Headscratchers / The Spy Who Loved Me

• Why is there an overhead magnetic crane in Stromberg's shark room? (Y'know, other than to give Bond a weapon to use against Jaws and his magnet-susceptible teeth.)
  • Could be a) that's how the shark cages are lowered into the pool, or b) the room was designed for another purpose: dry dock, perhaps, or a submarine bay.
  • Or it’s the original prototype for the system on the tanker that pulls in the submarines, and was tested there. The tracking system that occupies the early part of the plot would only find them, so Stromberg must have developed something else to catch them.
• How did the secretary's arm, assuming it's hers, end up in the main aquarium? The shark tank was a separate area.
  • Is it hers? It may be, but it also may be that Stromberg’s killed other people as well, in different locations.
  • It appears to have a diamond encrusted bracelet around the wrist, so it's a safe bet to say it's hers.
  • Maybe Stromberg is a sick enough b*stard that when he learnt that the shark bit off her arm and it was still floating around in the tank he had it fished out and put in his main aquarium as a reminder to others what happens to traitors.
• Stromberg wants to live underwater and has already built his facility? Why does he need to start a nuclear war to destroy surface life? Unlike with Drax in Moonraker, there's no sign he wants to repopulate the surface. We see a total of two women in his organization and both are killed.
  • He wants to destroy all of mankind except for his underwater population. He wants to make Homo sapiens as a whole a water-based species.
  • He's probably got a similar kind of repopulation / New World Order thing to Drax going on; it just doesn't come up since Bond never comes across that aspect of the project in his investigation. And, well, he's a Bond villain. They didn't exactly need reasons to behave like genocidal dicks.
  • Stromberg wants to build an underwater city (he hasn't actually built it yet, just his own digs); he also believes that human civilisation is "corrupt and decadent; inevitably it will destroy itself". This being the 70s, during the Cold War, he wouldn't exactly be the first person to think that all-out nuclear war between the Russians and Americans was just on the horizon- it's just that, instead or trying to survive or avert it, he has decided to provoke it in order to get it over with and start building the newer, better world that he (and again, likely others) believe will emerge from the nuclear holocaust- Utopia Justifies the Means. It just so happens that his particular utopia is an underwater sea kingdom. He doesn't need to destroy the world to build his society, but trying to build it while armageddon looms over your head is a headache, so it's more of a controlled disaster from his point of view if he is the one doing it.
    • But, again, where are the people and materials for this civilization coming from? He'd already have killed and/or irradiated most of the people on the planet. Mostly rural dwellers would be unaffected. Even when his facility was being destroyed, there's no sign of there being many people in it. There's no sign of women on the tanker or sub crews. He also won't have the manufacturing facilities to build the rest of his city as that will be destroyed in the war.
    • There would be pockets of the world where civilisation and manufacturing bases would survive, and if he can predict where those pockets likely will be then he might get ahead and make sure to build or own them there (for all we know at least some of the manufacturing has already been done). He probably also anticipates that if he survives a global nuclear war then he might be in a position to become a world leader as one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet pre-war (heck, he's already got his own army and ships); maybe Stage 2 of his scheme is to take over a coastal country and build from there. It's also possible that he, like many people at the time, simply underestimated just how devastating all-out nuclear war might be- he might expect Russia and America and other countries to be destroyed, but not that the entire planet would die from radiation sickness.
    • He's insane. He loves the ocean and its inhabitants (not that that alone would be insane), and that's as far as his line of thinking goes. If humans adapt, somehow, to underwater conditions, good. If we don't, well, humanity was decadent and corrupt, anyway.
• How does the submarine tracking system also disable the sub and force it to surface?
  • It doesn’t. It just locates the sub, allowing other weapons to be brought to bear to sink it, or in Stromberg’s plan, capture it. Stromberg’s tanker has some other system that pulls the subs in, perhaps originally tested in his shark tank, explaining the large electromagnet there.
