I Never Joke About My Work: A Primer on Q Branch For Those Who Haven't Seen the 22 Other Movies
The latest addition to the James Bond franchise, Skyfall, was an excellent movie for a lot of reasons, and in my opinion MUCH better than the previous three Bond offerings, finally bringing the series back to the enjoyability of The World is Not Enough and most of the previous films. However, one feature of the film obviously stuck out enough to gain its own fairly large slice of the fandom, all the more unusual since Bond films are very much a one man show. Since you've read the title and want me to get on with things instead of writing a whole book about Bond fandom, you already know that Ben Whishaw's young, computer genius Q stole scenes, gained fans, and is one half of the largest single pairing I can think of in this fandom. As I unashamedly read some of these fics, it became obvious to me that there are a lot of new fans coming in because of Skyfall, and there seems to be some confusion over what exactly the role of Q Branch is in the Bond mythos. And then, since no one asked my opinion, I decided to write a wall of text about it!
MI6's Q Branch in the movies
Yes, that's a sandwich.
It's been a long time since I read what Ian Fleming has to say on this subject, so I'm mostly going to focus on the movies here, since there are 23 movies and a couple of extraneous hangers on like Never Say Never Again and Woody Allen's 1967 Casino Royale.
Q Branch, as we all know, are the Quartermasters of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence-gathering service, roughly equivalent to the American CIA. In real life, a quartermaster is responsible for outfitting and supplying uniforms, food, weapons, fuel, protective gear, and any other equipment his organization needs to the field operatives who use them. Unless the quartermaster is in the navy, which means it's an entirely different position and best just to ignore in this context.
Since the movie universe doesn't care about mundane equipment and Bond doesn't have to carry all his gear on his back like he's in the army, this mostly means that the Q Branch historically functions as armourers. I'll go into why that may not necessarily be true anymore later, but Skyfall will get its own section and up until then, I'll be talking about the history of Q Branch.
While Q Branch is quite large and staffs a lot of people, from scientists to test drivers (and test flamethrowers and test boombox-rocket-launchers, etc), there is only one Q, the head of the division, the Quartermaster. There is not one Quartermaster assigned to each agent, though Bond has always gotten preferential treatment and never has to deal with underlings. Q is responsible for coming up with many to most of the gadgets Bond and other agents get to use and at the very least approving the designs thought up by the rest of his division, as well as overseeing all research and development of the many pieces of technology necessary for a movie spy to do his duty. Since the Bond films started in 1962, this means that the focus on computers was mostly pretty low and has only started to come to the forefront recently. The position of Q was historically an extremely devious mechanical engineer, not a computer programmer.
Before I move on to the man who will forever be Q to a lot of people, I'd like to emphasize this: there are a lot of people who work for Q, all of which have some degree of scientific training and who definitely have high security clearance. There are no interns in the secret service.
"I call it the 'Ghetto Blaster'."
Major Boothroyd, aka Q (Desmond Llewelyn)
Firstly, Major Boothroyd, who I will mean every time I refer to Q up until the Skyfall section, does not have a known first name. I saw someone attribute Geoffrey to him, but as a matter of fact, Geoffrey Boothroyd was the real person Ian Fleming named his briefly-mentioned Armourer character after, and no first name is ever explicitly mentioned in either the books or movies, so I wouldn't take it as exactly canon. Though Fleming was a huge fan of just taking people's names for characters if they sounded cool enough.
In the novels, Major Boothroyd the Armourer is introduced in Dr. No, where he calls Bond's beloved Beretta .25 a "ladies' gun" and issues him with a new Walther PPK 7.65 to replace it. In the movie Dr. No, this scene does happen, but with an unnamed armourer the director of the film wanted to keep separate from Major Boothroyd. Starting with the second film, From Russia With Love, the Major himself is on hand to supply Bond with an increasing number of ridiculous and extremely useful gadgetry. If M (both Sir Miles Messervy and Barbara Mawdsley) is the stern father (or mother) figure in Bond's life, Q is absolutely the fondly exasperated uncle.
There are a multitude of articles about the best Q gadgets to appear in the series, so I won't make a list, but I do want to point out a few features that form Q's own particular style. The most important of these features is, of course, that they almost all explode. It doesn't matter what the purpose of the object is, if Q can make it explode or at least pack explosives somewhere in it, he will. All cars have a self-destruct feature, briefcases are destructively tamper-proof, cigarette cases shoot tiny missiles, and just about anything you see in background shots of his lab, you can generally assume will explode. At least I do. Q also loves to have objects disguised as other objects, especially if he can put them into cars or watches, which seem to be his favourite gadget containers. Oftentimes, Q's gadgets are only one-use, either because their purpose is to explode or because Bond just never uses things twice. The famous exploding pen from Goldeneye is classic Q in every way.
