Headscratchers / Octopussy

• How come 009 could reach a British embassy West Germany so easily by just letting his body be pulled along by a river from Karl-Marx-stadt? The inner German border was heavily guarded, and dozens of people were caught and then even killed doing things like that. Not to mention that incredibly dangerous-looking lockage he was flushed into at the beginning...
  • 009 is a British double-o agent, to be fair. He's presumably a bit more resourceful and able to get out of tight scrapes than your average East German trying to cross the border.
  • He was in East Berlin, not Karl Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz, again). The Berlin Wall is even visible in the background at a few points. He also went to the British Embassy in East Berlin meaning he never had to cross the border.
• How exactly did Bond manage to get out of the Gorilla suit in the few seconds between the Indian Elite Mook noticing him and the decapitation of the costume? Without said Elite Mook seeing him doing so on top of that?
  • Because he used his Stealth Hi/Bye spy ability.
• Why does the airplane at the end have those handy rails on top for Bond to hold onto? It's not like they strap cargo onto the roof of the plane!
  • Presumably to help anyone who needs to access the top of the plane when it's on the ground (during maintenance, for example).
• So are we just not going to say anything about that name?
  • If we're being entirely fair, the movie does at least attempt to justify it by pointing out that it was the pet name that Octopussy's father gave her when she was younger. Quite what this suggests about their relationship is another matter.
  • To be even more entirely fair, while "pussy" has the obvious Double Entendre connotations it was also commonly used both to refer to actual cats and as a term of affection (especially in the early/mid twentieth century, when Ian Fleming was growing up and writing). If The Other Wiki is to be believed, the Oxford English Dictionary also had/has at least one definition where it's used to refer to girls / women who display catlike traits in some way (usually the nicer ones). It's only relatively recently that the Double Entendre meaning has become the overwhelmingly dominant meaning.
• What was the point of stealing Faberge eggs and making forgeries? Someone said something about stealing them, but we only ever see the bad guys buying them legally at auction. And then Kamal Khan smuggles them... where?
  • The Soviet general was selling the real eggs for hard currency, and using the forgeries to not get caught by the Soviet authorities. The egg they bought at the auction was a real one that they had to buy back after 006 stole the forgery. Otherwise the audit would have discovered it was missing and the general would be caught.
  • They called out specifically that Kamal Khan USUALLY sells, it was incredibly rare for him to buy. It wasn't that well explained, but the whole thing was a huge smuggling operation - Orlov would steal incredibly valuable art/jewelry from the Soviet archives such as the Faberge egg and replace them with forgeries, Octopussy would smuggle it across the border with her circus as cover, and Kamal Khan sold it in the West for huge profits. 009 stealing the fake Faberge egg made them panic, they didn't have time to make another fake so they had no choice but to try and get the original back to try and fool the surprise audit.
• Why does the switch operator move Bond's car to the other track? He had to know that a train was coming from the other direction, and, though the car took the worst of it, it's still not good for the train, either. He reacted with surprise and hurriedly moved the switch track when he saw the car, and it did not appear he was ordered to do so.
• What was up with the dead bodies in Kamal's meat locker?
  • They were a pair of assistants seen taking jewelry to the helicopter whom Kamal and Orlov had murdered to ensure their silence (you can see them when the jewelry is being unloaded from the helicopter, then it pans to Khan's assistant with a clear evil expression on his face as he looks after them).
• What's with that clowning? Bond is racing against the clock to disarm a bomb and yet he wastes precious time to put on a makeup, find more or less fitting clothing and only then goes for the bomb. Just grab a broom or a toolbox, do a Bavarian Fire Drill and go straight for the damned bomb with no time wasted.
  • A bunch of the guards looking for him saw his face. He couldn't risk them arresting him before getting to the bomb because he had no time to explain himself, he HAD to cover his face, and the only costume that would let him cover his face without immediate suspicion was a full clown costume with makeup, which is what he went for.
• Why does M agree to meet Bond in Berlin? Wouldn't the head of MI6 showing up near a border checkpoint be a tad dangerous?
  • Is M's identity publicly known?
• General Orlov destroys the real Faberge Egg, thinking it's the fake. Only Kamal realizes this and flinches.
• If Orlov did succeed in his plans to weaken the West's nuclear arsenal and allow him to lead Soviet Russia to glorious victory, where was Khan going to spend all the payoffs in a post-war communist world? Or worse, if the plan went wrong and the West retaliated with World War III?
  • Kamal is hardly the first capitalist Bond villain to team up with Commies though, and it's not like conquering Europe equates to immediate Soviet world domination. Like Kristatos and Blofeld he's a criminal so presumably Socialism would only have so much effect on him. Or like Goldfinger he could just be insane.
  • Kamal does not necessarily need to buy into Orlov's belief of classical communism to consider working with him. Soviet (and American) leadership in general has historically shown itself to be pragmatic as necessary during the Cold War - Kamal may be thinking that Orlov is just wrong and expects his vision to fail, or that he expects to be able to cut deals with other parts of the revised order as necessary (if the Soviet model really worked as advertised, the "some are more equal than others" quip wouldn't work). As far as the risk of nuclear retaliation from the West, again differing mental calculations between Orlov and Kamal can explain it - Kamal, not being based in Europe, has a higher risk tolerance for nuclear exchange there since he is more likely to gain and less likely to lose materially (Orlov's calculations appear to be different in thinking that Western Europe would rather have Soviet overlords above their heads than nuclear fallout).

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