While I was freezing at the barn I had this realization of just how good the SKYFALL script actually was.  For some reason I was thinking about the moment where Bond tells the old family retainer, “Some men are coming to kill us.  We’re going to kill them first.”  Then I remembered M taking a few shots, and she misses.  She bitches to Bond that she was a terrible shot.  Which is a lovely symmetry with Moneypenny, and how she fails to make the shot in the beginning of the film and hits Bond.  MoneyPenny leaves field work, and you wonder if that was the same trajectory that M took all those years ago.

It’s those little touches that make a script just sing.

I realize as I’ve written this that it might come across as “girls can’t shoot straight”, but that wasn’t how it played because you know M is the smartest, toughest person in any room, and I took it as an indication that Moneypenny might be the next M in twenty or so years.