Reckoning With the Ending of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

After ten Mission: Impossible movies, it shouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that Ethan Hunt saves the day. In the newest movie in the franchise, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise’s death-defying hero finishes what he started in 2023’s Dead Reckoning, where a malicious, borderline omnipotent artificial intelligence known as The Entity took over cyberspace — and by extension, reality. After acquiring the key (literally) to stopping it in the last film, Ethan is now crossing the globe to get to the A.I.’s source, hoping to stop it and its human allies from taking control of all the world’s missiles and unleashing a nuclear apocalypse. Luckily, once the job is done, everything seems pretty hunky dory, as if there had never been any reckonings at all.

That’s a little confusing because on many occasions throughout the movie, we’re told that by destroying The Entity, Ethan will essentially take down the internet and ruin the global economy. Granted, that’s a better outcome than nuclear annihilation, but it would still be pretty bad. So what gives?

In Dead Reckoning, all the governments of the world are searching for two one-of-a-kind, high-tech cruciform keys that will unlock The Entity’s source code and give them control over it. The A.I. has wormed itself into every level of cyberspace and can essentially decide what’s true and bend the world to its whims. The U.S. government is among those who want to be in control of the ultimate weapon. Which is why Ethan goes rogue, defying his government’s orders to bring the keys back to them. He believes nobody should have this power.

The Final Reckoning adds a new wrinkle. As Angela Bassett’s President Sloane explains, The Entity is so fully entrenched in cyberspace by now that destroying it would also take down the web. The president seems very concerned about this possibility — though it’s not like the web is currently working well, to the point where the highest levels of the government have gone analog because nothing online can be trusted anymore. Later in the film, Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a mercenary pickpocket-turned-ally of Ethan, suggests that Ethan should consider being the one to control The Entity instead of just destroying it, because he could be trusted to undo the damage it did.

At about the midpoint of The Final Reckoning, Ethan convinces President Sloane to give him approval to go about his nigh-impossible mission to destroy The Entity. In the meantime, she’s busy debating whether it would be worth it to launch a pre-emptive strike on all the nuclear capitals of the world before the U.S. loses control of its missiles to the artificial intelligence, in an effort to mitigate the potential impact of The Entity’s plan for total annihilation should it succeed. (She also agrees to target an American city to prevent a response from the other nations she attacked. This is the plot of Sidney Lumet’s gripping 1964 Cold War thriller Fail Safe, except The Final Reckoning doesn’t ever name which American city the president would be sacrificing.)

Thankfully, no nukes fly whatsoever. Ethan risks his life in a mid-air scramble with Gabriel (Esai Morales), a terrorist who works with The Entity, to obtain the poison pill, a virus that Luther (Ving Rhames) created to infect the A.I. He plugs it into the podkova, a special drive containing The Entity’s source code that Ethan obtained from the wreck of a Russian sub that was destroyed in the last film. Once he’s done that, and before The Entity can launch the nukes, Grace uses her pickpocket reflexes to pull a 5D drive that The Entity uploaded itself into. (Thanks to the trickery of the poison pill’s code, the A.I. mistakenly believed the drive was a secure bunker of servers.) The Entity is trapped, locked away from the net. Everything goes dark as the world seemingly loses power…

…And then it boots back up shortly afterwards. Everything seems fine! Planes aren’t falling from the sky (other than Ethan and Gabriel’s), it doesn’t appear to be a Y2K-esque catastrophe, and the final scene where Ethan’s crew meets back up in London some undetermined amount of time later suggests that society continues to function, seemingly as normal.

If there’s any fallout from Ethan trapping The Entity, nobody mentions it. In all honesty, it really seems like the movie is hoping viewers forgot about what President Sloane said destroying The Entity would do to the world. Ethan just held onto a plane in mid-air, beat the bad guy, and defeated a god-like artificial intelligence averting the fiery nuclear death of all humanity. Who wants to think about consequences like the global economy tanking? Ethan saved the day!

Can we try to explain what happened? Sure. Maybe President Sloane didn’t know that Luther’s poison pill to defeat The Entity worked in such a way that it averted any fallout. Perhaps she was just wrong in her assumption that stopping The Entity would tank the internet in the first place. Maybe the internet did get wrecked and cyberspace is in shambles, but we’re just not seeing it. Could it be that a post-digital world is a better place, actually? Nature is healing, and all that? There’s also the possibility that Ethan is actually going to control The Entity to fix everything; Grace gives him the glowing thumb-drive containing the A.I. in London. But Ethan had rejected that idea. Also, this reunion in London takes place long enough after the climax for Benji (Simon Pegg) to have fully recovered from a gnarly gunshot wound. Ethan didn’t have his hands on The Entity until now, Grace did, so any damage to the internet would’ve already been done well before this.

All of these explanations feel weak. The likely reality is that The Final Reckoning just wasn’t invested in exploring this narrative thread. There’s a lot about The Entity that Mission: Impossible doesn’t fully address. We’re told at the start of the movie that the entire world exists in a post-truth reality, ally nations have become enemies and enemies have become aggressors, and there’s an A.I.-worshiping death cult cheering on The Entity. This is verging on sci-fi dystopian stuff, yet ultimately The Entity is just a buzzword-y MacGuffin that Ethan needs to put in a box against all odds. Is anyone really surprised The Final Reckoning wouldn’t expand on the technological, economic, geopolitical, and social ramifications of the internet going down in the final minutes of cinema’s supposed farewell to Ethan Hunt? That’s not what Mission: Impossible is about. It’s about Tom Cruise hanging on to a biplane as it barrel rolls hundreds of feet over a gorgeous South African vista. And, to be fair, it does indeed rule when he does that. If you have a problem, complain about it on the internet. It still works just fine, apparently.