pussy, to be fair.
She is, let's say, ambiguously ethnic in that she has a tan and a weird accent.
Her accent gets slowly less weird over the course of it.
She starts out with quite a strong one,
and then by the end, she just sounds like the same woman.
She's dubbed by the same lady
I think she's supposed to be Swiss
the other fun thing
about Honey Rider
is that like Quarrel
she is childlike
the whole time
I'm not just saying this
she talks about how
her father
was the zoologist and they used to travel the world
and her only education was reading an encyclopedia and she has got up i know i fuck it oh my god
and bond is like yeah this is the fucking hottest shit i've seen in my life yeah yeah it's a bond
it's like one step down from oh like she's a thousand years old but she has the anime
titties body of a 17 like it's one step down from that like she's established to be dumb as bricks
but the danger presents itself and and bond immediately grabs the woman's arm to pull her
to where she needs to be and tells quarrel where else to go and it's like how about you
fuck off mate yeah this is
the kind of shit that should get bond righteously shot in the back of the head by quarrel but like
get your own damn shoes they mess they metal gear solid their way through a swamp and and then they
meet the fucking dragon because like if Bond maybe should learn a valuable lesson here
about intelligence received, right?
But he simply does not.
The whole time he's like, there's not a dragon.
This is a fucking, come on, man.
And Honey Rider, by the way, is like,
there is also a dragon.
I have seen it.
I have read about it.
He's like, yeah.
What's the letter D?
There's a point where she points at a pair of incredibly clearly tank
tracks on the ground and goes,
look, dragon tracks.
And it's like, yeah, okay.
Fucking nice, man.
Absolutely.
And we meet the dragon, which is
the funniest shit I've seen in a minute.
Yeah.
The dragon
is a wheeled, armoured
vehicle that has had a dragon face
painted on it and it has a flamethrower presumably because again chinese
yeah and it's the least threatening fucking vehicle i've ever seen in my life but bond
still manages to get owned because while he's sort of like he he's in this
sort of quasi military fetch my shoes commanding mode and his plan is okay you and me we're just
gonna shoot at the front of this with our tiny pistols this does not work his plan is to shoot
out the fucking headlights on it like yeah you know what kind of provides a lot of light? There's a flamethrower. And so as a consequence, Quarrel gets fucking incinerated.
Yeah, RIP Quarrel, F's in chat.
It's impossible to overstate how completely avoidable
Quarrel getting incinerated was,
because this thing was coming towards them so fucking slowly,
and the flamethrower had a range of maybe 10 feet,
but it just incinerates Quarrel
and then immediately they just turn off the
machine and get out and go alright
we're gonna take you away now
yeah we just wanted to kill that one guy
Bond isn't even fucking
sad yeah Bond's not even
arsed he's like what happened to my shoes
Bond's like fuck you had my shoes
fuck damn he had my shoes
but also Quarrel has been shown like swigging rum in a cheeky way I was like, fuck, he had my shoes! Fuck, fuck, he had my shoes!
But also, Quarrel has been shown, like, swigging rum in a cheeky way at various points, so he
probably goes up pretty well.
It does go up pretty well, it's...
Because ragdoll physics weren't invented yet, so the special effect for this is just
Quarrel just fucking falls over completely stone-ass dead.
Mm-hmm. Which...
But then, like, we get the first instance of Bond is bonked on the head and captured,
and brought to the lair, which is underneath a bauxite mine.
