Judi Dench wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

Judi Dench's M is the one lead in Skyfall who does not wear an Omega. The series has run on its Omega partnership since 1995, and this film keeps to it: Bond wears two Omega Seamasters, and Eve, the field agent revealed at the end to be Moneypenny, wears an Omega Aqua Terra. M wears a Hamilton instead. The reference is H32261735, a Jazzmaster Lady Quartz, a 27-millimeter steel watch with a black dial on a black leather strap, and it is about the least conspicuous watch a Bond film has ever put on a principal.

It is so far in the background that the people who track these things had to work to name it. Bond Lifestyle, which has catalogued nearly every watch in the series, says M's Hamilton "can just be spotted with enough details to identify it," working from the 12 and 6 markers and the thin white line of the Hamilton logo on the dial. The watch turns up in her office and at the public inquiry where she is called to defend MI6, hands folded on the table while the panel asks whether her kind of work still has a place. It is a quartz women's watch, the least expensive thing on any principal's wrist, on the one character who runs the entire service.

Skyfall is also where the character dies. Dench had played M in seven films, from GoldenEye in 1995 through this one, and the film kills her off, fatally wounded in the last battle at Bond's family estate in Scotland and dying in his arms. She wears the same small steel Hamilton through all of it, in the office and at the inquiry, and never once anything that asks to be looked at.