• What was the point of capturing the American sub? Stromberg already had the two subs and missiles he needed to start his war. The only purpose seems to have been to get Bond onto the Liparus so he could stop the other two and then use it to escape and destroy Atlantis.
  • To keep them from spying on Liparus. The Americans would instantly report on the two missing submarines emerging from inside the tanker.
• When did Q send the jet ski to the American submarine ?
• We all know Bond movies are not realistic, but when it comes to distances, they definitely should be. Atlantis, Stromberg's lair, is clearly mentioned to be off the coast of Sardinia, Italy. That's about 800 miles East away from Gibraltar, and on the Liparus' screen, we can see that the tanker is sailing the Atlantic ocean, probably one or two hundred miles away West from Gibraltar. How can a submarine, even a state-of-the-art vessel which speed tops around 36 mph, cross one thousand miles in less than a day (at top speed, it would take 30 hours, and probably a tad more ; if you were Stromberg, would you remain inactive for a day and half after the inevitable news of two nuclear explosions in the North Atlantic or shot Anya) ?
• Does General Gogol want Bond dead? It appears that he does.
  • In the opening sequence Bond kills a Russian agent - Anya's lover - who was part of a large and well-equipped team on a mission to assasinate Bond. Killing each other's agents is not generally done even in the movies, and especially not in a neutral country (the Australian Alps).
  • Then Gogol - knowing how this man died, and knowing his relationship to Anya - assigns XXX to a mission with Bond. She's one of his best agents. Did he count on her figuring this out and finishing the job?
    • Gogol says that the KGB didn't have all the details about the Russian agent's death. Sergei presumably was trying to kill Bond without informing his bosses, for whatever reason.
• Did Fekesh have a death wish or something? At the Pyramids, he left a very public situation where he would have been perfectly safe from any kind of attack (sitting with a KGB agent no less) to run off into the dark in a secluded place where he could immediately be murdered.
• In the pre-credits chase, why did the Russian agents waste the time and manpower to chase Bond down the slopes, instead of having a sniper calmly pick off Bond in his **very obvious** bright yellow and red ski suit?
  • It would have made for a very, very short Bond film.
• So the submariners Stromberg hired were too stupid to realize they were aiming their missiles at a (not so) random stretch of ocean?
  • Truth in Television: Submarine-launched ICBMs deliberately use a nonstandard and arbitrary coordinate system for the exact purpose of making sure the submariners don't know where the hell the missiles are going. It helps prevent the possibility of, shall we say, submarines going into business for themselves.
  • It also prevents the crew from feeling guilty about hitting a specific target, since they don't even know where they're firing.
• Anya addresses Q by his rank and surname; the KGB is clearly well aware of who he is! Same goes for Gogol addressing M by his first name.
• If Anya had stolen the plans for the car and knew of its underwater features, why was she so concerned when the car went off the pier? She knew they were in no danger.
  • She stole the blueprints, but it might have taken her a while to recognise the finished article. The original blueprints might have been based on a different car (the Lotus Espirit had only been in production for a year at the time the film was released). Also, she might not have thought that the sub part worked (especially if the KGB, having obtained the blueprints, had tried to build their own submarine car and failed). Therefore, she probably assumed that it was a normal (if somewhat flashy) car — as the audience did.
  • Reading something in a file two or three years earlier is not the same as living it in the here and now. Besides, the car had been taking machine gun fire, so there was no way to know for sure it wasn't already compromised.
  • Makes sense, as she only reveals that she stole the blueprints after the car turns into a submarine. Now that the danger is passed and it's clear that it actually works, it's all coming back to her.
• The suffix on the Lotus' registration plate is the letter 'Q', a clear nod to Q Branch in addition to creating an air of mystery for the car, as British registration plate suffixes went straight from 'P' (for cars registered in 1975) to 'R' (1976). 'Q' plates, used for vehicles where the registration date could not be verified (and so used almost exclusively on imports and kit cars) would not be introduced until 1983.

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