Big Bad / James Bond

"And it seems they were all part of one organization. Le Chiffre, Quantum, Sciarra, your friend Mr. Silva. And do you know who links them all?"

Every installment in the James Bond franchise will have an arch-villain pulling the strings, most often in the form of Bond's arch-nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

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Film

• Ernst Stavro Blofeld, from the movies (as well as the books they were based on), up until he was apparently killed in the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only. He's Back! for the Craig era as of 2015, though. Each Bond film also has its own Big Bad:
  • Dr. No: Doctor Julius No, though he's working for SPECTRE.
  • From Russia with Love: As far as the plot is concerned, it's Rosa Klebb, however, we're made aware of the mysterious "Number One" of SPECTRE who issues orders and terrifies even her.
  • Goldfinger: Auric Goldfinger. Technically, he's been hired by Communist China, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't care about causing chaos in the West and is just piggybacking them to get richer. Notable among the villains during the Sean Connery era who isn't affiliated with SPECTRE.
  • Thunderball: Emilio Largo, though "Number One" again appears.
  • You Only Live Twice: Number One takes direct command this time, and he's revealed to be the aforementioned Blofeld. Again, the Chinese are paying him, but he's the dominant partner by far. His scheme is to capture US and Soviet spacecraft, Playing Both Sides against each other to start World War III.
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Blofeld again.
  • Diamonds Are Forever: Blofeld again.
  • Live and Let Die: Mister Big, who seeks to corner the drug market in the U.S.A., and Dr. Kananga, a Carribean prime minister. They're one and the same.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun: Francisco Scaramanga. Hai Fat would like to be this, but Scaramanga has other ideas.
  • The Spy Who Loved Me: Karl Stromberg, who wants to start World War III and begin life anew in the sea.
  • Moonraker: Hugo Drax, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who wants to Kill All Humans.
  • For Your Eyes Only: Aristotle Kristatos.
  • Octopussy: Prince Kamal Khan and General Orlov.
  • A View to a Kill: Max Zorin, who wants to collapse Silicon Valley into the sea so he will have a monopoly on microships.
  • The Living Daylights: A Big Bad Duumvirate with Brad Whitaker and General Georgi Koskov.
  • Licence to Kill: Franz Sanchez, a drug lord who controls the country of Isthmus. His attack on Felix Leiter and murder of Felix's wife prompts Bond to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • GoldenEye: Alec Trevelyan aka "Janus".
  • Tomorrow Never Dies: Elliot Carver, who wants to start World War III to jack up his company's TV raitings.
  • The World Is Not Enough: Elektra King, notable for being the franchise's first, and currently only female Big Bad. Renard also drives a major chunk of the plot here as The Heavy and the one who caused Elektra's Stockholm Syndrome to begin with.
  • Die Another Day: Sir Gustav Graves (Colonel Tan-Sun Moon).
  • Casino Royale: Le Chiffre is The Heavy, but like other villains in the series, he's been hired by third parties (including a Nebulous Evil Organisation called Quantum) who all want the money they entrusted him with back (and want to kill him). Perhaps a better example would be the mysterious Mr. White.
  • Quantum of Solace: Dominic Greene, though other members of Quantum of equal or greater rank than him appear briefly.
  • Skyfall: Raoul Silva, real name Tiago Rodríguez, who wishes to humiliate and kill M for leaving him to die years ago.
  • Spectre: Franz Oberhauser aka Blofeld, the leader of the titular criminal organization. He's also the Greater-Scope Villain to Mr. White, Greene and Silva.
  • No Time to Die: There's a Big Bad Ensemble between Oberhauser/Blofeld and Safin. Oberhauser/Blofeld is the bad guy for the first act of the movie, sending his goons to attack Bond in the Action Prologue and later has the MacGuffin that kicks off the main plot stolen. Safin ends up becoming the real Big Bad, seeking to destroy Spectre for murdering his parents and decides to hijack the MacGuffin for his own nefarious purposes. Blofeld posthumously becomes the Greater-Scope Villain for Safin, being involved in why the latter ended up becoming a villain.

