Now pay attention, 007: James Bond's Q re-booted

Surely

Am I the only who looks at the new Q and thinks 'Maurice Moss'? Although it would probably detract from the balls-to-the-walls action that seems to be a requirement for a modern spy-thriller, I can't help but feel that adding a dosh of the Moss would certainly help me get into the cinema more...

Can't say that I like the Bond franchise "reboot" at all, to be honest, but Q was Q for a reason. He may not have invented those gadgets, you see, he probably didn't understand the new-fangled gadgets very much. But he was the Quartermaster, in charge of the department, herding the young geeks (like the new "Q") to get the results that could be tested to his satisfaction and only rolled out to the field agents when he was happy with them.

He probably could do all their jobs, at a push, but he didn't. He was the old-guy in charge of the young-guys that tweezered the talent out of them while curbing their enthusiasm to go too mad or use unreliable technologies. He was the equivalent of the ageing cardigan-wearing scholar in charge of the supercomputer datacenter - maybe he couldn't tweet properly on his first attempt, but he was around while computers still ran off punched tapes, could write better code than anything the young'uns could churn out and was there as an experienced, calm, sensible influence to herd the department away from schoolboy fantasies and towards a product that would save someone's life every time.

Bond knew that. He knew how Q worked. He knew that a Q gadget would never let him down. He knew that Q didn't want him touching stuff, especially stuff that hadn't been approved yet, because he was interfering in the old-guy's projects. And, numerous times, you could see Bond silently thank Q's attention to detail and testing and reliability.

Q *WAS* a Desmond Llewellyn (not the actor, the character - the actor was notoriously inept with technology, as was the actor who played his successor "R"). He was an old guy, who spent the afternoon sitting in a back room, maybe smoking a pipe, waiting for that young, keen guy who he'd sent back to the drawing board to see that he was right all along and came back with what he knew would have to be his correction / workaround / revamp because Q already knew it wouldn't work any other way, just from instinct. He didn't stamp on keenness and new ideas, but he was there as a mentor and merely guided those enthusiasms and channelled them through a filter of years of experience and got something even better from them.

You can't mess with Q. A young-geek Q isn't what would exist. Maybe a Q-in-training, or a Q-apprentice, yet to see that the little old man who makes him re-do everything is really teaching him how to be a better Q and who, in years to come, will joke with him in that backroom and see Q's human side come through and joke with him about how they were like the new recruits once.

The Bond reboot has missed the point of quite a lot of the characters and (admittedly) their enlarged selves that have been portrayed in the tackier of Bond movies. You can't mess with Q, though. That's the last straw.

P.S. NEVER has an actor and character had a more profound exit from their starring role than Desmond Llewellyn and Q. Never. Perfectly timed. Perfectly matched. Perfectly humble. Perfect.

Colin & Malcolm

I prefer Colin and Malcolm from Spooks.

"Old Q"

The article would have been better had it referred to "Major Boothroyd" instead of "Old Q". For that was his name.

Back in the real world..

.. you need someone who can MANAGE the kind of "geeks" the (wonderfully well written) letter alludes to - I think we could call them hackers. This is one of the harder problems to address: if you create a herd of techno-geeks you have to find a way to direct all that youthful enthusiasm so they don't end up hacking the electronics in the PM's car for a laugh but focus on stuff that genuinely helps the country, and at the same time keep the politics away from such a team so it can actually do its job.

The ideal age for someone like that is around 45-55 - mature enough to handle the politics, old enough to still have a focus wider than just computers, yet young enough to understand hacker culture and work with it (as a matter of fact, someone of that age may have actually spent their youth getting into trouble like that).

Been there, done that :). Twice..

Slightly different...

....but I enjoyed Simon Pegg's turn in Mission Impossible 4. He couldn't (yet) be 'Q' in the way Lee Dowling has nailed perfectly above- but he did work well as the film's gadget expert, even if said gizmos didn't.

Mr Dowling left out one of Q's most important qualities: He was prescient, and wouldn't give Bond a magnetic watch when the mission would actually require some plastic explosive toothpaste. How did Q know?

Bad casting

Desmond Llewelyn overstayed in the role of Q. All the other key roles were played by younger actors as time progressed, but Q stayed the same. Originally Q and Bond were the same age, Mid 30s. But because of bad casting, Q aged and nobody else did.

Just as fictitious characters are portrayed by different actors (Batman, Superman, Holmes, etc) Q should have been replaced at the same time as Conrey went. Q spent only a few minutes on screen in most films but the character was played brilliantly and became major. That was Desmond Llewelyn's skill. But Q was never an old man, Llewelyn was.

I think Benedict Cumberbatch could have played the new Q better - he's young, but not *that* young.

Before I forget..

.. epic letter, that article. Can't find a rating thingie, but you'd get top. Just so you know.

Waste of Good taxes by bad people

None of them put the fart in George Bush's cabbage.

My first impression:

"Good lord: Brain and the Doctor had a kid."

Thought I'd seen him before, he played Pingu in Nathan Barley. Also a "computer geek" there, but I doubt that's why they cast him. Although he did show quite the aptitude for falling out of windows...

I'd like to add something here but,

I think Lee Dowling has the definitive post for this thread.

Not another one

And Q isn't just younger, he's also tooled up for a new age: a computer geek, not a maker of underwater breathing equipment or exploding pants.

Oh, good - the Bond franchise has boldly decided to include one of today's most tiresome character cliches. Apparently imagination is not a requirement for Bond scriptwriters.

When will film and TV people learn that computers are boring? Sure, designing, building, and programming them are often quite interesting, and not infrequently fun. Even administering the damned things can offer a bit of entertainment. But on-screen they're dull, dull, dull, even in the ridiculous fantasy world of fictional "hacking" where top people can share a keyboard.

The computer has become deus and machina in one - it's the magic box lazy writers turn to whenever they write themselves into a corner, or in many cases just have a minor plot hurdle to overcome. And the hacker-nerd is their modern Delphic oracle - minus drugs and nudity - so the action heroes needn't bow down before it.

1980?

As someone who was born in 1980 and hence being 32, I am glad to be described as a 'slip of a lad'

Who plugs a foreign laptop into ANY ethernet port inside your network? What a chumpwit.