Ralph Fiennes’s M finds himself battling a cocky new colleague Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) who wishes to abolish the 00-programme in favour of a vast new multi-national computer-snooper programme. The code name of this awful new stuffed shirt is C – and Bond does not scruple to make crude innuendo on that score.
James Bond is cutting loose from duplicitous, bureaucratic authority - in the time-honoured fashion – and plans to track down a certain sinister Austrian kingpin at the heart of something called Spectre, played with gusto by Christoph Waltz. This is the evil organisation whose tentacular reach and extensive personnel may in fact have accounted for all Bond’s woes in Craig’s previous three movies.
The movie doesn’t say so but the “t” in Fleming’s Spectre stood for terrorism – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – and perhaps one of the first uses of the word in pop culture.