And Doctor No is the only person in the fucking movie who knows how to decorate is the thing we we have these we have
these sort of beautiful ken adams sets where everything's like lots of lots of concrete
that's sort of brushed in interesting ways and they have to oh yeah there is the detail that
like both bond and and rider are thoroughly fucking irradiated because uh yeah the island the island's radioactive
dog and so what they have to do is they have to like bond bond has to like get sprayed with
shaving foam and then brushed once with a broom and then honey rider has to take a full shower
it's it's great um then there's a lot of people working there who again are all chinese
all chinese all chinese and then they get brought to a room uh where they're supposed to stay and
it's like oh you will stay comfortably here and you will be dr no's guest and then they get drugged
kind of pointlessly just drugs and no reason because they get drugged
and then they just wake up in a bed
rested and it's just like ah
I just want to make sure you sleep well Mr Bond
Dr No is such a fucking considerate host
that he will roofie his guests
but only to make sure they get a good night's sleep
there's also no reason to have that scene
they could have just gone straight to the scene where Dr No
introduces himself I don't know why this is even in there
Dr No roofies them because he was going to see them for dinner and
they got there too early or some shit like he's literally just killing the fucking time between
and then they have to dress up also in asian clothing of course because they have to dress
you gotta dress chinese for this bond bond wears a sort of Mao four-pocket suit,
and then Honey Rider gets to wear a cheongsam and pants.
And they go and have dinner with Dr. No.
I'm surprised he's not like,
would you like some hoisin duck and pancakes, Mr. Bond?
Throughout all of this, this woman is getting
not only more and more english accented
but i think she might also be getting blonder like yeah yeah she does she goes to put on her
clothes and her hair is a completely different color radiation the radiation makes you blonde
yeah she's getting bimboified they wander through dr through Dr. No's office, which is, like, on the way to dinner, I guess,
as a flex.
And they find that he has a cool aquarium window
because they're under the fucking ocean.
And all of the fish look massive.
The reason why this is,
they altered the script, right?
They have Bond say,
yeah, I made it myself.
It's this convex glass.
And Bond actually has this quite incisive critique of supervillains
where he says, yeah, minnows pretending that they're fish.
Minnows pretending to be whales.
And then just at home he's like, just like you!
And Doctor No is like, yeah, I understood.
I understood that's what you were saying, yes.
The reason why this is in there
is because they bought stock footage of fish
and it didn't scale properly,
so all of the fish looked fucking massive
and they couldn't change it.
Yeah, because they're stood in front of a quite clearly
not convex window saying, it's convex.
Yeah, and now we get to the fun part.
This is the best scene of all.
Bond,
Bond, No, and Honey Rider
enjoy a delightful
dinner of two grapes.
It's so good!
And Dr. No goes completely out of
his way to mention his fucking hands
at least three times.
Like when he introduces himself, he
holds out a hand as if to shake and goes,
I don't really shake because of the hands.
Because of the metal hands,
which I lost
doing mad science.
Because of radiation, I think.
He has shiny black metal hands, yeah.
Yeah, I was... Chinese black metal
does sound like a fun genre.
But no, no, no, he...
The spread is sick.
My favorite thing is that Bond lands this absolute fucking roast of him.
Because they're kind of like...
First things first, they have to get the woman out of the way, which they do,
and Dr. No is like, yeah, no, my guards are just gonna probably rape her,
and Bond tries to hit him over the head with a
bottle of Dom Perignon.
And is dissuaded
by it being
pointed out to him how nice
the fucking champagne is.
And he's just like, oh yeah, okay, fine.
Yeah, go ahead.
He says it's a 56 or something
and Bond's like, I prefer the 53 myself.
And Bond's like, I prefer the 53 myself. And Bond literally goes just like, get the woman out of here, it's nothing he says it's a 56 or something and bond's like i prefer the 53 myself literally goes
just like get the woman out of here it's nothing to do with her and dr no's like yeah right leave
and then the woman just goes for the rest of the movie because yeah yeah all right that's enough
she goes to the same place that felix lighter did who has just fucking vanished
just yeah he's just fucking gone he's climbed into the machina to ex-Leiter.
Just completely vanishes.
No, what happens is they then have this sort of...
ideological conversation, right, where Dr. No outlines what his whole vibe is, and his
vibe is being the INTJ meme. Like...
The successful criminal brain is always
superior. It has to be.
And so
he announces that like
Bond gets this flex in that's just
like, oh you kill so many people you've
got to be a communist. Right.
And Nogue hits him with
East-West just points of the
compass each as stupid as the other.
Fucking go off.
