Pardon me while I continue to harp on the ending of No Time To Die, because I still haven’t fully recovered from that godawful ending. To recap my thoughts, James Bond never should’ve had a child, and Mathilde should not have existed in the first place, since Bond movies have had no issues coming up with emotionally compelling storylines without adding offspring to the equation.

The filmmakers were so close to fully embracing a nostalgic callback to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, complete with “All the Time in the World” and Louis Armstrong’s haunting rendition, that it felt like a missed opportunity. If they wanted to make that connection truly devastating, killing Madeleine or even Mathilde would have provided the kind of dire emotional consequence the story was clearly reaching for, although killing a child would probably have crossed even my admittedly high threshold for Bond’s misery.

Instead, the movie chose to kill Bond himself, apparently deciding that 007’s death was some grand emotional payoff it had been building toward. I would have much rather seen Bond survive while losing someone he loved, preserving the character while still giving the story a genuinely tragic conclusion. Don’t kill James Bond and call it groundbreaking when really it just came off as lazy and completely unsatisfying.