'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' Ending, Explained
If you came to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning to have a nice time and watch Tom Cruise jump on and off of things, and honestly feel so attacked by concepts like "the podkova" and a "decompression chamber" and "the Entity," we got you covered. Here's your guide to the explosive devices, time crunches, and daring escapes that make up The Final Reckoning's ending.
The stakes are catastrophically high in this movie. An evil AI called "The Entity," introduced in 2023's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, has seized control of nuclear weapons from all world powers, except the United States, and is prepared to blow up the world and start Earth over with a blank slate run by the few survivors. Ethan Hunt wants to destroy the Entity before this happens. Doing so would save the world but destroy all of cyberspace with it. So not the ideal solution. Other parties, including the United States government and a guy named Gabriel, want to control the Entity.
Before he died towards the beginning of the film, Luther created a "poison pill" for the Entity that would trap and corrupt it (similar to a computer virus) if connected to the Entity's original source code (a.k.a. the "podkova" that Ethan retrieved from a submarine at the bottom of the Bering Sea). Simply put: they have to put the thing in the other thing. The problem is that the Entity is very good at predicting human behavior and might just bomb everybody if it senses someone is trying to mess with it. Ethan's plan is to get Gabriel, the villain who used to be the Entity's human proxy, to do it for them—because the Entity would never see that coming.
They determine that the Entity is planning to infiltrate a bunker in South Africa which would protect it from the nukes it plans to deploy. The bunker hosts computer servers containing an archive of human knowledge expansive enough to ensure our history survives a nuclear holocaust. They decide to let the Entity into the vault, because once the Entity is trapped there it can be contained there. Grace and Benji, at least, don their best Indiana Jones/National Treasure-inspired attire for the warmer climate.
When they get to the bunker, Gabriel is waiting for them with some cronies and a nuclear weapon of his own. Briggs and Kittridge also show up. (Earlier in the film, like much earlier, the two agents agreed to go rogue and meet the IMF team at their final destination. How they figured that out is classified.) The feds hit the bricks when they realize that Gabriel has armed a nuclear bomb. But the damage is already done. The plan is wrecked. Gabriel flees with Ethan in pursuit and the others stick around to try and keep the bomb from going off.
By forming even smaller teams, of course! Donloe, the former CIA agent from the very first Mission: Impossible movie that the team reunited with on St. Matthew's Island in the Bering Sea, stays outside with his wife and Brigg's former partner Degas, to deactivate the bomb. Meanwhile Grace, Benji, and Paris go inside the bunker to try and download the Entity onto a drive as soon as Ethan and/or Gabriel plugs that poison pill into the podkova. While this is happening, Paris also performs an emergency tracheotomy on Benji with whatever materials they have hanging around... no biggie!
While his team splits up on the ground, Ethan takes to the sky to get the poison pill from Gabriel and plug it into the podkova himself if he can't get Gabriel to do it. Gabriel just happened to have an escape buddy, providing Ethan with the perfect opportunity to commandeer his biplane and chase after him. Ethan manages to catch up to Gabriel's plane and climb onto it... and then, after pulling some dramatic faces that would have made Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard jealous, Gabriel smashes his head into his own plane's rudder and dies.
Right before that happens, Gabriel taunts Ethan by saying that only he has a parachute. No matter what happens with the podkova and the poison pill and the Entity, according to Gabriel, Ethan is going to fall to his death. This turns out to be far from true. Ethan may not have been wearing a parachute when Gabriel made his attempt to escape, but there is another one in the plane. Ethan puts the parachute on his back, jumps, and even when it fails he manages to deploy a back-up parachute while inserting the poison pill into the podkova and saving the world.
So, basically, Gabriel died making an empty threat. How embarrassing for him!
Meanwhile, at another secure location, President Sloane is grappling with the information that she is the only human person with autonomy over nuclear weapons in the world. Her military advisors want her to launch a preemptive strike, which includes bombing one domestic location. We will never know which United States city President Sloane chose. That's probably for the best. I certainly don't want to think about which city the filmmakers think is expendable! We also don't find out what happens to the Entity's cult following. I'd keep an eye on them if I were the IMF or government of literally any nation.
At the very last second, as is the way with these movies, she goes against the advice of her male advisers and takes America's nuclear bombs off-line completely. Sure, that means that the country is defenseless... but it also means that an evil AI can't take control of them. She also survives an immediate assassination attempt, because the men literally cannot deal and one panics and shoots at her.
The movie and its marketing sure act like this is the de facto "series finale" of the Mission: Impossible franchise. However, there's no reason why the story can't continue. Ethan Hunt is alive. While Ethan's number one bestie Luther died towards the beginning of the film, the team is bigger and more capable than ever. He even gets a handshake from Briggs at the end of the film, implying that the U.S. Government won't be after him.
At the end of the film, everyone gathers in London's Trafalger Square. ("Just like the ending of Cats," said nobody.) Grace hands Ethan the drive that now houses the Entity, and one by one the team vanishes into the crowd. It's up to him whether he destroys the Entity–which would, again, destroy the entire internet–or just hands on to it. It's the happiest, and most ambiguous, ending we could have hoped for in a Mission Impossible film.
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