Grrl Power #1089 - Operation yes take backs (Patreon)

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It's probably best to assume that if an enemy goes for you data, they have some expectation of being able to use it. It bugs me in movies and other media when party 2 does a thing, and party 1 reacts in a predictable way, which is the outcome party 2 wanted in the first place. It seems like an obvious pitfall for any agency remotely involved in security or secrecy to fall for, but I guess they're still institutions run by people, who are mostly lazy and/or overworked and/or slaves to procedure. Plus, a lot of movies wouldn't ever kick off if the good guys didn't get caught with their pants down from the get-go. I just hate it when any average armchair idiot watches to good guys do something so dumb that all I can think of is "There are people who get paid literal millions of dollars for screenplays, and this was the best story they could come up with?" Like in Skyfall, when Q plugs the enemy's laptop into MI6's network. Like that dude wouldn't know about air-gapping, or any remote hint of cyber security whatsoever? All you can do at that point is just shake your head and give up on expecting any sort of clever story from the rest of the movie. I mean, if the bad guy can rely on the good guys doing shit that stupid, the good guys deserve to lose. He ceases being an arch-villain and becomes a high-schooler kicking a disable kindergartener.

I think this is one reason I have a lot of trouble writing villains. I want my good guys to be smart, or at least not act like they've recently had a catastrophic stroke, so in order for the villains to make any headway, they either have to ambush the good guys or have plans that are so convoluted and obfuscated that they seem vanishingly unrealistic to come to fruition. Like in Skyfall. When the villain escaped and Bond chased him into a disused subway tunnel, and the villain blew up an adjacent tunnel to crash a subway train down on Bond. The contingency planning for that would take months. Did his detonator have like, 40 different buttons on it so he could set off the correct set of charges depending on when and where potential pursuit caught up to him?

All of Skyfall villain's plan was so he could take a shot at M, who frequently walks in the open as show in the scene where she turns around to see MI6 blow up. Like he couldn't just post up with a hunting rifle somewhere. His plan wasn't to put M in an inescapable box, it was to impress himself, and draw out the screenplay so the movie could happen.

I don't mean to pick on Skyfall specifically, but it's easy because it's super dumb. Not as dumb as The Tomorrow War. Now that's a dumb movie. Like, every single scene is super super dumb.