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Major spoilers for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning follow.

If we know anything from the promotion for the eighth Mission: Impossible movie, it’s that everything has been leading to this; we’ve had trailers that have had clips from almost every movie in the series to this point, as well as portentous voiceovers basically telling both Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the viewer that everything that Hunt has done in the three decades of his spy career has all been leading up to the events of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning… and that’s not even including the fact that the last movie in the series, 2023’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One, as the title included at the time), ended with an incomplete mission, which had to be finished up this time around.

So… how does Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning live up to all of that? And is it really a truly final reckoning for Ethan and the Impossible Mission Force? That’s where Popverse comes in - we’ve assembled this Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning ending explained to tell you everything you need to know about the film, including a recount of the movie’s climactic stunt and whether or not Ethan Hunt lives to spy another day.

What happens in the Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning ending?

Much of the first half of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is spent completing the mission that Dead Reckoning predicted, as Ethan and his team jump through multiple freezing hoops to locate the downed Russian submarine the Sevastopol, which houses a physical hard drive that contains the Entity’s original source code — the thing necessary to control the rogue AI that, by this point, has taken control of the majority of the world’s nuclear arsenal and is working on controlling every country’s nukes so that it can wipe out all life on Earth aside from its human followers. (Don’t ask.)

By this point, there are multiple distinct groups that want the hard drive for their own purposes: the US government want it to control the Entity and avert nuclear apocalypse, Dead Reckoning’s villain Gabriel wants it because he’s been abandoned by the Entity and wants to control it out of revenge and also to rule the world himself, the Entity itself wants it so that no-one else has it, and Ethan and his team want it to upload a ‘Poison Pill’ code that will destroy the Entity once and for all. Through complicated reasons, all of these groups end up in a bunker in South Africa that is shielded from the internet and also against any potential attack, and therefore would survive nuclear attack; it’s the Entity’s choice of location to survive its own nuclear apocalypse, but a standoff between everyone ends with Benji (Simon Pegg) shot, the team working to defuse an entirely separate nuclear bomb set to go off by Gabriel, and Ethan chasing Gabriel with them both in bi-planes, to retrieve the drive containing the poison pill code needed to destroy the Entity.

(Yes, this is where the biplane stunts that have featured in much of the movie’s promotion come from.)

Because of the way the movie is set up, the team have a plan to use the poison pill code to ‘confuse’ the Entity so that it believes that it can safely download itself into the bunker in South Africa, except that Grace (Hayley Atwell) will use her pickpocket skills to actually transfer the Entity onto a separate drive where it will be entirely trapped and disconnected from the rest of the world. Except, they have to wait for Ethan to capture Gabriel and use the poison pill drive in order for that to happen, and that’s easier said than done; while Ethan gets the drive, Gabriel is killed after colliding with his own plane, and Ethan’s parachute bursts into flames even as he struggles to upload the poison pill code. The last the audience sees of him, he’s seemingly plummeting to his death…

…except, of course, he has a second chute that we only see after he’s safely on the ground. The Entity is successfully trapped on the drive, and the world is saved. (The US President — who’s Angela Bassett’s Erika Sloane, previously seen in 2018’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout, also rejects calls from advisors to launch an all-out nuclear attack on the nuclear capabilities captured by the Entity during all of this, but that feels almost surplus to requirements.)

The end of the movie is a scene where Ethan and his team reunite in London wordlessly, before going their separate ways.

Were there any Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning deaths?

Considering the number of times in the movie the audience is repeatedly told that this is the culmination of everything and Ethan Hunt’s final reckoning, there are surprisingly few deaths in the movie, at least of characters who we’ve seen before. (A number of Russian agents, and a couple of agents of the Entity, get killed, for example, but we’d only just met them, and only one of them even gets a name.)

As explained above, Gabriel (Esai Morales) dies as a result of his final showdown with Ethan. Ethan doesn’t kill him, however; he actually dies when he jumps from his plane to escape Ethan, boasting that he’s the only one with a parachute. That doesn’t actually matter; as soon as he leaves the plane, his head is struck by the plane’s rudder, and he’s killed immediately. Call it karma, perhaps.

Additionally, General Sydney dies. Played by Nick Offerman, he's one of President Sloane's advisors, and a man who wants the U.S. to launch a nuclear strike against the Entity for the entire movie, but ultimately dies protecting the President against an attack from one of the Entity's agents in the movie's climax. He's presumably shot by the Entity's agent, although that's not entirely clear from what happens on-screen.

The most meaningful death in the movie happens very early on; Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) — the only character not played by Tom Cruise to appear in all the movies — sacrifices himself to stop a nuclear bomb from destroying London. Curiously, he’s apparently sick enough to be seeking medical attention in his hideaway before his death, but this is never explained during the movie, and it wasn’t set up in Dead Reckoning, which takes place two months before this movie in terms of the series’ continuity. Somewhere, there’s probably a deleted scene that makes sense of everything.

Who and what were the big surprises in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning?

If we’re ignoring the fact that Ethan doesn’t die in the movie — and, in fact, seems to be set up with a new IMF by the movie’s end, so, so much for this being a “final reckoning,” I guess — the big surprises of the movie are likely in the many callbacks to the earlier movies in the series:

• It’s revealed that the Rabbit’s Foot from 2006’s Mission: Impossible III was actually the source code for the Entity, meaning that Ethan is at least partially responsible for everything that’s happened in the last two movies.
• It’s revealed that Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), the CIA agent who was hunting Ethan in Dead Reckoning as well as in Final Reckoning, is actually Jim Phelps, Jr., son of the villain from the first Mission: Impossible back in 1996.
• When Ethan is captured and taken into U.S. custody, the President's advisors read through a list of his accomplishments; it's essentially a greatest hits list of moments from the series to date, complete with flashbacks.
• As stated above, Fallout’s Erika Sloane is now the President of the United States.
• The President's note to Rear Admiral Nealy (Hannah Waddingham) is simply a date that is meaningful to both of them; that date is May 22, 1996 — which is, in reality, the release date of Tom Cruise's first Mission: Impossible movie.
• In perhaps the biggest surprise of all the callbacks, William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from the first Mission: Impossible returns as a major player in this movie, where the fallout of Cruise’s break-in to the Black Vault in that movie is revealed; Donloe ends up being part of the team that helps taking down the Entity.

The only other true surprise in the movie is an odd narrative swerve: after serving as the human face of the Entity in Dead Reckoning, Gabriel has been pushed aside by the AI villain in this movie, and ends up as a rogue third party (and someone human to punch in the face when necessary).

Are there any Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning post-credit scenes?

It’s a Mission: Impossible movie. We don’t do post-credit sequences here.

Will there be a Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning sequel?

Here’s the curious thing about Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. For all that it’s been set up as the final chapter in the series, it actually ends with everything primed for another movie. Not only is Ethan alive and well, but the movie ends with what’s almost an all-new IMF team in place, with Grace, Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and a reformed Paris (Pom Klementieff) alongside Benji, who’s recovered from being shot and has been named more than once as the new team leader during the movie. More than any other movie in the series, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning feels like it’s meant to have a sequel.

Does that mean it’ll happen? You’ll have to ask the executives at Paramount, I guess. But it’s definitely a possible mission, should they choose to accept it.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in theaters now.

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