Q for Quite Disturbing

I'm finding watching James Bond films of a certain vintage increasingly disturbing. I've already mentioned how, by the time Octopussy came round, Roger Moore was increasingly looking and sounding like a dirty old man, and that the Secret Service was appearing to be be ever more cash-strapped, with Q being forced not only to keep going into the field to equip agents, but also to carry out surveillance duties and even pilot hot air balloons for Bond. Things surely couldn't get any worse, could they? Well, actually they could. The other afternoon I found myself watching the 1985 entry, View to a Kill, in which Roger Moore's Bond was going beyond being simply a dirty old man and turning into a truly creepy perv, lusting after various women young enough to be his grand daughters. This time it seemed that it was the KGB which had suffered budget cuts, with its head, General Gogol, being forced to go and berate troublesome agents in person, before finding himself reduced to acting as a getaway driver for yet another of his agents.

At least the Secret Service seems to have got over its manpower problems since the previous movie, with Q only forced out of his lab and into the field once, right at the end of the film. However, I found this single field assignment very troubling, featuring Q using a remote surveillance device to observe Bond getting it on with the leading lady in a shower. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I find that pretty disturbing. Could it be that all those years of carrying out surveillance operations has left Q addicted to voyeurism? After all, he does has form for it - I seem to recall that back in Moonraker he caught Bond in the act of having a weightless shag with Holly Goodhead - "I think he's attempting re-entry, sir" - while in For Your Eyes Only he eavesdropped on Bond's foreplay with yet another much younger woman. Perhaps all those years of having to sit by demonstrating castration devices disguised as wrist watches and cars with ejecting toilet seats, whilst Bond made smug jokes before going off and knobbing half the beautiful women of the world in exotic locales, finally got to him. Knowing that the ladies would never go for some gadget-obsessed pensioner, he instead decided to settle for the next best thing - watching. Who could blame him? He had access to all the equipment, didn't he? I mean, if you could get your hands on tons of super-sophisticated surveillance equipment and could get away with spying on people having sex by saying it was on 'national security' grounds, you would, wouldn't you? Nevertheless, the bottom line is that the sight of an old man abusing his position of trust by secretly watching colleagues getting their end away is pretty bloody disturbing, and isn't the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a piece of light entertainment like a Bond movie.