Yeah, because I think it might be in the original novel
it was that he was
working for the communists,
but they change it in this film because I think by the time
this film came out, that was too much of a cliche.
So this is...
Dr. No, in classic Bond villain style,
explains who he is
and just says, actually, I work
for a secret organisation that MI7
has never heard of called Spectre.
Oh, I have a drop for this.
I'm a member of Spectre.
Spectre? Spectre.
That is unaltered.
They literally do just say
Spectre back and forth. For about five minutes
as well, it was a strange secret.
I lost my fucking mind when I
found out what specter stood for
like he just yeah yeah executive for counterintelligence okay cool terrorism fine
revenge and extortion it's such a clear acronym they're like fuck the four pillars of power. We're going to call it Spectre. I mean, you could have had Rocketeering. What does that stand for?
Special.
But my favourite detail about this is that both Bond and Noah
are just roasting each other the whole time,
including the reason why the group chat we have to organise this podcast
is currently called Eblis James Bond,
which is...
Bond goes... We can't all be geniuses can we tell me does the
toppling of american missiles really compensate for having no hands and it's so completely up
because his hands are not only functional but exceedingly functional.
We see him crush a thing to threaten Bond with them.
And he's just like, yeah, no hands much, bitch.
But Bond gets his fucking... How do you jack off with those things?
How do you finger a woman with a hand like that?
Noah's like, well, I thought I was going to recruit you for Spectre.
That's why I brought you here. I have a
better reason for not killing you immediately
than any other Bond villain in the franchise.
And Bond is like,
Bond, like, laughs it off. He's like, yeah, give me
the revenge section, that one sounds
cool, you fucking...
And what No tells him is...
You are just a stupid policeman.
It's an unironically phenomenal scene
where the two of them are sort of duking it out
with words.
Yeah.
And it's fucking accurate.
That's Bond's whole vibe, more or less.
Like, he pretends not to be, but yeah.
He's a dumb, lucky cop.
It's something. Yeah, Dr. No dumb, lucky cop. It's something.
Yeah, Dr. No absolutely has his number.
Yeah, and that number, 007.
That number is 007.
Dr. No is just like, yeah, I've finished my grapes.
Just have this guy beaten.
I want to stress at this point that Dr. No's plan
is that he's going to use his nuclear reactor in his base
to create a radio wave that'll make the fucking rocket
at Cape Canaveral fall over.
Fall over.
And then when that is accomplished,
he'll blow up his base and go somewhere else.
Yeah, he actually tells us that's his plan.
He's straight up like...
It's not entirely clear.
I mean, it seems if you've gone to all the trouble
to build this base
and if you
wanted to use it to divert missiles,
I mean, why not keep
the base? It's right there, man. It's pretty strategically
located, but he's like, yeah, no, once I've
done this, I'm going to blow
it up and move on to some
other shit. I'm going to do something else.
I just wanted to see if I could
do this. I don't know. I'm going to start a podcast.
I don't know. You stole start a podcast i don't know
he stole 10 million dollars from like the yakuza or something like that the tongs the hips and tongs
oh yeah and i wrote like 10 million dollars has been fucking ruined by inflation you can't get a
decent secret evil base for 10 million these days you can get a damn good pair of hands, though, apparently. Really? No's first line in the movie is,
One million dollars, Mr. Bond.
And that's him talking about how expensive
his fucking window is.
Out of 10?
I mean, I know that stock footage of fish is pricey,
but a million dollars?
That's a tenth of the money he stole.
How is that?
Yeah, he just blew it all on the window.
The sickest, most expensive element.
The Spectre
accounts department are like,
Dr. No, what are you spending this on?
Your expenses are awful.
Dr. No, we just needed you to have a radio
telescope or something.
I cannot stress enough
that
No's whole vibe is this.
The successful criminal brain is always superior.
It's just like, yeah.
And the successful criminal brain spent 10% of your budget on a window for BIP.
It's just, it's so, again, someone at Spectre is like, why are we giving this guy
money?
Why, yeah.
