Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ ending, post-credits explained

This article contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning — the latest, and possibly last, part of Ethan Hunt’s journey (more on that in a bit) —  is finally here.

And, clocking in at nearly three hours, it’s a lot of mission to take in. It picks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, which saw Ethan (Tom Cruise) and the IMF battle a mysterious, rogue AI cyberweapon known as the Entity and the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales), an assassin looking to control it for his own devious purposes. That film ends with Ethan and team in possession of the key necessary to defeat the Entity, but they first must find the sunken Russian submarine the Sevastopol, which houses its crucial source code.

Cue The Final Reckoning. At the beginning, we learn that, thanks to the Entity, the world is on the brink of collapse — the AI villain (which we’re told has its own cult following now!) is days away from having direct control over the world’s nuclear weapons, which it intends to use to bomb humankind into obliteration. (What it actually stands to gain from a world without sentient beings to mess around with is unclear.)

In the end, the mission once again proves to be not so impossible for Ethan Hunt and co., but as always, it’s a hell of a ride to save the day. So what exactly happened, and what does it mean for our beloved IMF characters?

Entertainment Weekly attempts the impossible mission of distilling all that down, below.

How does Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning end?

As mentioned above, if Ethan is to be successful in destroying the Entity, he first must find the source code, which is located in the frozen watery graveyard in which the Sevastopol now lies. To find the coordinates of the sub’s final resting place, the IMF team, which now consists of Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Benji (Simon Pegg) go to visit CIA analyst William Donloe and his wife, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), at their home on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, where he has been stationed since the Langley vault incident in the first Mission: Impossible film.

Thanks to his work with sonar monitoring, Donloe knows the necessary coordinates, which, after a fiery battle with some Russians, he’s able to send to Ethan, who is waiting on a sub that delivers him as close to the Sevastopol as possible. After a lengthy underwater sequence involving Ethan essentially being turned into a human washing machine inside the rolling submarine, he recovers the Podkova device containing the Entity’s all-important source code.

The team, which now includes Donloe and Tapeesa, finds Ethan in the nick of time and revives him. Ah, the miracles of decompression chambers and kisses from Grace, eh? From there, Ethan tells the team they have to travel to a South African doomsday vault, where the Entity wants to hide and survive after destroying the world. Ethan’s plan involves seemingly giving the Entity what it wants — at least at first — by letting it into the secure database, but then trapping it onto a giant, state-of-the-art hard drive from the late, great Luther (Ving Rhames), who tragically dies earlier in the movie. But to do that, they need Luther’s “poison pill” device — currently in the hands of Gabriel — and the source code they previously procured.

At the doomsday vault, the team is ready to give the source code to Gabriel in the hopes he will unknowingly serve as an honorary member of the IMF team and finish the mission by mistakenly plugging in Ethan’s source code with Gabriel’s poison pill. (Still following?) Gabriel and his henchmen have a nuke ready to blow everyone to smithereens to ensure they get what they want, but the deal goes south when Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and the CIA intervene and ruin everything. A gun fight ensues, and Gabriel escapes with the poison pill in the chaos, making sure to start the timer on the vault’s bomb as he does so.

Ethan leaves to pursue Gabriel to get the poison pill, and the rest of the team is then tasked with both stopping said bomb (Donloe, Tapeesa, and Degas stay behind for this), and trapping the Entity like a genie in a bottle (Grace, a severely wounded Benji, and Paris head to the vault to tackle this part). The catch — because there’s always a catch — is that they basically have the blink of an eye to ensure the Entity is trapped and doesn’t have time to connect to the world’s nuclear arsenal and set off its plan of turning the world into Fallout.

Ethan chases after Gabriel in his biplane. After a stunning mid-air battle, Gabriel dies, and the plane goes down. Ethan survives thanks to an emergency parachute and plugs the two devices in, sending the Entity to the vault, where pickpocket Grace’s impeccable timing effectively traps the AI villain in the hard drive before it can connect to cyberspace and kill us all.

Back with Ethan, we learn that Luther’s poison pill also contained a message of encouragement, full of talk of destiny, callings, and hope: “One such future is built on kindness, trust, and mutual understanding – should we choose to accept.” Naturally, it self-destructs after Ethan listens to it.

Mission now accomplished, Kittridge and U.S. Intelligence operative Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) — revealed to be the son of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) from the first Mission — show up with a peace offering for Ethan. Some time later, Benji, Paris, Degas, Grace, and Ethan briefly reunite in London. Grace hands Ethan the device with the Entity, and they all go their separate ways with a knowing grin and nod. What Ethan does with the Entity from there is not revealed.

Who lives and who dies in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning?

Gabriel — the primary human antagonist of the last two films — dies when his head meets the wrong end of a plane tail fin, splitting open like a coconut. Nick Offerman’s General Sydney also dies, uh, rather abruptly after saving President Sloane (Angela Bassett) from a situation-room assassination attempt.

But, far and away, the most consequential death is that of longtime IMF team member and hacker extraordinaire, Luther (Rhames). At the beginning of the film, Gabriel promises Ethan that someone he loves is going to die, and that someone ends up being Luther when he sacrifices himself to deactivate a nuclear bomb so that it explodes only partially, thus allowing Ethan the opportunity to escape. For some reason that’s never explained in the film, Luther is also shown before this in a hospital bed connected to all sorts of tubes, implying that he might have been dying anyway.

So, is this the final Mission: Impossible?

Unclear. The film’s themes and title would suggest so, but the ending leaves things open for more missions, should McQuarrie and Cruise (or a new team) choose to accept them. After all, most of the main players are alive at the end of the film, and the final parting between them suggests more of a “see you later” than one final “goodbye.”

For their part, McQuarrie and Cruise have been cagey when asked whether this is the final installment in the multi-billion-dollar franchise. Both have declined to offer any promises either way. Still, most recently, while debuting the film at Cannes, Cruise had this to say, per Variety: “I’d rather just people see it and enjoy and we’ve had an amazing time doing it and it’s been a lot of fun and I just want you all to enjoy it. Enjoy this and know everything is the culmination has come to this moment right now.”

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Is there a post-credits scene in The Final Reckoning?

No. If you were hoping that a bonus scene in the beginning, middle, or end of the film’s credits would shed some light on whether or not this is Ethan’s final mission, we’ve got some bad news: There is no such post-movie scene to speak of.