Fridge Brilliance
- What's the last thing Q does before his departure? He jokes about his work! Sure, it's a physical gag at John Cleese's expense, but it's a far cry from his Goldfinger era insistence on deadly seriousness.Bond: He seems well suited for the job.
- Zukovsky using the last of his strength to free Bond instead of killing Elektra. This could be taken as Rule of Cool on the surface, but it was really the sensible thing to do: Elektra might be dead, but Bond would still be trapped and unable to stop Renard had Zukovsky made the obvious choice.
- When the parahawks ambush Bond and Elektra on the mountain, they all collectively decide to pursue Bond all at once instead of sending at least one parahawk after Elektra, since she was their intended target anyway. And given that she's not a combatant nor does she have Bond's mad skiing skills, they could've gunned her down easily. Later on when Renard angrily demands know why Dr. Arkov's parahawks failed to kill Bond, he never brings up that they flat-out failed to kill Elektra—again—their intended target. This subtly foreshadows how she wasn't actually the target in the first place.
- Remember how in GoldenEye, Q mentions that the BMW has sidewinder missiles that never actually get used in that film? Guess what Bond uses to take down the helicopter during the attack on Zukovsky's caviar farm.
- When Bond meets Dr. Christmas Jones for the first time in Kazakhstan, she makes a preemptive warning not to make any jokes about her name; Bond instead goes for "I don't know any doctor jokes." Along with the subversion of expectations coming from previous Bond films there's a Watsonian practical reason for this as well. At this point, Bond is pretending to be Dr. Arkov (well, pretending to be Davidov's substitute who in turn was supposed to be pretending to be Dr. Arkov) for whom English would be his second language; making an accurate English-language pun in a language he's supposed to not be fluent in would have likely set off warning flags to Dr. Jones and cause her to be more suspicious.
Fridge Horror
- When Bond first confronts Renard, wanted international terrorist and Elektra's former kidnapper, the latter issues a Post-Rape Taunt to infuriate Bond. While it's later shown that Renard and Elektra are not just in cahoots but lovers, what if he wasn't lying? It would add a particularly dark tone to this A Match Made in Stockholm if Elektra was manipulating her own rapist into helping her get revenge on those who abandoned her and nuke Istanbul for profit.
- That could also be part of the reason why Renard is so suicidally devoted to Elektra: he feels guilt over what he did to her, and so he agrees to love, protect, and serve her in a deluded attempt to atone for it.
- In the expanded universe it was revealed that Elektra already had a major falling out with her grandfather for not giving the oil company to an Azerbaijani, and Renard's tenure in the KGB knew how the USSR nationalized the oil sands at the expense of her people made it easy to gain her trust. Her father attempted to send armed men and later 009 to rescue her who was responsible for Renard's inevitable demise.
