so in honor of me rewatching mission impossible: the final reckoning for the first time since last year (along with the rest of the movies leading up to it), i decided to write up my interpretation of how it should have ended.
this is not a Complete Fix for the movie, which to be clear i mostly like. the goal of this rewrite is me attempting to attach more meaningful arcs to all characters with as few substantive changes as possible, while also keeping all the elements i actually like.
in general, we're doing away with the clip show bits and respecting the audience's intelligence to remember things that happen in previous movies, especially when they mostly don't actually specifically matter to the plot. but i get the impulse to connect back to this whole 29-year movie history, which is why we're going hard on the connection to the first movie specifically.
when ethan goes into the Future-Telling Computer God Sarcophagus to talk to the entity, the scene plays out differently. he's in a mission breifing, in a familiar room. his first team -- jim, claire, jack, hannah, and sarah -- are all there, but they're played by the same actors, so they look older. the entity is trying to placate ethan with what it knows he wants: this is what it would've been like if they hadn't all died. it's an eerie reflection of the first movie, and instead of briefing him on a mission, his dead friends speak with the entity's voice. he's the chosen one, now, and he's going to be the one to make the entity's reality the true reality.
speaking of dead characters though, luther wouldn't die or have Mysterious Disease (i would posit the disease was the dreaded Not Enough Screentime Virus). like, we can just skip all that. the movie's long enough, and while i can see the merit of killing off the one other guy we've had around since the beginning, the movie doesn't, like, DO much with that until the very end. and also weirdly kneecaps the emotion of the scene by making it so that luther was already dying, so we don't have to feel bad about him sacrificing himself i guess? such a weird and bad choice and i fucking hate it.
secondly, ilsa's alive. this is fanfic world i don't have to worry about rebecca ferguson's shooting schedule, okay. we would get the reveal that she's back when she shows up instead of grace in the decompression chamber with ethan. "how did she get there," you may ask. luther told her; she was doing her own secret disarm-all-nukes mission in russia (so she was...nearby-ish), but now her plan and ethan's plan are the same. he face-touches her, asks if he's dead and if he completed the mission. she says "you're not dead, i'm sorry, there's more for you to do" (<- see what i did there. "i'm sorry" can apply to either part of that statement.) OH! and when he first wakes up and sees her, half-delirious, he calls her "julia." she doesn't contest it.
the team (ethan, luther, benji, ilsa, grace, theo, tapeesa, and donloe) meets up and goes over The Plan for the finale. ilsa explains that she had to convince ethan she was dead so that the entity would ALSO be convinced she was dead, and she would therefore not factor into it's plan. i think it's something along the lines of, grace and tapeesa would've died out on the ice if she hadn't showed up -- remember when ethan comes out of the Future-Telling Computer God Sarcophagus and weirdly warns grace to "stay off the ice" even though if she had, he'd've been dead for sure? that's why that happened; the entity didn't factor in ilsa's return.
anyway the plan-as-stated for the finale is the same, but luther and ilsa are now there. kittredge and briggs still fuck things up in the same way and benji still gets shot, but it breaks down like this:
grace, ilsa, and benji go to the server room. ilsa takes over the bit with the makeshift operation on benji, which doesn't have Quite the same impact as paris doing it but hey, the first time ilsa ever met benji she shot at him and now she's saving his life, that's also really good. and in general its characters we've known for longer and have more meaningful connections with than paris. nothing changes for grace though, she's perfect.
luther replaces theo with the bomb. this makes sense because defusing bombs is. a thing he can do. but ALSO we can still keep most of the dialogue i like that was cut because we didn't have luther's death scene. he just says the "what are we gonna do, retire?" stuff to donloe and tapeesa instead.
theo and paris now follow after ethan and gabriel. the plane scene still happens mostly unchanged because it's rad as fuck, but the goal this time is more to down gabriel. both he and ethan make it to the ground safely, but ethan still has the podkova and gabriel still has the pill. paris and theo catch up to them in the jeep while the two of them are doing some badass extended hand to hand combat sequence. ethan manages to connect the pill and the podkova, but is Grievously Wounded by gabriel right as theo and paris show up. gabriel is about to escape, and paris tries to fire a shot at him. as in the movie, she would've hit, but she's out of bullets. theo hands her his gun, so he can actually complete his arc about when doing the "wrong thing" can be morally justified, and she finishes the job and gets the satisfaction of acutally getting to see gabriel die.
ethan's dying, but he does get to hear that he saved Literally Everyone AND his team survived because of him. this is a direct inversion of the inciting incident of the first movie, wherein his whole team dies EXCEPT him, and we've been primed to remember that because of the bit with the entity briefing room now in the beginning of the movie.
he sees jim phelps show up and tell him he did a good job. it's not jim, of course, it's actually briggs, but ethan's hallucinating the father over the son. jim was evil in the end, sure, but he was also ethan's mentor. he sees the rest of his original team too, not the old versions from the entity's reality, but young, like they were when they died, waiting for him just up the hill. he'll be with them soon.
we end basically the same way, with the final team being team leader benji with ilsa, luther, paris, theo, grace, donloe, tapeesa. yay.
