Lashana Lynch’s mysterious role in Bond 25 may have been revealed: her character Nomi is reportedly the new 007 who’s taken over from James since he retired to be with Madeline Swann at the end of Spectre.
You can’t have missed the moaning about this on social media, from those who are complaining about “political correctness” and producers apparently forcing a female 00 agent on the franchise to appear current or whatever. The fact of the matter is, though, is that Nomi is completely in keeping with what we’ve known about the 00 section for the past 50 years.
As noted by ScreenRant, Twitter user Mark O’Connell pointed out that one scene in 1964’s Thunderball features a female 00. The sequences sees Bond arrive late to a gathering of the 00s as M briefs them on SPECTRE’s latest evil scheme. She’s difficult to identify on screen as she’s not clearly shown, plus the assembled group is referred to as “gentlemen,” but it’s a fact that there was a female 00 agent in MI6’s employ at the time.
What’s more, this isn’t the only occasion this trick has been played. Twitter’s Daniel Robinson noted that 1999’s The World is Not Enough did the same thing. Judi Dench’s M gathers the 00s agent together in a safe location in Scotland (no, not Skyfall) after an attack on MI6 HQ, and one of the crowd is a woman. This time, the agent in question is distinctive as she sits in the center of the group, holding a cup of tea.
In more recent times, meanwhile, Eve Moneypenny was introduced in Skyfall as a field agent. It was only at the end of the film that she decided to take an administrative role as M’s assistant. If she had carried on, however, she presumably could’ve graduated to 00 status – assuming she killed two people, thereby earning herself those zeroes.
Clearly, then, Lynch’s Nomi taking over the 007 designation is just a neat continuation of an established fact about Bond lore since the 60s. Still, we’ll see how the internet reacts to the new 007 when Bond 25 hits theaters on April 8th, 2020.
