Everything to remember about ‘Mission: Impossible’ before ‘Final Reckoning’

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to catch all the callbacks and Easter eggs in this weekend’s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.

But with nearly a thousand hours of missions across seven epic films, remembering all those characters and plotlines might seem impossible. Don’t worry, though, Entertainment Weekly has your back. Even Ethan Hunt needs a little help sometimes.

Set two months after the events of its predecessor, 2023’s Dead Reckoning, the latest (and possibly last) film in the franchise sees Tom Cruise’s Hunt and the rest of the IMF team in a globe-trotting race against time to find and destroy the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence hellbent on destruction.

In addition to serving as a direct sequel, Final Reckoning is filled with tie-ins to many of the previous films in the franchise, creating new throughlines and connections, as well as bringing back some long-forgotten characters.

Below, EW rounds up the key moments to remember from the heartpounding series.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Ah, the mission that started it all. When young IMF agent Ethan Hunt and his mentor, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), embark on a covert mission that goes very wrong, Jim is seemingly killed, and Ethan is framed as the only murder suspect.

On the run, Ethan uses the help of brilliant hacker Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and pilot Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) to help him sneak into the CIA to retrieve the confidential file that will prove his innocence.

Later, we learn that not only is Jim alive, but he is also the traitor. Ethan eventually gets the better of him in the film’s climactic battle, but Phelps still might be a character worth remembering.

The film also introduces us to an illegal arms dealer named Max (Vanessa Redgrave), whose daughter, the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), plays a role in Fallout; Henry Czerny’s IMF director Eugene Kittridge, a recurring character in the series; and Rolf Saxon as William Donloe, a CIA analyst at Langley, whom Ethan narrowly evades in the iconic vault sequence. Look for Saxon to reprise his role for the first time in Final Reckoning.

Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

The one where Ethan stops a pandemic. This time around, he leads his IMF team — Luther and helicopter pilot Billy Baird (John Polson) — on a mission to obtain a deadly German virus before a group of terrorists can get their hands on it. To save the world, he must battle the villainous rogue IMF agent, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), and his cronies, who have already managed to steal the cure.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

This film sees Ethan learn the hard way that a normal life is just not in the cards for him. At the beginning of the movie, he’s engaged to Julia (Michelle Monaghan) and has retired from active duty, spending his days training new IMF recruits. Naturally, this doesn’t last long, and he gets called in to help nab the elusive arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) — the most dastardly villain he’s faced yet.

Davian is after the Rabbit’s Foot. The MacGuffin of all MacGuffins, we’re told the Rabbit’s Foot is some sort of powerful, potentially destructive force, but its exact nature is never explained in the film. Of course, poor Julia gets caught up in the mess and nearly loses her life. By film’s end, they’ve stopped Davian together, and embark on their honeymoon. The film also finally introduces fan-favorite IMF team member Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), as well as the concept of detonators going off inside people’s brains. Ouch.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011)

When Ethan and the entirety of the IMF are blamed for bombing the Kremlin, the U.S. government initiates the titular “ghost protocol,” essentially disavowing the IMF and forcing them off the grid. Ethan must work to clear their names with his fellow outcasts, some of whom may or may not be trustworthy.

This movie also features the beginning of the end for Monaghan’s Julia, who is barely in the film, after Ethan decides he has no choice but to fake her death to keep her safe. Ghost Protocol also memorably features Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa, and introduces Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt, the IMF Secretary’s aide and an intelligence analyst, who also appears in Rogue Nation.

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015)

The IMF has been disbanded (for now), and Ethan is public enemy No. 1 for the CIA and its director, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). Meanwhile, the Syndicate, a consortium of rogue operatives responsible for terror attacks around the globe, is afoot, leading Ethan and the gang to team up with the enigmatic Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a disgraced MI6 agent undercover in the Syndicate. They work together to take down the group, and in the process, restore the IMF’s good name with the help of Hunley, who becomes the new IMF Secretary.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)

True to its name, Fallout involves arms dealer John Lark and his terrorist group, the Apostles, who plan to use three plutonium cores to launch a simultaneous nuclear attack on three cities around the world. Ethan and the IMF (and Ilsa, of course) join together with CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill) to prevent worldwide disaster, though it’s later revealed that Walker is, in fact, Lark.

It is also revealed that, in the years since Rogue Nation, Ethan and Julia divorced, and she remarried, but the two remain on good terms. This is the last we see of her character in the franchise to date.

This Mission marks the first appearance of Angela Bassett’s Erika Sloane, the deputy director of the CIA (who is upgraded to POTUS in Final Reckoning), as well as arms broker and con artist Alanna Mitsopolis, codename: The White Widow. (This is also the movie that famously features that brutal bathroom battle with Cavill and Cruise.)

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (2023)

After defeating his share of terrorists, assassins, arms dealers, and traitorous spies, Ethan is now forced to fight a rogue AI known as the Entity, as well as the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales), a killer with vague ties to Ethan’s past, looking to control the cyberweapon.

A two-part cruciform key is needed to either control or destroy the Entity, and various groups (including the White Widow) are after it. As is Ethan and his team, who want to stop the AI from falling into the wrong hands. Along the way, they encounter Paris (Pom Klementieff), an assassin working with Gabriel, who ultimately betrays her. We also meet Grace (Hayley Atwell), a thief initially hired by the White Widow, who teams up with the IMF in the end.

Plot-wise, the most shocking part of the film is the death of Ilsa, who is killed on a bridge in Venice by Gabriel. A devastated Ethan arrives too late to help her, but naturally vows to avenge her death. The film’s climactic moments involve a lengthy stunt sequence on a train, where, after a perilous fight with Gabriel, Ethan and the team finally get both halves of the key.

Armed with the key and the location of the Entity’s core (it rests at the bottom of the sea in the wreckage of a Russian submarine), Ethan and the gang have everything they need to force a final showdown with the Entity in Final Reckoning.

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The film also introduces Shea Whigham as Jasper Briggs and Greg Tarzan Davis as his partner Degas, two U.S. Intelligence agents tasked with tracking down Ethan and the IMF. In addition to Cruise and Morales, Atwell, Rhames, Pegg, Klementieff, Bassett, Whigham, Davis, Czerny, and more all reprise their roles in the upcoming sequel.