At the beginning of his run, Q acts like any craftsman would when entrusting his creations to another, carefully explaining all his innovations and hoping against all hope that he'll get them back undamaged.
vs
Eventually, he switches to a horrified resignation, but his non-car gadgets do become more and more disposable, like keychains that shoots stun gas and explode, the pen everyone loves, some exploding bolas that Bond never got his hands on...I'd say Q learned to adapt his style to fit Bond's, as well he should, since his job is to supply field agents, not for field agents to play nice with his toys.
This is not to say that Q is constantly pissed at Bond for destroying things. On the contrary, Bond has only had one other friend as loyal and long-suffering as Q - Felix Leiter, who I could and may write a whole 'nother post about. In fact, when Felix has been gravely injured and his wife killed and Bond decides to go on a murder rampage to take out the man responsible, defying MI6's orders and subsequently being hunted by his own people in License to Kill, who shows up to illegally assist Bond in his hour of need?
Hey look, an optical palm reader!
Desmond Llewelyn and the character of Major Boothroyd appeared in every Bond film from From Russia With Love (1963) all the way up to The World is Not Enough (1999) with the sole exception of Live and Let Die, thus working with every single Bond except for Daniel Craig. In his final film, Q introduces his hand-picked successor, R, and tells Bond that his retirement is imminent. Not long after the premiere of the movie, Desmond Llewelyn died in a car crash. He was 85.
R (John Cleese)
Bond is actually the only person to call the character R. As the new official head of Q Branch, former Python John Cleese's character is officially known as Q. For simplicity's sake - and because I still think it's funny - I will refer to him as R. This won't be a long section anyway.
As you can see from the above clip, R was set up to be disliked. With a lifetime of comedy roles behind him, one can only assume the writer or director or whomever makes these decisions just told Mr. Cleese not to be funny or something. R is sort of the George Lazenby of Qs, set up as the replacement for a long-running and beloved actor in the same role and completely failing to be at all likeable. The one thing R does bring to the role is more of a reliance on computer technology in addition to the previous Q's largely mechanical approach. Times, they are a-changin'.
This video is a link because someone disabled embedding on it :/
R appeared in The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan's last two films.
Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, a world without Qs.
I very briefly want to touch upon the two films in the franchise with no Q presence whatsoever. In Live and Let Die, Llewelyn's only movie off, Q's influence is very clearly felt, mostly through the magnetic watch he has delivered to Bond in the beginning of the movie. This is still an MI6 with a strong Q Branch head, even if he doesn't appear in the movie.
In Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, there's really nothing. As I recall, there's a brief appearance of a guy explaining things in a Q-like way in QoS, but considering how little I remember of the scene, I'm going to make an executive decision that it doesn't count. There is a car in Casino Royale, but no guiding hand behind it, we have no idea if R is still working for MI6 or has been fired for not getting along with the agents or what. Maybe he's gone rogue and tried to take over the world via technology and unexpectedly poor comic delivery. Maybe the next Q hacked his bank account and sold his house in order to prove himself to MI6. Who knows?
In my opinion, Craig's first two movies didn't feel very much like Bond movies and the total lack of a Q character didn't help this at all. Thankfully, the creative team returned to form much better than expected in Skyfall.
Q (Ben Whishaw)
Not gonna lie, this is mostly directed at the 00Q part of fandom.
Whether or not the actual, official role of Q Branch has changed at all, the new Q obviously has some ideas of his own about what his place in MI6 is. Bucking all precedent, he "doesn't go in for" exploding pens or flashy gadgets, providing Bond with only a palm-imprinted gun and a small, non-explosive signalling device. Not terribly impressive for the armourer of a top secret organization of super spies. He does, however, make up for his underwhelming quartermastering by being much more hands on in advising Bond when he's actually in the field. This is extremely unusual and pretty much unprecedented in Bond films, but due to the context of the film, I'm not sure yet if this is how the new Q is going to do things from now on or if it was just in response to a crisis so close to home. In the past, Boothroyd!Q has physically met Bond out in the field to deliver equipment (You Only Live Twice), moved his entire lab to foreign locations that might be more useful to Bond (or at least moved himself to other MI6 stations located more conveniently to where Bond was operating in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker), actually assisted in a field operation (Octopussy), and of course went off grid to help Bond in License to Kill, but this is a markedly video game approach in Skyfall (perhaps deliberately), with Q taking the Otacon role of calling up Bond with useful, but ultimately ignorable information (unless it's a plot point. Just like video games).
It remains to be seen how he'll continue in his promising career in espionage, but so far, new Q with his heavy reliance on computers and disregard of traditional (and explosive) gadgets is very different from his predecessors. "Why does this matter at all?" you may ask. Craig's Bond movies are a reboot, right? Well, yes and no. In fact, my headcanon says entirely no, but considering that Dench's M is still very much the same M who got so annoyed with Brosnan's antics and Whishaw's Q knows about the Goldeneye exploding pen, no matter what your views are on how the continuity works, Skyfall is very much a part of the Bond universe and I'd love to see more fic contrasting the old era and the new. Now go forth and write more, and if anyone has questions about anything else in Bond history, my Ask is open.