Why does the desert facility explode?

During Spectre, Bond and Swann escape Blofelds desert facility, only for it to explode.

WHY/HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?

Bond is stripped of weapons (except the concealed explosive within his wristwatch) before entering, and as far as I could see there is no point in which he is able to sabotage the facility.

There is no point in Blofeld destroying his own facility, as Bond is an enemy of the state and a fugitive; there is no-one (except his close colleagues) on his side. There is nothing to hide in the facility, and it would result in a huge loss of personnel. Even if Blofeld wanted to hide the facility for some reason, it doesn't make any sense to just blow it up immediately, there is no motive for this.

What have I missed?

james-bond spectre

Best Answer

I think you are referring to the 2015 Bond flick, Spectre, right?

The facility in the crater had plenty of heavy duty storage or processing tanks, pipes, pumps, etc. It seems to be a chemical processing plant or maybe something related to petroleum, though its location in a meteorite crater is quite odd.

The facility explodes because, just as Bond and Dr. Madeleine Swann are about to run away and miraculously outrun the explosion, Bond fires a single shot from a firearm he took off a henchman after he escaped. The shot is at a pressure gauge on one of the pipes. The facility appears to have no fire or explosion suppression design and so the little explosion on the gauge sets off a chain reaction of explosions on every piece of the rest of the facility. Even the (presumably) non-explosive data centers.

Stylistically, it is a return to Bond movies of the 1960s and 1970s where the bad guys have a huge facility with hundreds of co-conspiring workers doing the evil work of aspiring world domination. And always, Bond makes the huge facility catastrophically explode.