In Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the unstoppable force that is Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) faces the immovable, inevitable Entity, a rogue AI with the power to rewrite reality itself. Their conflict has been brewing since 2023’s Dead Reckoning, the first half of what could be Ethan’s last stand. The Entity has been studying Ethan: it knows exactly which buttons to press to ensure that he fails his mission, paving the way for a new world order. As we learn in Final Reckoning, however, this showdown has actually been in the works for much longer. Everything Ethan has ever done in his 30-year tenure with the Impossible Mission Force has led to this — in fact, his past efforts to save the world might have inadvertently brought the Entity online.
Even if this isn’t the last we see of Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible is doing its best to wrap up its eight-film franchise in as neat a bow as possible. That consolidating makes for a handful of callbacks and retcons, the most interesting of which brings us back nearly 20 years to Mission: Impossible III. A huge chunk of Final Reckoning hinges on Ethan’s misadventures in the 2006 film, and the recovery of the “Rabbit’s Foot,” a MacGuffin that’s much more important in hindsight.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.
Mission: Impossible III pits Ethan against Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), an international arms dealer involved with malicious groups around the world. Ethan is tasked with finding the latest object of his curiosity, the Rabbit’s Foot. Its true power, and even its true nature, remains a mystery throughout the film — and the answer to that mystery becomes irrelevant once Davian abducts Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan). With her life in the balance, Ethan has no choice but to deliver the Rabbit’s Foot to Davian. He’s fortunately able to save Julia, stop Davian permanently, and deliver the Rabbit’s Foot into IMF custody before all is said and done, but that’s the very act that paves the way for the Entity.
Throughout Mission: Impossible III, theories about the Rabbit’s Foot abound. The general consensus is that the MacGuffin is some kind of biological superweapon, but Ethan’s guy-in-the-chair, Benji (Simon Pegg), initially posits that it’s something called the “anti-god.” He relays a story about an old professor at Oxford, who always believed that one day, an unstoppable technological compound would be created to eviscerate the world. His professor referred to it as the “anti-god,” and Benji asserts that it could truly be anything: an “accelerated mutator,” a piece of “mystery tech,” or even “a really expensive bunny appendage.”
It turns out that his theory was more accurate than he could have guessed: the Rabbit’s Foot actually contained the source code that would create the Entity years later. The scientists initially studying it didn’t have the resources to crack it — but once Ethan steals the Rabbit’s Foot and delivers it to the IMF, it’s eventually given the juice it needs to become an all-powerful AI. For all his efforts to save the world, Ethan has actually brought it even closer to the brink. The very thing he had a hand in creating is now set on destroying him and all human life.
It’s a great ironic twist, one that capitalizes on one of the bigger plot holes in the franchise. Even better, it retroactively makes Mission: Impossible III — one of the saga’s most polarizing installments — all the more important in the grand scheme. It’s now more than the film that introduces Julia, the woman who would go on to haunt Ethan for the rest of his life. It also depicts the birth of Ethan’s greatest adversary, making Final Reckoning a full-circle moment in more ways than one.
