After a fairly difficult production and several COVID-related delays, No Time to Die will finally see James Bond go up against his toughest threat yet in the form of Rami Malek's Lyutsifer Safin, who has been described as a dark reflection of 007. But while Safin has been confirmed to have a secretive history with Bond's love interest, Madeleine Swann, No Time to Die's trailers have also shown the mask-wearing villain pursuing someone across a snowy landscape, eventually causing them to fall into a frozen lake.
While it's not uncommon for the female lead to go up against the villain, Madeleine's presence is made even more intriguing when one remembers a story she told in the previous installment of the Bond franchise, 2015's Spectre. In that film, she recounts to Bond a story of a man coming to their house to kill her father Mister White (one of the lieutenants of the criminal organization Spectre) when she was a child. She concludes the tale by explaining that she eventually retrieved a gun and killed the intruder.
When all of these various pieces are combined, it makes one wonder if Safin was the assassin who came to kill Mister White. It stands to reason that Safin came to the house and was fought off but not killed by Madeleine. He then could have ended up chasing her to the frozen lake, only for her to turn the tables and cause the villain to face an icy defeat. Another major piece of evidence that supports this theory is that, in the trailer shots of Safin in the snowy environment, he's shown to have a single bullet hole in his jacket. It looks to be fairly recent, and it would stand to reason that this is where the young Madeleine shot him. Obviously, that wouldn't be enough to kill Safin, but it could've angered him enough to chase the young girl out to the frozen lake.
In the shots of the present-day Madeleine examining Safin's mask in the trailer, she is teary-eyed and appears to be terrified at the sight of it, which would perfectly line up with this theory. Perhaps this is her first realization that the man she thought she killed so long ago is actually still alive and wants revenge. And it would also explain why she's so hesitant to tell Bond about her history with Safin, as she was the one that nearly killed him and ultimately caused him to transform from a hitman into a megalomaniacal terrorist.
The only major flaw with this theory is an interaction between Madeleine and Ernst Stavro Blofeld late into Spectre that seems to imply that Blofeld himself was the man who came to kill Mister White. However, this is never explicitly said out loud, and the recent Bond films haven't been afraid to retcon certain story elements. Should No Time to Die reveal that Safin's snowy pursuit is of Madeleine, a lot of threads would be connected and a backstory would be established for Bond's newest adversary.
After numerous delays, Safin is finally set to make his big screen debut in Not Time to Die on October 8.