No Time To Die promises to be worth the unfortunately extended wait.
Not one but two major villains have been announced for No Time To Die, with both Rami Malek’s mysterious newcomer Safin and the returning franchise nemesis Blofeld promising to cause Craig’s edgier incarnation of Bond no end of bother throughout the new flick. However, the character most likely to hurt the hero is neither of these major villains, but a figure far closer to Bond's hard heart.
Sure, there’s no doubt that either long-time, personally connected foe Blofeld or former SPECTRE assassin/new kid on the block Safin could try killing the new millennium's Bourne-influenced Bond (although the former has been trying that for some decades with no luck thus far). However, neither of these villains can hurt Bond where it truly counts, in the super-spy's stone-cold heart. The more traditional Bond villains of No Time To Die can't hurt Bond the way that returning love interest Madeleine Swann can, as this Bond girl is the longest-lasting romantic partner that the infamous womanizer has ever been with, and the tragic twist of Casino Royale has already proven that Craig's loose cannon Bond does not take heartbreak well.
First established in a (censored) Skyfall scene, by the time the action of No Time To Die picks up, Bond and Madeleine's relationship will have lasted years on and offscreen. Indeed, it’s one of the longest canon relationships that the character has ever had, and this is a man who was married once before (albeit very, very briefly). This newfound commitment comes after the loss of Casino Royale's tragic antiheroine Vesper Lynd, meaning viewers can presume that, in the intervening bliss between movies, Bond has finally learned to love and trust again. As a result, if Craig’s already-troubled Bond loses his love interest, she betrays him, or her secret is as terrible as the trailers suggest, then the pain is far worse than anything the actual villains can do.
Over the decades, Bond has been wronged and double-crossed by many a Bond girl (although only one of these characters got their side of the story told in the original ending of The World Is Not Enough). But most of the agent’s paramours have been short-lived one-off flings, meaning 007 could fling them off a building post-the inevitable betrayal with a quip and not another thought. This more serious post-9/11 Bond, however, has already had his heart broken once by losing Vesper Lynd in his grim origin story, so there’s no way that an end to his longest and most stable relationship ever won’t result in Craig’s Bond breaking down during No Time To Die's runtime.