And like, we don't, that's the other fun thing, we don't know anything about Spectre is like, why are we giving this guy money? Why? Yeah. And, like, that's the other fun thing.
We don't know anything about Spectre other than their stupid ass name.
But, like, so we have Bond beaten, right?
And thrown in jail.
And then Bond plays fucking Hitman 3 like I do.
Which is to say, he busts out of his cell by virtue of, like,
kicking the world's flimsiest
great off. He uses his shoes.
Thanks, Quarrel. Yep.
Climbs through a series of
ducts, finds a guy in one of the
weird, like, Tesco
bag-ass hazmat suits
that they're all wearing because
of the radiation, and just kind of
like, hugs him until he can take his clothes
yeah Bond learns a new attack
he levels up
this is the thing it's not the first time
it's not the first time because
he gets to do this once
before when they're fleeing
across the salt marsh he like
very gently hugs a man from behind
and cradles him down into the water without
visibly harming him at all oh it's like a contextual button press stealth attack yeah
and honey rider is like i can't believe you did that did what and bond's just like because i
it's like half implied that he's that he kills him but i can't see how like he took the knife
of honey rider in that scene and then he just kind of like makes the guy
lie down it fucking rules and it cuts to honey rider and this we're going way back but it cuts
to honey rider in this and she just goes like why she's looking completely off to the side it's like
he just sort of like pushed him over in the previous scene honey rider confessed to a murder
she says yeah she says oh I murdered my landlord, yeah.
My landlord rapist.
Worst kind of landlord.
So, I mean,
Bond gets this hazmat suit,
which obscures his face not much
at all, and he wanders
into the world's best decorated
nuclear reactor.
It's a sick set. It's actually a phenomenal set.
It's a fucking... It fucking goes so hard, man.
It's like this this beautiful poured concrete, every second surface has a big flashing light on it that says
Danger level maximum or something.
And in the middle of this is Dr. No wearing a plastic bag over his head because of the
radiation.
Because for some reason, not only do you need a nuclear reactor that irradiates the whole
fucking island it's on, but to use that nuclear reactor, you need to be in the same room as
them.
You don't want to put a cover on that or something?
Like, no, no, we spent all the budget on a window you can just you can just have that in
another building but no no i have to i have to line up with all of my guys next to the nuclear
reactor a successful criminal brain is always not just that it's that like the big switch to turn on
the nuclear reactor is on like a gantry.
It's a crank.
It's a hand crank.
So they are in the process of make rocket fall down.
And 10 feet away is just an open nuclear reactor.
And I can't help but feel that even if you had a radiation suit, that's not going to work, man.
No wonder you lost your hands.
He put so much of his money into that fucking window
it was just like we don't have any shielding for the reactor and also we can't afford a second
room bond fucking fudges every stealth role across this room right he picks up some documents that
they just have in the nuclear reactor room and he's just kind of like perusing
them and walking around and looking like the most suspicious motherfucker you've seen in your life
he's almost that's a that's a a going theme in this movie is that no one knows how to look
casual like the the three blind mice guys are constantly looking completely suspicious the whole way around.
The guy, the sweating guy. Even in the intro where the guy walks across and then shoots at the fucking camera,
the classic introduction to James Bond, his walk is so suspicious.
And then...
Well, because that's not an actor.
That's Bond's stuntman.
They just did it last minute.
No one knows how to be casual.
It's so funny how shit it looks when you can see it in HD now.
So, yeah, I highly recommend that.
But, yeah, no, Bond gets fucking...
He gets his disguise blown by Dr. No,
who thinks he's a guy called Chang,
because everyone is Chinese.
Again, important note.
This guy...
