Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the major plot holes in Skyfall?

26th November 2012

My answer to What are the major plot holes in Skyfall? on Quora

I find it hard to believe that MI6 could be that incompetent.

First, they lose that hard drive.

Then, they get hacked.

Then, despite having been hacked, they capture the hacker and put him in a computer-controlled prison (maybe a physical lock might have been a good idea) then plug his laptop in to their network and turn it on.

Then Bond convinces M that the smartest thing to do is ditch the entire country’s security apparatus in favour of driving up to Scotland with basically no weapons, no backup and deliberately leaving a trail for the bad guy to follow. Which gets M killed.

That kind of annoyed me—but not as much as the bit where Bond (the Luddite) helps Q (the computer genius) decrypt a message by spotting some hexadecimal scrolling past on the screen. The message has an N and a U in it. N and U aren’t in the hexadecimal alphabet! #nerdrage