The long-awaited No Time To Die pays off plenty of Craig-era James Bond Easter eggs, and one of the best must be Q learning from his near-fatal mistake in Skyfall. No Time To Die has finally arrived in cinemas, and the final movie from Daniel Craig’s 007 is a fitting swan song for the actor’s gritty, grounded reinvention of the iconic character. However, No Time To Die still finds time to pay off some Easter eggs set up by earlier Bond outings, as proven by Q’s smartest move in the new movie.
Late in the action of No Time To Die, Moneypenny and Bond barge into Q’s house as the lovable geek prepares for a date to get help unencrypting the villainous Obruchev’s flash drive. James Bond's brilliant quartermaster Q manages this feat and in the process avoids a crucial mistake that could have jeopardized the entire mission. There’s a good reason he avoids the mistake, too—it’s the one he made during 2012’s Skyfall and was the action that set that movie’s barnstorming third act in motion.
Q resists the urge to plug the stolen USB into MI6’s main system when he attempts (successfully) to decode the drive and it shows he remembered how disastrously wrong that can go. Q plugging Sliva’s flash drive into the secret service’s servers is how Javier Bardem’s villain got control of the organization’s computer systems in Skyfall, thus triggering his daring escape and capture of M. This string of events eventually culminated in the death of Judi Dench’s version of James Bond's boss M, a famous first for the franchise. Given Silva’s status as an almost godlike genius, it seems likely he would have engineered another plan had Q not fallen into his trap. Avoiding plugging into MI6’s internal systems while tinkering with a device nabbed from a nefarious villain in No Time to Die was a smart choice by the gadget maker.
This clever Easter egg is not the entire extent of Q’s contribution to No Time To Die, though. Q is also involved in setting up the fateful prison visit between Bond and Blofeld, during which Safin manages to infect Madeleine with his experimental killer nano-bots. This sets in motion the events of No Time To Die’s tragic ending, although Q can hardly be held responsible for the villain’s master plan this time around. This is, however, perhaps the most active role any version of Miss Moneypenny and Q have had in assisting Bond throughout the plot, with the duo reappearing throughout No Time To Die and repeatedly playing pivotal roles in the story.
Whishaw’s version of the character, while still charmingly befuddled, is a far cry from Desmond Llewellyn’s iconic iteration in this regard. Where that gadget maker mostly stayed behind a desk toying with new inventions, the new Q proved himself an action hero in his own right alongside Moneypenny as the pair assisted Bond throughout Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond. It may not have been enough to save 007 in the end, but the No Time To Die duo did prove they were more than just their earliest incarnations—and in Q’s case, capable of learning from past mistakes.