Not the fall but the bullet and that bloody song
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Moore did this the best, IMO. An upper class know it all who knew exactly what his superiors were talking about and then proceeded to school them.
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Never really thought that the Trevelyan thing needed all that much explanation. There’s enough plausible explanations for it for the viewer to fill in the blanks on their own, such as the one that I subscribe to being that Orumov pulled the gun to the right enough to intentionally miss Trevelyan.
The Skyfall bit, on the other hand, needs an explanation. Bond gets shot with an assault rifle, falls off a bridge at an incredible height, floats unconscious down the river until he then falls down a waterfall, again while unconscious. That’s fairly ridiculous even by Bond’s standards.
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It’s all been a dream from then onwards.
Makes sense.
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It would certainly make it easier to ignore Spectre and No Time to Die, that’s for sure.
One has to wonder what would cause Bond to dream that Blofeld was his long-lost “brother”.
That’s not even such a stretch when we look at Fleming giving Blofeld his own birth date - or even putting himself on the stage as Dexter Smythe, a guy living slice-by-slice off the wartime exploits of others. Some element of self-harm/self-sabotage, variants of impostor syndrome, is oftentimes present when intelligent people struggle with creativity. Some choose to tackle these issues head-on and give them the shape of familiar characters.
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Bond always survives, no matter the peril—part of his mystique (and something that DAF sends up during the course of the film).
So by default, let’s learn about Trevelyan’s brain injury and subsequent recovery.
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The real cracker isn’t so much that Trevelyan survived a direct point blanc hit to the head* - but that he’s next heard of several years later and isn’t just working hand-in-glove with the Russians but actually their bloody boss! How did that come about?
One might speculate 006 has been working for the Russians for some time already, possibly also already under suspicion by M which is why he sent Trevelyan and Bond (without telling Bond about his suspicion; those were the Gardner days of the old M who openly schemed to arrange an interesting death for Bond). Ourumov has been the underlying then and didn’t much move up the corporate ladder until his overdue retirement.
Trevelyan meanwhile went through extensive debriefing, spilling the beans on every 00 op and whatever else he picked up in Whitehall (plenty). However, it became glassy-nosty enough for him to hold back on the juicy stuff (most of B. Johnson’s schooldays and what happened in his wardrobe) and arrange to put up a private outfit with trusted comrades and the right set of legs to keep them in business.
*Various possibilities for malfunction of the projectile or physical abnormalities might explain away that. Occam’s preferred one would be Ourumov just missing on purpose though.
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Always assumed that Trevelyan was a double before and Orumov was shooting blanks.
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I seem to remember that we only see from afar him being shot, with the focus on Bond‘s reaction for not being near enough to step in.
What explanation does the film actually give when they meet again?
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I always just assumed blanks and that the whole ambush was planned by Oroumov and Trevelyan. To be fair though, even blanks that close would have stopped his face and burst his ear drum.
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Pleasingly ignorant of guns myself, but I did understand that one couldn’t fire blanks and live ammunition from the same gun or cache or whatever it is called. Ourumov shoots a soldier, presumably dead, with the same gun. Unless everyone is shamming.
Absolutely none, from memory.
Hmm. One wonders about a recent incident afresh.
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It’s probably easier to just aim off target than doctor the gun with different loads. At a distance one just can’t tell.
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If the shot went past him, would the gun fire explain his scars?
Maybe they planned it without him, he fell down due to shock, and later on they turned him before he rose within the ranks and became the perfect double double-O.
Still, would have been nice to get an explanation in the film.
Weird that I never questioned this before.
I‘m so gullible, just like EON wanted me to be.
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You could get nasty scars from the muzzle flash, no doubt about it. But I always took that particular stuff to be the result of the shortcut six minutes they make so much fuss about. Perhaps the plan had been for Trevelyan to defuse the mines once Bond was captured - which somehow then blew up in his face…
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That’s what I always thought it was. Seems like the most likely explanation.
I always assumed he got the scarring on his face from having not made it completely clear of the building before it blew up. I think that this is backed up by the repeated references to Bond having changed the timer to 3 minutes and how it was Bond that gave him his scars.
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006 is shot while off screen, so we need less explanation than Bond would; he’s looking right at the “killing”, and given his line of work he should be able to tell a genuine point-blank head shot from a pretend one.
That said, the explanation remains simple: 006 is played by Sean Bean, who contractually cannot end a workday without a death scene.
Craig’s survival is likewise explainable: his suits, though at least one size too small, are woven from Grade A plot armor, blunting the impact with the water, while his inflated sense of self-importance acts as a flotation device.
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Which will then explain his inevitable return in Bond 26. The missile just bounced off because…he’s James Bond.
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What I said elsewhere. He’s James Bond, he can’t die. And while other Bonds saw this as a good thing and went happy-go-lucky with it, Craig-Bond realised the curse that it actually is - which explains his general grumpiness. All explanations or questions about or why he survived this or that (including This or That) are moot, because the First Commandment of the Bond franchise is “James Bond Will Return.”
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