September 6.
Sticking with scenes UnScene for the moment…
(The reference to OHMSS is to Blofeld; oh, those buttery fingers of mine)
The duel over a Poker game was always a bonkers idea, even with the added element that this is not entirely a game of chance. Bond’s mission should just have been to snatch Le Chiffre with an unmarked van and CIA’s to freeze his assets across the western hemisphere. I strongly suspect that’s the gist of the board of enquiry’s report on the matter - that got somehow misplaced in a batch of HMRC documents marked for destruction.
Which is why - sadly, sadly - it’s subsequently become difficult to learn lessons from this particular after-action report. But the ministry, the JIC, all involved agencies and allied intelligence services are optimistic to do a significantly improved and streamlined performance in future operations. Trust us on this…
Bond so often fails that Mi6 doesn’t expect him to do better as long as he finally nails it (them). As Q always says about his favorite 00: it‘s not a bug, it’s a feature.
So the real issue for me is: why doesn’t Savalas-Blofeld recognize Lazenby-Bond when Pleasance-Blofeld encountered Connery-Bond before?
Answers:
a) because that question already is giving the answer which nevertheless is a cheap one
b) because continuity has always been as important to EON as pleasing message boards fans
c) because the ear lobe operation came with serious side effects for Blowie’s memory
d) because this Bray fellow was dubbed anyway and nobody could imagine Bond being an expert at doing impressions, too
e) because Blofeld actually did recognize Bond and just was cool enough to play along until he could trap Bond in that cable car room
f) because Lazenby-Bond was so arrogant that he thought he could pull this false identity trick off, and then got so confused about how much he actually rather would be a heraldry expert (lumberjack came in second) that he actually was convincing enough (Blofeld: it should be Bond but he cannot be that daft, can he?)
g) because Savalas-Bloob was practicing holding his cigarette too much in order to notice
h) because before his scar removal operation Blofields also had some minor psychological problems which were cured by a whole personality transplant (icky psycho Pleasance became charismatic coolness giant Savalas) and his memory was wiped clear (among other things, hopefully)
i) because we only see what Bond thinks and makes up in his mind so villains, allies and he himself always look and behave differently - leading to that final film in which he is revealed to be a small child lying sickly in bed and dreaming of all those adventures. And women.
I’ll go with option E. Either that, or because Bond’s disguise of eyeglasses and a kilt were so subtly effective a la Clark Kent/Superman that he never suspected the Hilary Bray he saw could ever possibly be 007. 
They’re taking a lot more of a risk here considering this is Bond’s first mission and he’s yet to properly establish himself. But indeed, this is my answer too. M knows Bond has a certain magic that others don’t and has confidence in him to finish the job, regardless of what obstacles (eg. dry walls) are put in front of him.
As for OHMSS, the best explanation is that Connery’s You Only Live Twice didn’t happen in the Lazenby timeline. Therefore this issue has never bothered me. But if we need an in film explanation I’m going for a combination of option E and F.
OHMSS isn’t such a mystery. George is wearing a kilt when Blofeld meets him. Who’s going to be paying attention to a face when there are legs like that in the room?
It’s the cardigan, some special Q-branch cloaking weave from the outer Hebrides.
While we see this
what Blofeld and the Spectre goons see is this
Works for me.
Overall, Bond not being recognized is just part-and-parcel of the rules governing the Bond film universe. The question was going to be raised, so in a stroke of either genius or laziness or disregard or all three, the creators just ignored it.
With great respect to Jim, a modest suggestion for a potential option:
Something to explain why Blofeld dresses in drag to leave The Whyte House
Or is it more like this?
September 7.
I suppose the Carver thing is somehow self evident; that guy (like most of us back then) just didn’t see the internet as relevant for news. It was some message boards where people discussed their particular interests and posted pics of their pets. Twitter didn’t yet exist and Facebook was still a long way from the data behemoth with the potential to spread lies and shift votes. Nowhere near as powerful as the set of traditional newspapers and news channels Carver acquired after the Maxwell/Murdoch pattern.
That said, I suspect if Carver had had a social media network and they had shown him giving nut jobs and propagandists a platform, nobody would have believed that’s a dangerous thing. How threatening can they be, the flat-earthers and the holocaust deniers and the neonazis? For the 90s the scheme to instigate a war for ratings was probably the best choice.
The Q masquerade on the other hand was baffling and confusing. My only explanation is they wanted to have the ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned’/‘That’s putting it mildly, 007’ exchange. Otherwise the priest costume is entirely superfluous; other films depicting clandestine meetings in churches just use the pews. And nothing here suggests Q would actually need a cover to meet Bond.
Having a scene explaining this - like Q being an admirer of Greek church architecture or some such - might possibly just point out, how scurrilous and unnecessary the meeting is. Perhaps better left untouched?
I always suspected Q would rather be a field agent, having a lot of fun with disguises (the gardener outfit at that point was already hanging in his closet, and let‘s better not ask how many third or four nipples he had prepared, just for fun).
And the older he got the less interested in reality he was. Just the cooky uncle, and he embraced it. Well, spending the rest of your time in a lab devising absurd gadgets to kill and torture people will probably do that to you.
I never asked myself what Q was even doing there and that it was unnecessary until… I heard people complaining about this. I always understood that the scene was actually originally intended with M (I assume without the disguise), but due to the absence of Bernard Lee they then turned it into this scene with Desmond.
What Q does on his time off work is his buisness. His successor bough a pair of hairlesss cats!
More of Q in priestly garb. Easy vote.
I always try hard in Sideswipes to pick a side, so to speak, but in this instance it’s impossible for me. Do I care about the “why” for Q? Of course not, as the answer to “Why” is invariably “It’s Q!” Why is Q in Brazil in MR - well, it’s Q! Why is Q working on a “retirement” boat in water on the upper floors in TWINE? I dunno, “it’s Q!” Why does Q look like some millennial student hanging out at the National Gallery of Art? I dunno, “It’s Q!”
As for Carver, other than the karate piss-take, he is absolutely one of the most uninteresting and nonsensical (I’m going to use my weapon’s firing stealth boat to boost the value of my media empire? Really - I’m going to use cutting edge weaponry to…wait for it, have more TV stations???) villains of all-time (not Pryce’s fault), not even one-dimensional, actually half-dimensional.
I’m passing!
Some of these Carvers even want to destroy democracy for bigger ratings.
Re: Carver there’s also that old anecdote about Hearst’s New York Journal in 1897 sending some illustrator to Cuba to cover local tensions that would lead to conflict between the US and Spain. The guy couldn’t find any evidence of tensions and reported as much home.
Hearst supposedly replied: ‘You furnish the pictures, I furnish the war.’
Evidently that’s the whole plot of TOMORROW NEVER DIES.
As boring as he may be (to me, Jonathan Pryce always looked like Chris de Burgh, which gives him a difficult stand with me, anyway), there’s that one quote of his Carver of which I always thought it was taken from somewhere else:
“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”
One stumbles quite often on this one in the “outside world”, sometimes attributed to Fleming, which it certainly is not. Interestingly, when you search for it on the interweb you’ll find many sources that attribute it (correctly) to Bruce Feirstein – unlike other Bond quotes, which are usually related to their respective characters and not the script writer.
With that said, one has to concede that it’s been proven wrong in the past few years too many times… 
