So I'm rewatching the Bond movies with my brother and my dad - who haven't seen them in a number of years. Also we started with the Moore films so that we didn't start with Dr. No (which, with Goldeneye were the last Bonds they'd seen).
So after AVtaK, my brother asked "Was Jaws one of Dr. Mortner's other attempts at making a superhuman?" Naturally I didn't know, poked around the net and here but didn't see it talked about (but perhaps my google-fu was weak), albeit I understand some people don't like the super-henchpeople so it might not be a well beloved topic either.
Anyhow after Goldfinger, my brother had the same question about Oddjob after he didn't react to being hit by a gold ingot (no-sold to use the professional wrestling parlance) and had previously crushed a golf ball in his hands.
Now one thing we felt when discussing it between each other is that we needed to distinguish the "superhuman" from the "trained agent". "Could Bond do it" was our litmous test on a lot of these things. For example there's nothing that, say, Red Grant or Wai Lan do during their appearances that strike me as something Bond couldn't do, so they would be "trained agents".
So from AVtaK we know Zorin was one of Mortner's experiments and I think its easy to extrapolate that May Day had to be one as well as she clearly does things I'd have trouble buying Bond doing (hurling the person over her head, for example).
Jaws is certainly superhuman (walking away unharmed several times from things that would have killed or maimed even Bond). Was he a product of some kind of project to engineer a superhuman though? Certainly nothing in the text indicates that to be the case.
Oddjob seems to fit (Bond seems to notice the golf ball as a feat if nothing else).
My brother suggested two others, I'm less certain about.
Xenia Onatopp - from our memory at least as we haven't gotten back to that film - was identified as the assassin of the Candian Admiral because her unique style of assassination led to a specific break in the spine - something that could be superhuman. But we haven't reseen Goldeneye so this may be us misremembering the character and scenes to fit the theory.
The other one is Vargas from Thunderball. Certainly a bit of a dedicated killer (since he has no interest in anything else) but he gets little chance to do anything else on-screen to indicate some superhuman ability.
And of course we have the two head scratchers - Baron Samedi and Solitare from LaLD. Samedi seems to survive death (from the coffin of snakes) but since the coffin was a prop in the ceremony, its possible that Samedi always had an "out" with the snakes (perhaps using snake venom to build a resistance or having the snakes milked prior to the ceremony) in case of accidents rather than being necessarily supernatural. Solitare does seem to predict what's going to happen in the movie (but then again that doesn't necessarily have to mean she has psychic powers either).
So I guess the question to the group is are there other characters who might qualify as superhuman in the Bond films or are all the feats we see ultimately explanable as normal on the natural curve of human phyicality? And could it conceivable all tie back into the work of Dr. Mortner somehow?
If this has been discussed before, apologies, but I didn't find a thread dedicated to it here (but again, might have not looked for the right keywords).