The Source of Skyfall's Plot Discovered

Every serious Bond fan should watch this. It's Inspector Morse episode, "Masonic Mysteries," which aired in 1990.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9ayV4xht58

As I was watching it last night it became bloody obvious to me that Purvis, Wade and Logan ripped the overall plot almost directly from MM and utilized it for SF. By way of a very brief precis, what we have here is an "innocent victim" (Silva/De Vries) who was found and punished by a villain (M/Morse) and effectively imprisoned. Nursing a desire for revenge, Silva/De Vries escapes detention and proceeds to initiate an elaborate plan to humiliate and punish and ultimately kill M/Morse. This plan, which is the work of a truly ingenious psychopath, depends upon the very actors and institutions in question behaving in a very precise way over an extended period of time. The actors/institutions duly fall into line and the plan works to perfection. In the end, however, when the final confrontation between Silva/De Vries and M/Morse arrives, Silva/De Vries fails, literally, to pull the trigger, and M/Morse narrowly escape death.

These are not mere parallels; it is an almost exact replication. However, if you remain unconvinced, consider this scene from MM. In the scene, Sergeant Lewis (analogous to Q) digs into suspicious digital financial activity at a charity associated with a murder victim. The activity involves the suspicious shifting of large sums of money from various accounts to various others, and ultimately, a huge sum being transferred to Morse's savings account. As Lewis digs into this activity, the images on his computer screen suddenly, and for no apparent reason, melts and disintegrates. Then, the masonic image of an arm and hammer appears on the screen and begins hammering.

This scene, I submit, was clearly the inspiration for an almost identical scene in SF where Silva hacks into MI6's computer system, gets into M's computer, and, as she watches in horror on her laptop, the screen goes all funny and we see an image of M, cast as a fool, and then the words, "Think on your sins."

Again, the verisimilitude is far too great to be coincidence. At any rate, watch MM and see what you think. It's a great made-for-TV movie, BTW. It will hardly be a waste of your time.

Interesting find.

Guess Home Alone wasn't the only thing they ripped off!

Peter Morgan is I think the writer who came up with the idea of killing M, but I'm guessing he only sold them a story outline, not a whole script? Cuz it'd be harder to buy into him being this much of a thief.

... I just looked at the wiki page and it indicates Morgan collaborated with P&W on the story before he left. Still, the story they detail doesn't really reflect this movie at all, so I guess Morgan is in the clear on this.

Wouldn't surprise me that this is on Logan, as he is among the most derivative hacks to ever succeed brilliantly in this biz. He certainly pinched the 'I think he got the point' end of EXCALIBUR for STAR TREK NEMESIS, except it wasn't even effectively contrived there. So far as I know his work on THE AVIATOR ended back in 1996, so it's hard to understand how he qualified to be on the writing credits. Then again, all he supposedly did on GLADIATOR was write Commodus' one-liners, and yet he again got a significant credit. RKO 281 is vaguely creative typing, since all he had to do was transpose the existing information and add in the apocryphal stuff as 'fact.'

I'm a little more sensitive to story pinches than most ... it's why, despite my admiration for him as a screenwriter, I still have a little question mark about Ronald D. Moore's early career, as his second TREK script takes one helluva lot from somebody's TREK novel, yet nobody has ever even squeaked about it.