In Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Luther Stickell, before parting ways with his team, told his friend Ethan Hunt that he needed to go underground and work in a place completely offline, somewhere the Entity couldn’t find him. When the menacing AI last attacked the team in Vence, it had hijacked their comms system and started impersonating Benji to mislead Ethan. This was the moment when both Benji and Luther smashed their laptops on the ground so that the Entity couldn’t jeopardize their mission, though it was too late. Luther believed he might have had traces of the AI’s encoding in the hard disk he was on the previous night, which would help him design an algorithm to combat the Entity, and that’s how, some two months later, Luther developed the poison pill.
It seemed like Luther had been working against the clock to develop a counter-weapon against the world’s most lethal artificial intelligence, and in doing so he had compromised his health beyond repair. Now the reason why Ethan’s new nemesis, Gabriel, planted a six-megaton nuclear bomb in the underground tunnels where Luther was hiding was because he knew that Luther was the only person who could create another poison pill. Gabriel’s grand plan was to possess the poison pill and the Entity’s original source code stored on the Russian submarine’s system, Podkova. With these two things in his control, he could enslave the AI and become the god of the new world. And if he had kept Luther alive, then Ethan would have never brought Podkova to him. So, Gabriel’s actions were what most villains generally do: kill the man who invented the most powerful weapon in the world so no one could replicate it.
With Luther dead, Ethan and his team had no other option but to retrieve the Podkova from the sunken Sevastopol and hand it over to Gabriel. However, there was one more device, a 5D optical data drive that Luther had developed, which neither the Entity nor Gabriel were aware of. Ethan and Benji had planned to imprison the AI in their magic bottle so that the AI couldn’t trigger a nuclear launch of the global arsenal and destroy the whole world. Well, it would have done it anyway so it could remake the world in its own image, but in order to protect its existence, the Entity wanted Ethan to allow it an entrance into the Doomsday Vault, a secret bunker that wouldn’t be destroyed in a nuclear fallout. So Ethan’s end plan was to recover the poison pill from Gabriel and plug it into Podkova soon after which point Luther’s destructive algorithm would infect the Entity’s original source code and create a digital toxin, which, when uploaded to cyberspace, would quickly attack the Entity and alter its ability to perceive reality.
Through the poisonous malware, Ethan and Benji had planned to trick the AI into believing that they were actually helping it to enter Doomsday Vault’s central data server, while in reality, it would be uploading itself into Luther’s 5D data drive. The issue here was that as soon as the entity would find itself safe inside the data drive, it would initiate a nuclear launch in the blink of an eye. So Grace had to pull out the data drive in 100 milliseconds and disconnect the AI from cyberspace. Meanwhile, Luther’s poison pill would erase all traces of the Entity’s code from the global servers so that it was no longer in control of the world’s nuclear command centers and therefore couldn’t launch an attack. So, in The Final Reckoning’s ending, Ethan and his team didn’t actually destroy the AI completely; instead, they took it as a prisoner, while it would be locked till eternity.
I know many of you might be wondering, What if that 5D data drive fell into the wrong hands? Who would re-upload the Entity into an online server?” Well, there was a silver lining if you see it. In The Final Reckoning’s ending, Ethan handed over the damaged Podkova with Luther’s poison pill attached to it. And if we entertain the possibility that Luther’s self-destructive mechanism didn’t do any damage to his algorithm or the malware he had created, then it could be possible that the IMF and other secret agencies could develop an antidote of their own in case the Entity strikes back in the near future.
