All the biggest callbacks to previous ‘Mission: Impossible’ films in ‘The Final Reckoning’

This article contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is quite possibly Tom Cruise‘s last hurrah as Ethan Hunt.

To really drive home that point — “our lives are the sum of our choices,” after all — the film features several callbacks, cameos, and flashbacks to the previous seven movies in the franchise. Below, Entertainment Weekly breaks down the most important references to past films and how they factor into the new one (now playing in theaters).

The Rabbit’s Foot (Mission: Impossible III)

The mysterious Rabbit’s Foot is first introduced in the third movie as an ominous, all-powerful biological weapon, but its exact purpose or how it works is never explained. Dastardly arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) sought the Rabbit’s Foot — also referred to as the Anti-God — in the hopes of selling it to terrorist groups, but of course, Ethan and his IMF team stopped him in the nick of time.

In The Final Reckoning, though, the Rabbit’s Foot is resurrected and finally given some more explanation. Ethan learns through the course of the film that it’s actually an amalgam of malicious code from which the Entity — the rogue AI, world-ending cyberweapon from Dead Reckoning — has been derived. The implication being that, because of his actions in Mission: Impossible III, Ethan unknowingly contributed to the creation of the Entity, and therefore, he simply must be the one to stop it once and for all (naturally).

CIA Analyst William Donloe (Mission: Impossible)

One of the most iconic sequences in the Mission: Impossible franchise comes in the first film when Ethan breaks into a CIA vault to steal the NOC (non-official cover) list of every known field operative. To do so, he must get past the keeper of the vault — poor CIA analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). Ethan ensures Donloe leaves his post by spiking his coffee with laxatives (rude!), then rappels down from the ceiling to snatch the list. On the way out, he accidentally leaves a souvenir: a knife, which lands blade-first on Donloe’s desk.

In Final Reckoning, we discover that Donloe kept the knife but harbors no hard feelings for Ethan. The former analyst ends up becoming a critical new addition to the gang in their mission to stop the Entity from destroying the world.

The IMF team, which now consists of Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Benji (Simon Pegg) first encounter Donloe and his wife, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), at their home on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, where he’s been living for the last 30 years as an unofficial punishment for the Langley incident.

Thanks to his work with sonar monitoring, Donloe is the only person who knows the final resting place of the sunken submarine that contains the Entity’s source code. Donloe and Tapeesa even tag along for the final part of the mission, set in a South African doomsday vault, where the team tries to simultaneously stop a nuclear bomb from going off while also attempting to trick and trap the Entity into a massive hard drive that will act as its prison.

Jim Phelps (Mission: Impossible)

In the very first impossible mission, Jim Phelps, played by Jon Voight, is initially presented as Ethan’s mentor who dies on a covert mission with his protégé. Later, it’s revealed that Phelps didn’t die at all, and his fake death was a setup to frame Ethan. Phelps is eventually revealed to be the IMF mole and dies while trying to flee (for good, this time).

Apparently, that isn’t the end of Phelps’ story. We’re first introduced to Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) and his partner Degas — two U.S. Intelligence agents tasked with tracking down Ethan and the IMF — in Dead Reckoning. In Final Reckoning, Ethan figures out that Briggs was, in fact, born Jim Phelps Jr.

Ethan assumes that Phelps has been holding a grudge against him for supposedly “framing” his father 30 years ago. Phelps denies this and insists his beef with Ethan is entirely his own. Still, by the end of the film, the two finally reconcile their differences with a handshake, probably largely thanks to that whole bit about Ethan successfully saving the world… again.

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Sundry flashbacks

The bombing of the Kremlin in Ghost Protocol is also given a bit of a retconning makeover in Final Reckoning, with the latter film claiming that the bombing was meant to kill Ethan (and was therefore, like the Entity, essentially his fault). Originally, Ghost Protocol insinuates that the bombing was intended to simply frame the IMF team or the U.S. government (or both).

Other tie-ins to past films include several quick flashbacks of various IMF team members or allies of yesteryear (RIP Ilsa Faust), as well as shots of the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and Ethan’s ex-wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan).