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IRL (In Real Life) => Music, TV, Movies => Topic started by: JasonPratt on June 11, 2021, 06:43:06 PM

Title: A definitive argument that THE ROCK is the final Connery Bond film
Post by: JasonPratt on June 11, 2021, 06:43:06 PM
Sort of. It's still an alternate canon ending, of course, because (in the loose canon of the series) some events from the Connery/Lazenby era are referenced later through the end of Brosnan's run, in such a way as to imply they're the same person (not using "Bond" as a generic cover name, though with Connery's Bond gone that could loosely still apply. The Craig films definitely hard-reboot the series however.)

Absolute credit to Pentex, here:



To summarize the timeline:

1962 -- Bond defeats Dr. No, but declines being picked up by Leiter, who knows him, to make out with Ryder. Leiter's boat is definitely not the only American craft out grabbing No's surviving henchmen, though, and so soon afterward Bond gets picked up by another boat who naturally refuses to take that excuse seriously. ;) In a bureaucratic snafu, Bond uses a cover name "John Mason", for which there is no identity (as noted in The Rock) and he's processed to Alcatraz until his identity can be sorted out. He promptly escapes from this maximum security prison, and disappears into the San Francisco underground where he doesn't survive as a soldier of fortune  8) but gets back in contact with MI6, who recovers him for ops.

1963 -- one of his dates from the previous mission, Sylvia Trench, complains that she hasn't heard from Bond in 6 months, and From Russia With Love doesn't explain otherwise, providing a proper gap for the theory. The Rock's script implicitly (and somewhat explicitly) states that "Mason" never got back to Alcatraz before it was closed in 63.

1971 -- after continuing his career (including through the Lazenby film), Connery's Bond is last seen boarding a cruise ship on vacation. This ship exists in real life! -- and in real life docks in San Francisco in 1972!

1972 -- As Mason's daughter explains in The Rock, "Mason" meets Jade's mother in San Francisco, and gets her pregnant. Pentex thinks Bond promised to marry her and retire after finishing his next assigned mission, but he doesn't present any evidence for that (maybe there's something in Jade and Mason's conversation about this). At any rate, M sends Bond to find the microfilm (apparently in San Francisco) in order to figure out what the US (or at least recently deceased JE Hoover) knows about British secret files, and return it to Britain.

Bond uses local FBI agent Womack as a way to get into where the film is being kept, thus betraying the agent

The mission goes sour, and rather than doing the expected thing, trying to leave the US immediately, Bond heads far inland, hiding the film in Kansas. (Blofeld mentions Kansas being out in the middle of nowhere in Diamonds, so that might have inspired him. "If we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years.") Nevertheless, he's caught trying to pass through the Canadian border somewhere, whereupon US intelligence identifies him as the mysterious "John Mason" who escaped from Alcatraz in 1962 or 63. MI6 doesn't want to admit that they had a major agent stealing the film, and Bond out of faithfulness to his country keeps claiming he's John Mason: a name he knows doesn't exist, so which cannot officially be blamed on MI6.

The theory's main weakness is that no one in US intelligence manages to identify "Mason" as "Bond", which would be weird considering how often Bond has helped the US, but then of course that was with the CIA. While it would be normal protocol to get the CIA on "Mason's" case, Womack might have been spitefully stalling them out to keep Mason imprisoned, which the film does kind of imply anyway.

1995 -- the events of The Rock happen.