After a brush with friendly fire and atomic bullets, an injured, despondent Bond retires to an exotic beach to sleep around and court danger. Neither seems to make him happy. He's numb, unable to create any joy for himself. It's a brief window into Bond's thoroughly miserable downtime. He's rootless and restless by design. 007 lives to work. He's a company man through and through. Take that away from him and he's just a loose jumble of self-destructive drives searching for purpose. He needs direction. He wants a parent, basically. Skyfall explicitly noodles around with the idea of Bond as a lost, damaged little boy seeking approval. It's a reading that Ian Fleming frequently stressed in Bond's relationship with his taskmaster M. Bond wanting to please the only authority in his life that he respects.
It's an idea that hasn't been particularly well mined in any of the previous films. The various M characters are typically defined as anonymous, interchangeable, desk jockeys; fit to issue orders and not much else. Here though, there's history. M's importance to Bond is a central conceit, underpinning the spy's war with a shade, an earlier agent that didn't quite measure up to the MI6 taskmaster's impossibly high standards. Raoul Silva is a discarded child. GoldenEye introduced Judi Dench's M as a kind of joke - could an irredeemable misogynist handle taking life-and-death orders from a tiny middle-aged woman? That was 17 years ago. In the interim this M has transformed from Bond's idea of a meddling accountant into a dispassionate iron lady entirely comfortable with feeding her agents into the meat grinder. Naturally, he adores her. She demands complete sacrifice in pursuit of results, something Bond willingly gives.
M allows Bond to test his limits and abilities in pursuit of something he trusts is worthwhile. He almost wants to die, and lacking any workable value system of his own, defers agency to her. Mother knows best. Silva, M's other child in Skyfall, although superficially similar, thinks too much. In an aside M reveals the fallen agent outlived his usefulness when he began to make his own moves, gathering his own intelligence. He sought to impress his master with ingenuity and external action. It got him deformed and stricken off. Conversely, Bond wins his girl's heart by retreating into himself, forcing everyone else to contend with a physical manifestation of his own internal dilemmas. Skyfall doesn't play the blockbuster game. It doesn't attempt to top the last multi-vehicle pile-up. Instead the action contracts, getting smaller and tenser, until you arrive at a man prowling an abandoned space - his cold, childhood home - protecting that which he has made his own.
