Tom Cruise’s expensive final outing in the Mission: Impossible franchise is finally here. It is a fitting conclusion to Cruise’s journey in the IP. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning kicks off with Cruise hearing a message from Angela Bassett’s Sloane, who is now the President of the United States. Alongside Bassett’s voice, fans are taken through a flashback of Ethan Hunt’s previous adventures.

The throwback is kind of poignant when you realize that this is the last impossible mission that Hunt and his team will undertake. It also instills a little fear in the audience about the fate of Cruise’s character. Will he make it out alive in this battle with a sentient AI? Here’s how Ethan Hunt vs the Entity played out in The Final Reckoning.

Before Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning enters its third act, we see Ethan Hunt and his team separate for their mission to find the Sevastopol submarine. Tom Cruise‘s character embarks on a mission to find the long-lost ship. His friends help him get the exact coordinates of the ship from St. Matthew Island, where they meet former CIA coder Bill Donloe.

Ethan has to retrieve a gadget called the Podkova, which has the source codes for the Entity. We would all feel a little claustrophobic seeing Ethan searching for the gadget in the submarine, which is submerged deep in the sea floor. The stakes are made higher when the submarine slowly plunges further into the depths of the ocean.

However, Ethan manages to escape Sevastopol with the Podkova, even though he loses his diving suit and almost dies in the process. Hayley Atwell‘s Grace pulls him out of the water and revives him in the decompression chamber. This brings us to the third act, where Ethan must make Gabriel part of the plan.

He has to hand over the source code to Gabriel outside of the Doomsday Vault in South Africa, where the Entity wants to take a safe harbor while the world gets pushed into chaos. Hunt counts on Gabriel to use Luther’s poison pill on the Podkova to take control of the Entity (the AI has declared Esai Morales’ character as an outcast by this point).

The plan is to trap the Entity in a five-dimensional data drive, designed by Luther, when Gabriel uses the poison pill. Grace, the skilled pickpocket, is tasked with the seemingly impossible mission of trapping the Entity, since the data drive has to be connected and disconnected within 100 milliseconds to avert any mishaps.

In typical Mission: Impossible fashion, the team has to improvise in the climax after their plans get disrupted by the arrival of Kittridge and the IMF team. Ethan’s team has to split up for separate missions in the third act. Ethan, who still possesses the Podkova, goes after Gabriel for Luther’s poison pill.

IMF agent Degas volunteers to stay behind with Donloe and his wife outside the vault. Their mission is to disconnect a nuclear bomb set off by Gabriel. They know that it is a suicidal mission, as they sent Grace, Benji, and Paris (who is now on Ethan’s team) into the vault. Benji is wounded in the shootout between Gabriel’s men and the IMF, and he is on the verge of a lung collapse.

Ethan and his team’s mission runs on a clock as they are approaching DEFCON 1. Angela Bassett‘s President Sloane is being pressured into launching pre-emptive strikes on the capitals of other nuclear powers, whose missiles have now been taken over by the Entity. She is also asked to make a twisted goodwill gesture: to launch one of the missiles into one of her cities.

Ethan pursues Gabriel, who flies out of the Doomsday Vault in a biplane. Cruise’s character hangs on to the landing gear of a second biplane, flown by one of Gabriel’s men. As Ethan and Gabriel take their fight into the air, down in the vault, a badly injured Benji gives back-to-back instructions to Paris and Grace.

Paris has to operate on Benji’s collapsed lung as per his instructions, while Grace prepares to trap the Entity into the 5D data drive. Outside, Donloe finds a way out of their suicide mission: they have ten seconds to escape the reduced blast radius.

Instead of ordering a strike, Madam President decides to take their missiles offline. However, before she can make a call, an attempt is made on her life. At the end of it, the Entity takes control of the U.S.’s missiles before they go offline. Only Ethan and his team can now save the world from the Entity’s planned nuclear armageddon.

Tom Cruise does one hell of a stunt on top of a flying biplane. He manages to take the poison pill from Gabriel, who is killed in a freak accident. Before he could connect the poison pill and the Podkova, the biplane catches fire, forcing him to jump out and use the parachute. Unfortunately, the parachute also catches fire. A freely falling Ethan manages to connect the Podkova and the poison pill.

As soon as Grace gets the green signal that Ethan succeeded in his mission, she puts her skills to use. The data drive was connected and disconnected in exactly 100 milliseconds, trapping the Entity in it. Outside, the bomb goes off, and the entire world’s power is shut off before restarting. We see that Donloe, his wife, and Degas have made it into the vault alive.

Ethan is shown to have survived the fall with the help of an emergency parachute. As Luther’s message plays out from the poison pill, we see the huge sigh of relief on all the characters in the film. Ethan gets picked up by Kittridge and IMF officer Briggs (who is really Jim Phelps Jr., the son of Jon Voight’s villain from the first film).

In the first act of the film, Gabriel kills Ving Rhames’s Luther, who was already dying from a terminal disease. He traps him in an underground tunnel with a nuclear bomb. Luther’s skills could only save the city and not himself, as he made the ultimate sacrifice.

We fear for Benji’s life in the climax after he gets shot. However, the tail end of the film shows Ethan reuniting with Grace, Benji, Degas, and Paris. Not only do we learn about Benji’s fate, but we also get to know about the Entity’s fate in this scene. Ethan hasn’t ‘killed’ the Entity as he intended. Grace hands over the 5D data drive to the only man she trusts not to weaponize the sentient AI. The film leaves the AI’s fate open-ended.

However, the same cannot be said about the film’s other villain, Gabriel. He dies a brutal death when attempting to escape from the biplane. He hit his head against the plane’s tail, causing instant death. Sadly, there was another character who didn’t make it out alive in the climax.

After President Sloane hesitates to order pre-emptive strikes, we see Nick Offerman’s General Sidney, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ask his subordinate for a weapon. We initially thought that he might be planning something bad.

When Sloane announces her plans to take the missiles offline, one of the bodyguards, presumably a member of the Children of the Atom cult, tries to kill her. Sidney shoots him down with his weapon, but gets fatally wounded in the process. He probably foresaw an attack on the President and carried the weapon into the meeting to stop it.

By turning Gabriel against the Entity, we now have a little clarity on one of the major unanswered questions from Dead Reckoning. Why did Gabriel help the Entity in the first place? The sequel film explains away Gabriel’s motivations as purely selfish, even though he seemed like a loyal disciple of the Anti-God in the previous film.

We also never get to see where the enmity between Ethan and Gabriel first started. Both films only show the flashback scene of Gabriel shooting Marie without explaining the latter’s role in all of this. The only other hint about the incident is a conversation between Gabriel and Grace in Dead Reckoning.

Another mystery that wasn’t explained on the screen was the date, May 22, 1996. In the real world, it is the date of release of the first Mission: Impossible film. However, in the movie, it was only suggested that the date was important to both President Sloane and Admiral Neely (played by Hannah Waddingham). It was intended as a message from Sloane to Neely to trust Ethan.

Tom Cruise has already told Variety that there will be no more Mission: Impossible movies. However, like the rest of the franchise’s films, the movie left Ethan’s fate open-ended. Unlike other big-budget productions, this MI film has no post-credits scenes.