I cannot stress enough, this man is chinese who has specifically
said he's not working with the east all of his guys are just chinese for some reason chinese
he's like doctor no's like chang why aren't you wearing your yellow face and maybe we should take
the second to stress that doctor no is wearing makeup that makes him look a little bit more chinese he's got
like yeah he's a canadian man in yellow face he's got like um something above his eye to make it
look like he doesn't have a fold there and nothing else also he is dressed like chairman mao the
whole time he is dressed like chairman mao but wearing a plastic bag over his head and he busts
bond stroke chang like skulking and essentially just tells him
yeah just go to work go go get across the room and go to the big switch that make reactor go yes
it's incredible which one does right and my favorite part is the guy working next to him
who has my exact physique it's just a guy it's just kind of a schlubby guy with a paunch wearing a plastic
bag it's fully see-through that guy's entire thing it's so funny and he's just like wearing
a t-shirt and shorts underneath yeah yeah i came here from podcast i'm safe as hell right now man He's come from the beach Oh yeah also
Sorry Honey Rider's just getting
Shells that's why she's on the beach
Yeah she likes shells
Because she has the mind of a child
She's like this is worth $50
What's she doing right now
We don't know
She's somewhere else
Who care
So as Dr. Noah's preparing to knock the rocket over,
Bond turns a big crank, moving a danger level meter past the level that says danger. It says
nothing else on it, merely danger level, and he's like, ah, this should go to the right.
So he does that, the podcast guy tries to fight him, and for that, this kind of like
schlubby guy is my hero, right, because he gets, Bond presses the B button, and like
Judo throws him off the edge of the gantry and he just fucking dies.
10 foot drop.
Again, 10 foot drop.
10 foot drop, he he just fucking dies. Ten foot drop. Again, ten foot drop.
Ten foot drop, he's just fucking gone. This is in the wild one of the only examples of
turning a big wheel that says something
and looking back at Dr. No like a contestant on The Price is Right.
He's just rotating this big fucking thing that says danger rating
and checking over his shoulder every couple of seconds.
But what's also very funny is all these podcast henchmen have quite clearly
been trained very well, because
an alarm sounds, and all
the henchmen just fucking bail.
They just drop what you're doing.
They just exit stage right and
go.
Except for Dr. No, who is
like, I gotta fist fight this guy
with my metal hands.
Yeah, he has the advantage.
Yeah. So he climbs on top of the gantry over this open nuclear reactor.
They fist fight.
Bond judo throws him off the gantry
because he's got
one move!
Bond uses the heavy attack.
He uses the heavy attack.
He throws him over the thing.
He presses A again.
And Dr. No is like, he's trying to climb out of the boiling reactive water,
and he can't get any purchase on the thing because, and I cannot stress this enough, no hands.
So the lesson of...
We can't all be geniuses, can we?
Tell me, does the toppling of American missiles really compensate for having no hands i guess
this movie is having no hands do not be disabled is a problem for you
if you have if you have a disability it will be your undoing in the ultimate life this starts a
this starts a trend that continues right even into the modern day james bond we'll get to the
fucking die another day wheelchair thing we'll get to the fucking die another
day wheelchair it's very richard the third is that all the bond villains have some kind of
physical deformity yeah right but anyway the base is exploding and he finds honey rider
tied to the floor for some reason yeah it's like i'd say it's like a two out of ten damsels in
distress i will point out one detail.
In the original script, she was intended to be menaced by crabs.
And the crabs that they got in Jamaica had been shipped internationally in frozen containers,
and so they just had a bunch of sluggish crabs who didn't want to act in a very aggressive way.
And so they were just like, yeah like yeah no we'll just have him
try and drown her instead
so she's like chained up
they didn't want to wait for the crabs to warm up
the room that James walks into
where Honey Rider is it feels
like there was a scene that just didn't
happen there
she's clearly
in the crab scene I suppose
she's clearly in like a set up and he just walks in Yeah, the crab scene. Yeah, the crab scene, I suppose, yeah.
She's clearly in, like, a set-up, and he just walks in and goes,
Jesus, and just lets her out, and then they leave.
Yeah, they did all of this bondage stuff.
He's like, we'll just skip this scene.
And so on the way out, he does a series of heavy and light attacks against people.
There's one moment where he collars a guy, where he's trying to find out where Ryder is.
He's like, where is she?
He's like, oh, no.
He punches him to the floor.
And then another henchman executes the sickest jump I've seen.
Yeah!