Literature

• Like in the films, most James Bond novels have a Big Bad.
  • Casino Royale: Le Chiffre, the paymaster of a SMERSH-controlled trade union. His plan is less grandiose than usual Bond fare, as it revolves around him trying to save his own ass after he used SMERSH funds to invest in a chain of brothels that were shut down when prostitution in France was made illegal. To this end he puts together a huge baccarat game at the eponymous casino to recoup his losses, while Bond tries to thwart him.
  • Live and Let Die: Buonapart Ignace Gallia, alias Mr. Big, head of a Harlem and Caribbean crime ring/cult that smuggles 17th-century gold coins into the United States to finance SMERSH's operations.
  • Moonraker: Sir Hugo Drax, the wealthy British industrialist behind the United Kingdom's Moonraker ICBM program. His real name is Hugo von der Drache, a bitter unrepentant Nazi seeking revenge on Great Britain by collaborating with the Soviets to engineer the "accidental" bombing of London to scare Western Europe out of stationing nuclear weapons on its soil.
  • Diamonds Are Forever: Jack and Seraffimo Spang, the bosses of the Spangled Mob, a gang smuggling diamonds out of Africa.
  • From Russia with Love: Colonel Kronsteen and Colonel Rosa Klebb of SMERSH, orchestrating a plot to kill Bond and publicly humiliate Britain on the orders of Colonel General Nicholai Sergenovitch Grubozaboyschikov (sic), head of SMERSH, in retaliation for Bond thwarting their previous endeavors.
  • Dr. No: Dr. Julius No, arguably the most colorful of Fleming's Bond's literary villains. At the behest of the Soviet Union, he's been sabotaging the American missile program from a secret lair in the Caribbean as well as salvaging and providing the downed missiles to the Soviets.
  • Goldfinger: Auric Goldfinger, SMERSH's treasurer who comes up with an elaborate plan to rob Fort Knox of its gold bullion, wiping out the local garrison and most of the town's populace in the process.
  • For Your Eyes Only: A collection of short stories rather than a novel, each story, except for "Quantum of Solace" and "The Hildebrand Rarity," has its own Big Bad:
    • In "From a View to a Kill," it's the nameless assassin who ambushed a NATO dispatch rider delivering top-secret documents to NATO headquarters.
    • In "For Your Eyes Only," it's Herr von Hammerstein, an ex-Gestapo officer and former chief of Batista's counterintelligence bureau, who becomes a target for Bond after he has two British citizens killed to intimidate their daughter into selling their property to him.
    • "Risico" has Kristatos, a CIA informant who's actually in charge of a narcotics smuggling ring funnelling drugs into Britain with the backing of the Soviets.
  • Thunderball: Emilio Largo is The Heavy of the novel, orchestrating SPECTRE's plan to steal nuclear warheads and threaten to detonate them unless a ransom is paid. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, functions as the Greater-Scope Villain.
  • The Spy Who Loved Me: "Sluggsy" Morant and Sal "Horror" Horowitz, the two mobsters hired by Sanguinetti, the owner of Dreamy Pines Motor Court, to burn down his motel as part of an insurance scam, which also involves killing employee Vivienne Michel and pinning the blame for the fire on her.
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, alias Comte Balthazar de Bleuville, who, under the guise of running an allergy clinic, is brainwashing women with connections to Britain and Ireland's economically-crucial agricultural industries to poison crops and livestock with deadly pathogens, likely at the behest of the Soviets.
  • You Only Live Twice: Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, a sadistic European expatriate living in Japan who's opened up a "Garden of Death" stocked with deadly plants, animals, and fumaroles where suicidal Japanese can end their lives in exotic fashion, something that has proved to be a political embarrassment for the government. So embarrassed that Japanese intelligence requests Bond kill the man in exchange for some intel on the Soviets. "Shatterhand" turns out to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who by this point has cemented his role as Bond's Arch-Enemy, and so 007 is more than willing to carry this task out.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun: Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a Cuban assassin who's attracted the ire of the British Secret Service for killing several of its agents. Worse, he's working with the KGB and the mob to destabilize Western interests in the Caribbean.
  • Octopussy and The Living Daylights: Another anthology of short stories, all but one of the stories, "007 in New York," have their own Big Bads.
    • "Octopussy": Dexter Smythe, a retired British Army major who killed a German mountain guide (and a parental figure of Bond's) in the aftermath of World War II to hide his theft of two gold bars from a Nazi cache.
    • "The Living Daylights": "Trigger", an elite KGB assassin ordered to kill a defector codenamed "272," whom Bond has to keep alive.
