But the connections between the Daniel Craig Bond movies have largely felt unnecessary, an intriguing idea that never fully took root.

The good films are quite good and the weaker ones are usually good enough. It’s been easy to care about the stories within individual entries. But drawing out the narrative also requires a story that commands interest and demands new chapters, which the Craig era films have never figured out how to do. His Bond becomes increasingly weary as the series progresses. That suits Craig’s approach to the character. Rather than a fresh start each time out, Craig’s Bond series would become a continuing story. The film ends with him capturing another bad guy tied to Vesper. Quantum changed that, picking up almost immediately where Casino Royale left off as Bond deals with a villain left over from his previous adventure. But was it successful? Has Bond emerged from his turn-of-the-century transformation newly relevant? Did the attempt at making individual entries part of a bigger story work? To find answers here at the end involves first going back to the beginning. It’s been a thoughtful overhaul filled with bold choices. And they’ve tried to smooth out the snarls of James Bond continuity while telling a multi-part story with a distinct beginning, middle, and seemingly definitive end. They’ve addressed the former without making Bond fundamentally un-Bondian, emphasizing the toughness of his character and the emotional toil of the job rather than, say, his tendency to leer at every woman who crosses his path.

The Craig films, which culminate this year with the fifth film in his cycle, No Time to Die, have treated both Bond’s retrograde personality and tangled continuity as problems that needed solving. Why did some of the supporting cast remain consistent and others did not? Is it any wonder why a fan theory that “James Bond” was just a codename caught on in some corners? A new actor would take over as Bond from time to time, but it was unclear whether or not the Bond of the moment and the Bonds of the past shared the same history. It’s because Bond fans could be driven to the brink of madness trying to connect one film to the next. That’s not just because the character’s original conception - a borderline sadist who used and discarded women while eating elaborate meals, drinking to excess, and smoking constantly - felt increasingly out of time as the 20th century turned into the 21st. Before Daniel Craig arrived, James Bond hadn’t made sense for years.

Casino royale cast Jeffrey Wright