Just over his friend's body.
He's just like, yeah, fuck this shit.
I'm out.
And then, fortunately, Bond finds a woman he can grab, to ask where...
Yeah, he grabs the nearest woman, who is, like, in my opinion, significantly more attractive than any of the quote-unquote Bond girls in this movie.
100%.
But she is black, so, like, that, no.
Of course.
So, yeah, he's just like, where is she?
And he, like, unbuckles her from this James Bondage.
He's just like, where is she?
And he unbuckles her from this James Bondage.
Punches his way to the exit,
having just fucking shinobled a decent part of Jamaica.
Yeah, I just want to point out that
Bond has exploded a nuclear
reactor in the Caribbean
Ocean.
First of all, he's dead.
He's got cancer within five years. He's fully dead.
Oh yeah.
They just put him in the shower and they like scrubbed him once with that brush.
Yeah, it's fine.
Which is how you get rid of radiation.
Jamaica and a large section of the ocean
is now permanently irradiated.
He should have just let Dr. Noam
make Rocket fall down and escaped
and said, hey, I know who made Rocket fall down.
You can build this and just stop Rocket fall down.
Yeah.
You should have just escaped and said,
hey, I found out who's making rocket fall down.
You'll never believe it.
It's a Canadian man and yellow fish in the Caribbean.
No.
Also, I caused a nuclear reactor meltdown off the coast of Jamaica.
Sorry.
This is an island that is so radioactive
that they get irradiated from running around on it
and getting mud under their fingernails and stuff.
Because Dr. No can't afford another room!
Couldn't afford any shielding!
Because he spent all his money on a window!
Yeah, and he's just sent that fucking island into the atmosphere!
Oh, fuck, that window is probably the sleeper bad guy of the fucking movie.
Yeah, like, genuinely, Doctor No looking at the control panel with two buttons, million dollar window,
or reactive shielding, and is just firmly pressing.
He's like, buddy, I know what I want.
Yeah, I do what I want, and what I want is to look at some giant fish.
I wanna see some fucking fish, dude!
Giant fish.
Bond punches his way onto a convenient boat. Guys are like,
this is the original, like, evil-based
blow-up thing. There's guys diving off
of piers. It's all done in miniature.
It's really well done, all things considered.
This thing blows the fuck
up, and then his mate
Felix Leiter shows up,
and is like, would you like some rescue? No thanks.
I am going to fuck this
child-brained woman in this boat.
Bond shags in a boat.
There's a weird number of Bond films
with him shagging in a boat. It happens quite often.
Yeah.
This is the first.
We don't even get a James Bond
will return. We just get a the end.
We never get a debrief. He never goes back to
England and M's like, good work, Bond. You made
Rocket not fall down.
We see on the TV that Rocket no fall down rocket rocket goes straight up so we know we did well we see fine work 007 we see rocket go up and that's it did rocket fall
down did rocket fall down i can't talk to you now i'm shagging this child-brained woman in a boat.
Ah, very well.
Does she still have the shelves?
He's cheated her out of $50.
Fucked up.
Oh, God.
So we have...
What we have on this podcast is a system, right?
We're not just going to say,
oh, this Bond movie is bad, right? We're not just going to say, oh, this Bond movie is bad, right?
We have a system.
We're going to rate them out of 007 on the four attributes of Bond.
Smum, cultural insensitivity, unprovoked violence, and misogyny.
The scum spectrum.
The scum spectrum. So how do you think dr no falls
in terms of smum i think i am it's not the smarmiest james bond ever gets i think i'm
gonna give him a five out of seven it's mom i i kind of agree right because he
connery is like pulling the smarm out, he will smirk at everything, especially the
whole uh, it's a dragon is it thing, but like, there's an air of vulnerability to Bond in
this that just will not come back until Casino Royale, basically.
So I think, lower on the smarm, cultural insensitivity.
I put, I'm looking at a full 7 seven out of seven. Seven out of seven.
Like the instinct.
What if the Chinese woman was white,
but also Chinese and then Chinese?