    • "The Property of a Lady": The resident general of the KGB branch in London, who has the rather mundane job of surreptitiously paying off one of his spies through an auction at Sotheby's, giving Bond an opportunity to identify him.
  • Colonel Sun: Colonel Sun Liang-tan, who's scheming to disrupt a Middle Eastern détente conference hosted by the Soviet Union and pin the blame on the United Kingdom, thereby triggering a new world war that will leave China as the surviving world power.
  • Licence Renewed: Dr. Anton Angus Murik, Laird of Murcaldy, a nuclear physicist who attempts to blackmail the British, French, West and East German, and American governments by hiring terrorists to capture six nuclear reactors and threatening to start meltdowns.
  • For Special Services: Nena Bismaquer, née Blofeld, who leads a revitalized SPECTRE in what is an apparent attempt to capture NORAD but is actually an elaborate plot to exact a personal revenge on James Bond.
  • Icebreaker: Count Konrad von Glöda, real name Aarne Tudeer, a former Oberführer in the SS and now leader of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Action Army, which is responsible for a wave of assassinations in the Eastern Bloc with the aims of overthrowing said bloc and ushering in a Fourth Reich.
  • Role of Honour: Jay Autem Holy appears to be this, but is actually The Dragon to Tamil Rahani, the new leader of SPECTRE, who's overseeing a plot to replace the United States' nuclear codes with their own and sell them to the Soviet Union.
  • Nobody Lives for Ever: Tamil Rahani again, who literally puts a price on Bond's head after sustaining a terminal injury following his conflict with 007 in the previous novel.
  • No Deals, Mr. Bond: General Konstantin Nikolaevich Chernov, codename Blackfriar, the chief investigative officer of Department Eight of the KGB's Directorate S, who's hunting down Soviet personnel turned by the British in an operation called Cream Cake.
  • Scorpius: Vladimir "Father Valentine" Scorpius, an Arms Dealer to terrorists and leader of a satanic cult called "The Meek Ones" which he has turned loose in a wave of bombings and assassinations.
  • Win, Lose or Die: Bassam Barradj, leader of the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism (BAST), who schemes to kidnap and ransom President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Mikhail Gorbachev.
  • Brokenclaw: Lee "Brokenclaw" Fu-chu, the crime lord of San Francisco. He's working for Chinese intelligence to hack into the New York Stock Exchange and collapse the United States dollar's value, which would trigger the extreme devaluation of most of the world's currency.
  • The Man from Barbarossa: General Yevgeny Yuskovich, the leader of the Soviet terrorist group "Scales of Justice." His ultimate goal is to derail perestroika and arm Iraq with nuclear weapons before the United Nations coalition can invade.
  • Death Is Forever: Wolfgang Weisen, the former spymaster of the just collapsed Soviet Union, who nevertheless is making a last ditch attempt to save communism by killing Europe's heads of government and ushering in a new revolution.
  • Never Send Flowers: David Dragonpol, an actor gone insane on an assassination spree.
  • SeaFire: Businessman, philanthropist, and covert Arms Dealer Sir Max Tarn, convinced that he is the Nazi messiah and who has been secretly destabilizing Europe to pave the way for a Fourth Reich. His Operation SeaFire is one of these destabilizing tactics, and involves causing a catastrophic oil spill in the Caribbean, igniting it, and then dousing and purifying the area with an experimental "automatic anti-oil pollution system" (AAOPS).
  • COLD: The Ice King, or General Brutus Clay, who's leading the Children of the Last Days to take over the United States.
  • Zero Minus Ten: Guy Thackeray, a British shipping magnate who's forced to sell his company EurAsia Enterprises due to a clause that requires its handover to the descendants of Li Wei Tam should the British ever lose ownership of Hong Kong, something that will come to pass with the impending transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. Thackeray's reaction is the blow up the city with a nuclear bomb he created in secret.
  • The Facts of Death: Konstantine Romanos, leader of a cult called the Decada conspiring to start a war between Greece and Turkey with the aim of expelling the Turks from Cyprus. However, his plan his hijacked and he himself killed by his girlfriend Hera Volopoulos, who has her own plan to release a deadly virus in the ensuing chaos and then extort the world for its vaccine.
  • High Time to Kill: Le Gérant, leader of the criminal organization known as the Union, who orchestrates the theft of Skin 17, a formula for an airplane-coating material that will allow a craft to reach a speed of Mach 7. However, it turns how the two hired to steal Skin 17, scientist Stephen Harding and RAF turncoat Roland Marquis, have no intention of handing over the formula and instead want to sell it for themselves, creating a Big Bad Ensemble.
