With a few exceptions (e.g., remote mines activated with omega watch in GE and TND) gadgets are always different in each film. Why? If an exploding pen and laser watch did well in one mission, why not make it standard issue going forward? By Die Anohter Day, Brosnan Bond should have laser/remote mine watch, exploding pen, x-ray specs, along with his DAD gadgets.
Ditto for Craig - shouldnt he also have the radio in his shoe and the thumb-print gun in Spectre? Shouldn’t Dalton have the keyring that explodes with gas when you whistle in LTK? Moore and to a lesser extent Connery should be flush with gadgets by their final films.
You could argue that they’re all prototypes that never actually work or are too expensive to make more of. But I don’t actually buy that. They clearly work in their initial missions, so why not use them again?
It’s government property, so he’d have to return it at the end of missions, which would then preclude LTK and Spectre seeing re-used gadgets, given he wasn’t there on government business. And Brosnan DID reuse the laser watch from Goldeneye, he uses it to break in through the ice in DAD.
And the rebreather in the same scene is from TB, or near enough.
Maybe Bond relishes the thrill of figuring new ways to cheat death, so he deliberately leaves behind all the older, proven gadgets even though he’s expected to take them along. And he only takes the new one(s) because he’s expected to report on their effectiveness at mission’s end. And he keeps hoping he can tell Q, “it failed, thank you very much, but I survived anyway!”
Or maybe he keeps all the old gadgets in the trunk of that Aston Martin he’s driven for 50 years.
By the time the next movie is out, those gadgets are useless because everyone knows about them.
Just take the DB10 from SPECTRE: okay, there weren’t any people out on the streets in Rome who might have seen the flame thrower, but he parks it on the bottom of the Tiber to be fished out by the Italian Police. Certainly made a few headlines…
That signature gun from Skyfall? He doesn’t even pick it up before escaping from the dragon’s den, leaving it for Silva’s men to find out about it (of course, one of them already knows).
And what he doesn’t leave out in the field, he destroys. We all know Q’s ongoing laments about returning the equipment in one piece.
And also, MI6 has a massive security problem. Traitors everywhere. Vesper, Mitchell, Silva, C, and that’s only the Craig movies. Alec Trevelyan even used his knowledge about the Q watches to disarm the detonators in GE. “Ah. New model. Still press here, do I?”
IMO - All of the above. The re-breather does make three appearances. TB, OHMSS and DAD. As to the others, left behind or destroyed. Hey, if Q issues a pen, lighter, watch with a bomb in it or has an explosive self-destruct charge in the cars (FYEO, TLD) he has no right to whine.
As to Bond still carrying them as ‘standard issue’ - There is the deleted scene in AVTAK with Bond collecting his property at the police station.
There is another reference in GF on the jet when Bond asks if his luggage survives and about his attaché case. “So sorry. Black attaché case damaged when examined.” Bond does offer a slight smile as it means that his FRWL issued case probably flooded a bunch of Goldfinger’s thugs with tear gas.
Other than that, time and technology marches on. Two of my personal favorites were the cigarette case as a microfilm reader in TSWLM and then as an x-ray device in MR.
The other side gets wise to the stuff fast. e.g. in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, Anya Amasova already knew how the Lotus worked she “stole the plans two years ago”.
On the basis of your perceptive examples, it’s Bond himself. The prospect of a BigBad threatening the World with material that Bond himself previously left lying around somewhere would be an amusing, flamboyant escalation on the more mundane (but regular) example of an intelligence spod leaving their laptop on a train.
Of course it’s Bond himself. Heaven knows what he did that the previous Ms kept sending him out in the field. The occasional butterfly for Lee’s, Brown’s was an old buddy (according to some theories), and the Dench’s… one word: Mommy. A jester’s licence to kill he had.
Mallory was on the right track, he wanted him out as he saw the security risk. But of course, Bond did what he always does when they’re trying to get him back on track: pouting and going rogue. And then used his underlings Q and Moneypenny to brainwash M, which resulted in him killing his superior C, the only guy who was willing to do the right thing.