We want to have a Chinese woman as a main character,
but also we would hate to employ a Chinese woman.
So we've got a white woman in a bamboo house.
Yeah.
And then all of the black guy being,
all of Quarrel,
let's put some respect on his name, being instinct driven.
Like he makes this point several times when he's being asked to just give them navigation directions to Crab Key and they'll go himself.
So they don't have to come to the island.
He's just like, yeah, no, I navigate with my senses.
I get my navigation from my nose, my eyes, my instincts.
Then later on, when they're about to set off at night,
Bond's like, we'll be fine.
And he goes, where my belly used to be tells me different.
And it's like they take every single step to make sure we know for a fucking fact that this guy is less than Bond, both intellectually and physically.
This is the most imperial Bond movie by a long shot because when
it was made this was still like a thing like jamaica was not a nation it was a colony a crown
colony yeah and it was it was still a crown colony you still had these clubs full of white guys in
shorts sitting around being like oh yes one pedophilia please well this is this is what i
mean when i say that when james bond films
are bad they're bad in ways that reflect the society that made them and that's that's why i
think they're kind of interesting culture and in this ever-changing world in which we live
now unprovoked violence not very low like he as i say he has two moves, but he only ever really seems to deploy those moves when somebody is a direct obstacle to him.
With the exception of the professor, which is just murder.
Yes, that's true.
He does murder a guy straight up.
I think that's going to boost it.
Let's say a six, maybe?
Out of seven?
Yeah.
I would say so, because the murder offsets a lot of-
I genuinely believe it to be a one or two out of seven.
I think he does get a lot more violent later on.
I want to give us room to go way up.
All right, you know what? Fine.
I concede the point.
So we'll say a one or a two in unprovoked violence.
Now, misogyny.
Oh, where do we start?
Again, he does get a lot more misogynist later on.
There aren't, I would say, Again, he does get a lot more misogynist later on.
There aren't, I would say, and this is very sort of fluid.
It's entirely dependent on your own sort of ethics here.
I would say that there aren't outright rapes in this movie. I don't think Bond is on screen vitiating anybody's consent,
which he will do
later, one million percent.
Yeah, there are some explicit
links later in the series.
Talking about the misogyny of this movie,
we have to decide, are we talking about the misogyny
of Bond, or the misogyny of the
movie, because that is definitely two
different things.
The movie...
I would say that there's less
miss in this misogyny,
because it's much more straightforwardly just a sexual fantasy, and that everybody wants
to fucking get railed by Bond.
And that persists through all of the movies, but like, yeah, the grimmer stuff that we're
gonna talk about, especially like later Connery, there's fully, like, it's just made explicit that women are not into Bond and he's just fucking them, whatever.
But, like, in this case, everybody from Moneypenny on down wants the D.
Yeah.
And is, like, willing to do pretty much whatever for it.
Yeah, and also, you know, comes on to him and takes part in it.
I mean, I want to give it a few points for Honey Rider's child brain.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think the movie itself is more misogynistic than Bond is.
Just through how the women are portrayed.
Bond himself at least seems, in most of the cases, for things to be consensual.
He even straight up tells Honey Rider,
oh, my intentions are strictly
honorable and although that's not true it's more than he ever bothers to do later there's one one
point i want to bring up just to sort of drive home the misogyny of the the movie itself and
the production is that the character sylvia trench and money penny those actresses were originally supposed to be playing each other's
character they were swapped when the director of this movie who i don't care for his name and i
don't i'll never credit him said that the character who ended up playing sylvia trench quote smelled
of sex which is why she got given the smarmy a job so the movie itself is is fucking horrendous
in its treatment of of women in its treatment of cultural minorities yeah yeah um so apart from our
our patented scum a patented scum uh spectrum which upon, this comes out fairly well. We've eased
into the Bond canon.
It's a total score of 17.
Not one of the most
egregious.
How was this movie to watch?
How did we enjoy watching it?
Well, I... Go ahead.
