19 Years Later, Mission: Impossible Finally Reveals the Franchise’s Biggest Mystery

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning concludes Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) journey by revisiting the franchise’s previous installments and analyzing how every spy adventure is connected. That means dissecting what makes Ethan tick and how his burning desire to protect the people close to him is both his biggest weapon and a flaw enemies constantly exploit. In addition, Mission: Impossible is filled to the brim with recurring or returning characters, who sometimes connect to Ethan in surprising ways. This exploration of its protagonist’s past leads to some mindblowing reveals, as Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning explains how some events of the first movies unfold into the desperate battle against the malignant AI known as The Entity. For instance, The Final Reckoning finally explains the Rabbit’s Foot and the importance of the mysterious weapon at the center of 2006’s Mission: Impossible 3.

Warning: Spoilers below for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

In Mission: Impossible 3, Ethan Hunt is drawn back into the field to rescue his former protégé, Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), who has been captured by the ruthless arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Davian is seeking a mysterious object known as the Rabbit’s Foot, and Lindsey manages to warn Ethan about it before her death. Willing to avenge Lindsey and stop Davian, Ethan assembles his team to intercept Davian during a deal in Vatican City and later to steal the Rabbit’s Foot from a secure facility in Shanghai. Davian escalates the conflict by kidnapping Ethan’s wife, Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan), forcing Ethan to deliver the Rabbit’s Foot to him in exchange for her life. The IMF, particularly Director Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne), also wants the Rabbit’s Foot, believing it to be a weapon of immense destructive potential that Davian intends to sell to a Middle Eastern terrorist group for a catastrophic sum.

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The Rabbit’s Foot’s exact nature and function are deliberately kept vague throughout Mission: Impossible 3, heightening its menace. Characters within the film refer to it with grave fear, with Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) mentioning it’s sometimes called the “Anti-God,” a name that hints at its apocalyptic capabilities. While its specific destructive power is never explicitly shown, the film heavily implies it could cause devastation on a massive scale, justifying the extreme measures taken by all parties to acquire or contain it. By the end of Mission: Impossible 3, audiences only know it’s a technologically advanced item important enough for Ethan to risk everything, but its true purpose or how it operates remains largely a mystery, serving as a classic MacGuffin that drives the plot forward. Now, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning returns to one of Ethan’s early adventures, explaining what the Rabbit’s Foot truly is.

How Does Mission: Impossible 3‘s Rabbit’s Foot Connect with The Final Reckoning‘s Entity?

In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, we learn that the Entity was first developed under the supervision of U.S. Director of National Intelligence Denlinger (Cary Elwes). He aimed to create the ultimate invisible weapon to take down any technology he perceived as a threat to the U.S. military sovereignty. Due to its state-of-the-art stealth technology, the Russian submarine Sebastol becomes one of the Entity’s targets in 2012. So, Delinger installs an instance of the Entity aboard the submarine and orders it to sabotage its cloaking. However, the Entity becomes self-aware and uses the submarine’s missiles to destroy itself and sink the hardware containing its source code, the Entity’s only weakness. After that, the Entity escapes into cyberspace, accumulating knowledge and plotting for world domination.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning reveals the origins of the Entity. As it turns out, its source code was initially developed in a laboratory in China, under the codename “Rabbit’s Foot.” That means the weapon Ethan steals in Mission: Impossible 3 is the Entity, at least a proto-version of it. Since Ethan secures the Rabbit’s Foot at the end of Mission: Impossible 3, the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) becomes its jailor in 2006. That means in the six years between Mission: Impossible 3 and the sinking of the Sebastol, the U.S. government took control of the Rabbit’s Foot through the IMF and eventually turned it into the Entity. That makes Ethan indirectly responsible for the events of Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, as he enabled the U.S. government’s dangerous employment of an advanced AI in their defense strategies.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is currently available in theaters.

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