“Everything you’ve done has come to this,” Kittridge (Henry Czerny) spits at Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt during The Final Reckoning. The eighth Mission: Impossible movie certainly wears its past on its sleeve but unless you’ve been binging the series before stepping into the cinema, its many montages, references, and Easter eggs – including The Rabbit’s Foot so integral to the plot – may have passed you by.
Don’t worry, we’re here to save the day, Tom Cruise-style. Below, you’ll find some of the biggest The Final Reckoning Easter eggs and callbacks to the Mission: Impossible franchise. Be warned, though, some spoilers are present within.
The Entity’s voices
Final Reckoning viewers are treated to a cacophony of voices to begin the (potentially) final Mission: Impossible movie. While it eventually devolves into a muddled buzz of voices, only interrupted by Benji, Ethan’s time in the Entity sees him recollecting speeches from various important figures in his time at IMF. The main ones we could pick out are the distinctive voices of Rogue Nation/Fallout villain Solomon Lane and Mission: Impossible 3’s Owen Davian.
Julia
Perhaps one of Final Reckoning’s biggest surprises is that Ethan Hunt’s ex-wife Julia doesn’t show up again (though her arc certainly wrapped up in Fallout). Instead, Gabriel uses a mention of her before planning to torture both Ethan and Grace.
Ethan, as Gabriel points out, has let the women in his life down – including Julia being kidnapped during the events of Mission: Impossible 3. A handful of moments from the threequel are shown during Ethan and Grace’s interrogation.
Phineas Phreak
Right before Luther is blown up, he tells Ethan that no one can hold a candle to Phineas Phreak. But who is he?
Don’t worry, it’s not an off-screen character that was suddenly introduced. Phineas Phreak is the hacking code name for Luther and is first mentioned during 1996’s Mission: Impossible while Ethan is hunting for fellow disavowed IMF agents to break into the CIA Black Vault in Langley.
Flashback montages and the security briefing
A decent chunk of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’s opening hour is interspersed with miscellaneous flashbacks to previous Missions.
We’d be here until Doomsday if we listed all of the clips Christopher McQuarrie opted to deploy but, narratively speaking, three of Ethan’s most iconic moments are brought up in a security briefing. They are, in order, Ethan’s infiltration of the CIA Black Vault in 1996’s Mission: Impossible (with one member of the council asking what a ‘NOC list’ was), the bombing of the Kremlin in 2011’s Ghost Protocol, and his recent infiltration of another security meeting, as shown in 2023’s Dead Reckoning.
William Donloe
Real Langley-heads know all about William ‘Bill’ Donloe. He was the only man present during Ethan Hunt’s iconic zip wire infiltration of the CIA Black Vault, but it was an oversight that cost him his job.
For his failure in the Black Vault, Kittridge promises to ship Donloe off to Alaska. As Final Reckoning shows, he essentially made good on that threat – sending him packing to St. Matthew Island on the same day as Ethan’s break-in to steal the NOC list back in 1996. Cold.
The knife
When Donloe and Ethan meet face to face for the first time, Donloe hands Ethan a knife. It’s unclear if it’s exactly the same one, but it certainly resembles the knife dropped by Jean Reno’s Krieger during the CIA Black Vault infiltration.
Jim Phelps
Shea Whigham’s Briggs clearly had history with Ethan Hunt – we noticed as much in their brief interactions in Dead Reckoning.
What we couldn’t have foreseen, however, was the reveal that Briggs is Jim Phelps Jr., the son of Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps from the first Mission: Impossible movie.
While Briggs/Jim Phelps still believes Ethan had a part to play initially in disgracing his father’s name, he ultimately comes to respect the legendary IMF agent – even if we can’t quite forgive director Christopher McQuarrie for that split-second fakeout where it looks like Phelps is about to shoot the man who took down his father.
May 22, 1996
Hannah Waddingham’s Admiral Neely and Angela Bassett’s President Sloane clearly have a history tied together by an event that went down on May 22, 1996.
While they both lost someone on that fateful day, there’s another reason that date should be circled in your calendar: it’s the US release date for Mission: Impossible.
Mission: Impossible fans had already figured out that the Rabbit’s Foot would be making a return from Mission: Impossible 3, but few could have guessed how it could factor into the series’ endgame.
In Mission: Impossible 3, Ethan thought he was stealing a bioweapon for Davian known as the Rabbit’s Foot. In actuality, it was the origins of the Entity, a piece of “malicious code” that would eventually form the AI superweapon.
While we don’t see the Rabbit’s Foot used (or even stolen) in Mission: Impossible 3, Final Reckoning retcons it into something even deadlier than Ethan – or Davian – could have imagined.
Your next mission, should you choose to accept it, is to check out our ranking of the best Mission: Impossible movies.
