Spectre Ending: 8 Potential Ways It Sets Up Bond 25

4. The New MI6 Status Quo

After being incredibly minimalist with iconography in the first couple of Craig films, Skyfall brought several key Bond - Q and Moneypenny were given new-age reinventions and Ralph Fiennes placed Judi Dench as a seemingly more classical version of section chief M. But after the jolting reintroductions in the previous film (or in one case Quantum Of Solace), Spectre once again mixed things up and leaves us with a very different status quo going forward. We now have M who's not only fully capable of holding himself in a fight, but who is actually happy to get his hands dirty. Q is much more akin to the Connery-era gadget master, just with a younger face that allows him to get stuck into the odd bit of serious plot himself. Tanner has gone from being a vague shoutout to a minor part in the books/throwback to a couple of Moore's films to being a key part of the team. Moneypenny is on the face of it not that dissimilar to the earlier version now she's out of the field, but Spectre's emphasis on her having a life outside of work suggests we shouldn't expect too much fruitless flirting. These are seismic alterations to these characters that leave us with a MI6 vastly different even to the one we finished Skyfall and ensure that even if Bond's back in the fold sooner rather than later we should probably expect him to find things a bit different to how they were in the past.