  • DoubleShot: Domingo Espada, a Spanish gangster and fanatical nationalist whose plan is to forcibly reincorporate Gibraltar into Spain. The Union provides the planning and manpower to pull off Espada's scheme, with framing Bond for the murders of the British prime minister and governor of Gibraltar an integral part of the conspiracy, making Le Gérant a Greater-Scope Villain.
  • Never Dream of Dying: Le Gérant, real name Olivier Cesari, who is hired by anti-Western Japanese terrorist Goro Yoshida to blow up a movie screening at the Cannes Film Festival attended by a number of politcally important VIPs.
  • The Man with the Red Tattoo: The aforementioned Goro Yoshida, who this time plots to unleash mosquitos carrying a mutated virus at the G8 summit and in other cities thereafter.
  • Devil May Care: Dr Julius Gorner, a drug trafficker with a pathological hatred for the United Kingdom because he believed he was ill-treated while studying there for being foreign (instead of for his being a compulsively cheating narcissist). In retaliation, he floods Britain with heroin hoping to cause societal collapse, and, when that isn't happening fast enough, plots to frame the British for devastating terrorist attacks on the Soviet Union to plunge it into a unwinnable war against a nuclear-armed superpower.
  • Carte Blanche: Sebastian Hydt, a business magnate specializing in waste management, who's assembling a new type of bomb called the "Cutter" to assassinate, on the behalf of an American pharmaceutical company, a cancer researcher on the verge of a breakthrough, framing the Serbian government in the process. However, his Evil Plan is used as a smokescreen by the other, more ambitious and more dangerous Big Bad Felicity Willing, the managing director of the International Organization Against Hunger, a humanitarian organization that administers one-third of all food aid to Africa. With this food aid, she is bribing Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda to support an impending Chinese-funded Sudanese military campaign against separatists in South Sudan. Furthermore, in return for the funding, Sudan's oil will be sold to China instead of Britain.
  • Solo: Hulbert Linck, a billionaire funneling heroin into the Democratic Republic of Dahum and arranging things so that his pawn General Solomon Adeka inherits his tribe's oil-rich land, important in maintaining the deal giving 50% of the revenue from the oil sales for 25 years to Linck.
  • Trigger Mortis: Sin Jai-seong, or Jason Sin, wealthy businessman and SMERSH operative with an elaborate plan to sabotage the United States' Vanguard rocket test and make it look like it crashed in New York City with devastating effect, with the goal of forcing a halt to the American space program and providing lucrative opportunities for Sin's company Blue Diamond, a construction and recruitment firm.
  • Forever and a Day: Irwin Wolfe, an American businessman who still resents his country's involvement in World War II, which he considered a European affair and cost the lives of his two sons, and Corsican drug lord Jean-Paul Scipio, who are working together to flood the United States with heroin. Wolfe hopes a drug epidemic will force America to focus on internal affairs and retreat from foreign interventionism, while Scipio gets lucrative profits.
  • With a Mind to Kill: Colonel General Nicholai Sergenovitch Grubozaboyschikov, now chief executive of a new mysterious Soviet agency, Stalnaya Ruka, which is actually a conspiracy of renegade Soviet military and intelligence leaders with the aim of assassinating Khrushchev and replacing him with a more Stalinist leader.
• Young Bond
  • SilverFin: Lord Randalph Hellebore, who is developing a Super-Soldier serum with the help of an immoral science.
  • Blood Fever: Count Ugo Carnifex, who is going to be the shadow emperor of Europe.
  • Double or Die: Colonel Irena Sedova/Babushka becomes the sole mai villain of the novel after she has her partner shot.
  • Hurricane Gold: Theda Glass and her gang are the main villains of most of the book, but her place is taken by El Huracán once the action moves to the island of Lagrimas Negras.
  • By Royal Command: Dr. Perseus Friend, who wants revenge on Bond for almost having him killed.
  • "A Hard Man to Kill": Caiboche, the man who has take over the ship that Bond's in.
  • Shoot to Kill: Anton Kostler.
  • Heads You Die: Audacto Solares and La Velada.
  • Strike Lightning: Konstantin Grunner.
  • Red Nemesis: Adam Elmhirst and La Velada.

Video Games

• Each of the James Bond games with an original storyline has a Big Bad:
  • 007 Racing: Hammond Litte, a wealthy billionaire whose true intentions isn't revealed until halfway into the game.
  • Agent Under Fire: Adrian Malprave and Nigel Bloch. Malprave is the senior partner but takes little part in the action while Bloch is the Final Boss, mirroring Renard and Elektra's relationship in The World Is Not Enough; Bloch even looks like Renard.
  • NightFire: Rafael Drake
  • Everything or Nothing: Nikolai Diavolo, who was also apparently Dragon Ascendant to Max Zorin.

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