It seemed like the moment Ethan Hunt went into that capsule device Gabriel used to communicate with the Entity and finally had a verbal conversation with the sinister AI, he quickly realized that he was no match for the godlike entity, mostly because it already knew Ethan’s moves and could process infinite possibilities in the blink of an eye. This means Ethan has to be spontaneous and think out of the box if he wants to stop the Entity. For the longest period of time, Ethan had been hell-bent on killing the AI, to erase it from existence by corrupting its original source code. [Spoiler Alert] But suddenly, in The Final Reckoning’s ending, Ethan and his close friend, Benji, unveiled a five-dimensional optical data storage developed by none other than Luther Stickell. Now hear me out. The Entity knew about the Poison Pill, which it knew Ethan and his team would use against it, but the AI didn’t have any idea about this 5D optical drive because, as William Donloe said, it was a concept that only existed on paper until Luther developed it. The drive was Ethan’s trump card, the five-dimensional bottle in which he ultimately captured the most powerful AI in the world. But how?
The thing is, just like every boring thing in the world, even Ethan Hunt started repeating himself over and over again. In every mission, he’s going to end up going rogue, going against the orders of his seniors because he believes he knows better. Well, Ethan did save the world quite a few times, but it always came with a cost. And you see, one doesn’t need the most powerful processors in the world to understand this pattern. So the challenge for Ethan was to outdo himself. To do something he’s never done before. For the first time, he didn’t rogue; he tricked the AI into believing that he was following its chain of commands. The Entity wanted Ethan to help it gain an entrance into the isolated servers inside the Doomsday Vault so the Entity could survive the impending nuclear armageddon. The servers in this secure bunker were cut off from the rest of the world’s networks, which was why the Entity needed a minion to do this task for it, especially when its former henchman, Gabriel, had turned into an outcast because he tried to betray his master.
The Entity’s end goal was to take control of the arsenals of the global nuclear powers and trigger those missiles all at once to wipe humanity off the face of the world. I think after such a devastating nuclear fallout, only a chosen few would survive the aftermath, who I believe might be a part of the Entity’s cult, “the children of the atom.” And while the Entity would train itself on all the world’s knowledge stored in the doomsday vault, its blind followers would sooner or later find a way to extract it from the secure bunker so that the Entity could remake the world in its own image and be god of the new world order. Well, that pretty much seemed like the Entity’s end game, but correct me in the comments if I am wrong.
However, before the Entity could achieve any of that, Gabriel tried to blow up the vault, thereby destroying the AI’s safe haven and leaving it no choice but to put a halt to its sinister plan of global destruction. Gabriel wanted to get a hold of Sevastopol’s hard drive, Podkova, which stored the Entity’s source code, and with Luther’s Poison Pill already in his possession, it would have given Gabriel an upper hand, forcing the Entity to be his slave for the rest of his life. I think the Entity knew Gabriel would pull such a stunt, but it had too much trust in the abilities of Ethan and his team, which was why it was relatively unconcerned. You see, none of AI’s cult members were present near the doomsday vault, nor did they try to stop Gabriel from blowing up the secure bunker. Maybe the Entity, in one of the possible outcomes, had foreseen that Gabriel would plug the Poison Pill into the Podkova drive, which was the reason why it recruited Ethan to allow it an entrance into the vault’s servers but what the Entity hadn’t anticipated was that Benji and Grace would be using an experimental 5D drive to bottle up the genie. However, to successfully accomplish the mission, they had to remove the drive in 100 milliseconds, or the Entity would have escaped the trap that they had laid out for it. Well, in the end, Grace did pull off the “impossible mission.” It was all about the right timing, because that’s what sets apart a good pickpocket from a great one, and Grace was indeed the best of the lot.
So, as per The Final Reckoning’s ending, the Entity isn’t entirely gone. It’s still there, very much living inside that 5D optical drive, which means Ethan and his friends had only postponed the danger and not completely eliminated it from the roots. If anyone accidentally or intentionally connected the drive to any electronic device, then it would only unleash the threat of the Entity again, and we are back to square one, and Luther died for nothing. I am still not sure why Ethan didn’t just take a hammer and crush that disk to pieces and get done with it. Maybe he’s setting that task aside for the next film in the franchise. Obviously, the makers said that this was going to be the last Mission Impossible film, but then why have such an ambiguous ending? Or maybe Ethan really didn’t learn anything from his past mistakes, and he’s just going to repeat himself all over again.
