Maybe Bond wasn’t so wrong when he killed all his leads. In fact, looking at Daniel Craig’s version of 007, eliminating those leads was often the only way to keep the mission from falling apart or worse, falling into the wrong hands. Maybe M should have said thank you more often instead of half way bailing on him after every murder?! These weren’t just impulsive kills; they were strategic, calculated, and often necessary.

Take Casino Royale (2006). Bond kills Mollaka, a bombmaker, after a brutal parkour chase through Madagascar. Also what a fucking solid action sequence. Really setting the stage for Craig’s athletic ability. Could Mollaka have given up more names if captured? Maybe. But Bond didn’t have the luxury of time, and more importantly, the intel recovered from his body directly led to the discovery of Le Chiffre.

In Quantum of Solace (2008), Bond is chastised by M for killing Mitchell (a double agent) and Slate (a hitman), yet both deaths move the mission forward. His “trigger-happy” decisions expose Quantum, a shadowy global organization embedded in world governments. Each death peels back another layer. In this case, had Bond played it safe, the scale of corruption may never have been revealed.

And lets be fr fr? His methods are efficient. Bond doesn’t waste time with long interrogations or red tape. HONEY BADGER DONT GIVE A FUCK. He assesses a threat, neutralizes it, and keeps moving. There’s no bureaucracy slowing him down, no drawn-out extraction missions with unreliable outcomes. In a world full of shifting alliances and misinformation, clarity is rare but Bond creates it by cutting through the noise. He doesn’t get everything right, but he gets results. Results matter.

By Skyfall (2012), the stakes are personal. Bond doesn’t hesitate to kill when necessary, because he knows what happens when threats go unchecked. Silva is a former MI6 agent turned terrorist, and Bond’s pursuit of him includes collateral damage but the final kill, protecting M at the cost of his own pain and injury, is the only reason Silva doesn’t completely dismantle British intelligence.

Even in Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021), Bond’s tendency to end leads rather than interrogate them is less about impulsiveness and more about pragmatism. He’s up against vast, deeply connected organizations (Spectre and Safin’s network), where capturing one member rarely guarantees reliable intel. In fact, as we see repeatedly, the leads are often more dangerous alive than dead. Almost every single time? Also how many rats are within his own organization. Often the critiques are coming from people who are safe behind their little desk sipping tea.

And yet, despite all the deaths, Bond still beats the bad guy. Every time. Maybe it’s not pretty, maybe it doesn’t align with modern ethics of justice and intelligence work but his methods are effective. And yes, they’re efficient. He neutralizes threats before they spread, handles chaos with precision, and leaves no loose ends. I still think he could do a little better with the double tapping. But again, he does well with what he has to work with. He prevents world altering catastrophes over and over again. Sometimes, the cleanest way to protect the world isn’t with more questions. It’s with final answers. FINAL ANSWERS LIKE DEATH lol

So no, maybe Bond wasn’t so wrong when he killed all his leads. He just didn’t have time to play nice in a world that wasn’t playing fair.