I find it kind
of middling. It has a long, sort of
dry spell in the middle. There's
like... I appreciate that there's more intrigue than you usually get in a Bond movie, I appreciate
that there's more threat than you usually get in a Bond movie, but like, it takes a
fucking while. Like, it's a two hour movie, and it feels like it could have lost a half
hour.
Definitely. Yeah, I was skipping through parts when I watched through it
the second time.
On the other hand, though,
I think it's worth
retaining in the canon
or whatever, purely because of that
dinner conversation over two grapes
each with Dr. No.
Where, I mean, you're
not going to get a better critique
of James Bond in the james bond
movies and i include the modern daniel craig ones with that than you are just a stupid policeman
i mean fucking get his ass yeah it was a nice place to start because i i alluded at the start
that there's two reasons i find the bond films interesting one political which we explored and
one personal and the the personal one has a hauntological dimension to it as well and that's because um when i first went to drama school and began my
professional acting career i remember them telling me at drama school your casting is period hottie
sexy doctor or discount hiddleston and i remember somebody they did that's what they told me
or discount Hiddleston.
And I remember somebody,
they did.
That's what they told me.
I remember somebody telling me,
you are going to play James Bond someday.
That's what,
that's what your career can be aimed at.
But then of course,
something happened to me as it happened to Alice and to Dan.
I feel like you still can.
A very strange thing happened,
which is that I found out I was a woman.
So that's why there is this kind of hauntology to the bond series for me so it's quite interesting to look back and and see bond not as a kind of mythical ideal of masculinity or something to be aimed at because you know as i said at the start
alice and i we've been in that world we've lived that kind of life this this podcast is a little
bit of therapy for us we are kind of sc scourging ourselves of this dickhead who plotted out the course of what
masculinity was supposed to be like, and so we're doing this all-trans feminist podcast.
To kill James Bond.
That's right.
We have to kill the Bond in our heads, And that's what we're gonna fucking do.
And we're gonna get into, like, the fucking character and the inner life of the women around James Bond.
We're gonna do all 24 movies. We're gonna have a Patreon.
Including the one with a trans Bond girl.
We're gonna have a Patreon where the deal is, we've invented a totally unique podcasting system which no one has ever done
before where if you subscribe to our patreon you get a bonus episode per free episode and those
bonus episodes are going to be about things let's say that the deuterocanonical bonds so
our first bonus episode which should be coming out the same time as this is going to be about
bonus episode which should be coming out the same time as this is going to be
about GoldenEye
64
we do have a guest lined up for that but
we can't say yet
but when you hear this it will
probably be out so we don't have to say
either just head on over to the
Patreon
we'll find it reasonably priced
we may
also do some Q& a episodes at some point absolutely
yeah we'll vibe it out we'll see how we do well this has been episode one was expecting a a funnier
name than just dr no to shake out in the thing but like i guess we're just calling it dr no dr no on the adventure of the
million dollar window dollar window you needed to see those fish man and of course james bond
will return as will we as we investigate the next bond movie in the season i believe it's
from russia with love from russia i will have Love. From Russia with love. I will have watched From Russia With Love in preparation for it, so it better be.
Let's just say it's From Russia With Love, and if we're wrong, it is From Russia
With Love.
Perfect.
This is great.
This is good.
This is a good ending.
Do you want to plug yourselves in case anyone doesn't know who you are, Abby?
Nobody doesn't know, and she's singing.
Once trans women get like this, I'm afraid we're... Yeah, we're going to have to stop before we start singing as well.
Yes.
And I just want to...
It's a fantastic song.
If I've said anything interesting or cogent,
I can almost guarantee it came about in conversation
with a girlfriend of the show, my girlfriend,
Eliane,
while we were watching it the first time.
I am not as smart as I came across.
Dev has used up that plug already.
There is one detail that I want to add as a closing note.
You already know who we are.
I don't feel any need to introduce ourselves again or plug the Patreon again.
I merely want to point out that at an early scene
professor dent accidentally borats check this shit out that secretary of his was very nice
very nice
very nice very nice bye everyone Very nice. Very nice.
Bye, everyone.
Bye.