Mission: Impossible 7: Ending explained

By all accounts, Dead Reckoning is likely Tom Cruise's last outing as Ethan Hunt. (Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Contains spoliers

The latest Mission Impossible movie released on Wednesday, July 12. By all estimates, the movie will mark Tom Cruise’s last outing as spy Ethan Hunt. The Mission: Impossible finale has been split into two parts, making the title quite a mouthful to say (or indeed write). While the official title of the movie is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the movie is simply being referred to as Mission Impossible 7 or MI7, in tune with the rest of the series.

When will Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two release?

Mission Impossible isn’t the only movie franchise to split the finale into two parts. Avengers did it with Infinity War and Endgame, the Spider-verse series will also conclude with Across the Spider-Verse and Beyond the Spider-Verse.

But should you think about it, the very first movie franchise to experiment with a two-film finale was Harry Potter. As some of us of a certain vintage will remember, the final book of Harry Potter was too large to fit into a two-and-a-half-hour movie. As a result, we got Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2.

Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two is scheduled to release about a year from now, on June 28, 2024.

What is the Entity in Mission Impossible 7?

While it would appear that Esai Morales plays the villain in Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, it become clear that his character is merely a pawn and an employee of sorts to an invisible antagonist.

Morales’ boss, so to say, is an AI program called the Entity. While we don’t see the Entity itself (how can we, it being a string of ones and zeroes), we are told that it was designed by the Americans to sabotage a Russian submarine with a state-of-the-art stealth technology.

Even though the Americans were able to embed it in the sub’s mainframe and gave it a singular purpose of sabotaging its stealth capabilities, Entity becomes sentient, rewrites its own objective, and proceeds to destroy the boat. Worse, it starts infiltrating the files of the world's governments.

And so, the Entity becomes an omniscient being that’s nowhere to be seen but present everywhere. One would say, almost godlike. No surprise (if somewhat eye-roll-inducing) the being’s loyal employee should be called Gabriel.

Mission: Impossible 7’s ending explained

Even as the Entity goes about creating chaos and wreaking havoc all over the world, we are told that there is a way to stop it, or at least control it.

This is where Ethan Hunt and his team of merry men come into the picture. The key to stopping this sentient being from taking over the world is, as it turns out, a key! Split into two parts, said key can rein in the sentient powers of our invisible god or destroy it.

Governments all over the world are now in a race to find the two parts of the key so they can control this all-powerful AI and gain supremacy. Ethan Hunt, of course, believes no one person or country should hold so much power. So, defying his orders, Hunt goes rogue (yet again), decides to find the two parts of the key, and shut down the Entity.

To be able to do this, he must fight Gabriel atop The Orient Express, steal the key from him, and most importantly, not kill him since he’s the only one who knows what the key is capable of. To make matters worse for Hunt, we are told that Gabriel and he have a history, one involving a woman’s death nearly 30 years ago, setting Hunt down the path he walks today.

At the end of the movie, we see Ethan Hunt parachuting his way out of The Orient Express down to a meadow where Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn awaits his arrival. Mission Impossible 7 ends on a cliff-hanger as Hunt and Benji drive away from the scene as a submerged submarine housing a god casts a long shadow.