Biggles Wrote:YES! I love that part, and when I first saw it (at the theatre, first run--that's how old I am), I thought "yes, plug the bastard"!

Mike Hanson Wrote:** SPOILERS **

Rereading some of Paul's excellent books, I found it interesting
how Rasalom seems to fall into the cliche mold of the Bond
arch-villain in one major way, yet gets away with it because
of Paul's excellent characterization.

WTF you ask?

The James Bond arch-villain always makes one major mistake
in every single movie, and that is, he/she will, at one or more
points in the movie, have Bond completely and utterly at their
mercy, and, instead of simply outright killing Bond with a gun
shot to the head or whatever, said villain will not only gloat
over Bond and spill his/her whole evil plan, but will leave Bond
tied up to die in some wildly imaginative manner in which we
the audience just know he will escape.

And thus we come to Rasalom gloating over the aged Glaeken,
instead of outright killing him (which would be the safe thing
to do, regardless of his "seeming" condition) when he finally
meets him after so many decades, and then leaving
him alive...and Rasalom's gloating over the exhausted form of
Jack down in Florida, and once again showing a complete lack
of foresight as to Jack's capabilities (and this after his realization
in Conspiracies, when first meeting Jack, that Jack had personally
destroyed all the Rakoshi).

One might surely come to the conclusion that Rasalom is the
biggest idiot on the planet, with one HELL of a sub-conscious
death wish.

But Paul covers his bet by making good old Rasalom a being
who feeds off of the intangible emotions of fear and despair,
and the opportunity to feed off of fallen Glaeken and a broken
Jack is just too overpowering a desire for the prince of evil to
ignore.

Mike