Timothy Dalton is English, born in Wales.
Yes, Fleming added that in his later stories as an homage to Connery's performance after
Dr. No was released.
I think you have a politically painted idea of Bond that sort of ignores pretty much the last fifty years, and hangs some heavy post-colonialist readings from a Marxist perspective on your understanding of the character.
There's nothing particularly Marxist about my interpretation of the Bond series, but to pretend he doesn't represent a colonialist fantasy of Englishness is just silly. The entire thing hinges on a fantasy of English power that does not actually exist post-World War II.
I won’t even go into the sexual politics of Bond, as that’s a thing that had to change from day one
If you're gonna say that "Character X is like James Bond," then you gotta go into the sexual politics of both respective characters, because it's a key element of the Bond series. And the sexual politics of Okuna's role in
Collatoral Damage has a pretty major divergence from that of the vast majority of Bond films.
The sneering around ‘English’ Bond
"Sneering?"
has an unpleasant whiff to it, when the character is repeatedly shown as somewhat of an exemplar of the idea of multicultural ‘European’ ‘global village’ types
I strongly disagree with this reading -- the James Bond series strikes me as being far more invested in the idea of Bond's Britishness (and, yes, with Bond coded as upper-class English in particular -- it's not like we ever hear Bond with a Cockney or Northern accent) than with any ideal of multicultural European. I mean, he literally skyjumps with a Union Jack parachute. One of his films is entitled
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. And it's not like he's gone from working for MI-6 to working for the Common Security and Defense Policy in Brussels.
But that's also not really relevant to the issue of whether or not Okuna is a Bond pastiche, since Okuna's national identity is coded as "American" whatever the in-universe identity is.
And of course ‘The Outrageous Okona’ isn’t English. Or British. We’ve seen him on screen. He’s the ‘not Riker’ in many ways. That’s half the point in seeing him back, and seeing him flirt. And Okona is not particularly working class.
He hangs out and is fluent in the social conventions of low-class bars, he's constantly repairing his own stuff, and if I remember correctly he's got money problems. He's coded as working class.
David Mack himself just pointed out the Bond-alike thing with Naomi,
And he specifically said, "I didn't think of it as any kind of series-specific homage." He cited Q and Bond as one example but elaborated that the trope of a semi-antagonistic relationship between tech support and field agent is an old trope and that he wasn't trying to imitate any particular series.
I don’t get much of a Bourne Identity vibe from it either, and that’s a real go to place for mainstream fiction these days.
I agree. Okuna in
Collatoral Damage doesn't read as Jason Bourne either; the most obvious divergence being the relationship between the field agent and the agency: Starfleet Intelligence is painted as flawed, but not as fundamentally antagonistic the way the CIA is in the Bourne series.
).
