The Impossible Missions Force, a secret U.S. agency, takes on missions the government will deny if they fail, first on television under Dan Briggs and Jim Phelps, then in the films under Ethan Hunt. Over eight films, Ethan is framed by Phelps, loses and regains his wife Julia, sees the IMF disavowed and shut down, and fights the anarchist Solomon Lane and finally the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence. The Final Reckoning ends with the Entity trapped on a drive in Ethan's hands and the team going separate ways.
- Recapped
- 10
- Watch time saved
- 177 hours
- Latest
- 2025
No. 01 · 1966 · Series · optional
Mission: Impossible recap
The original series ran for seven seasons, from 1966 to 1973. Each episode begins with the leader of the Impossible Missions Force finding a recorded message describing a mission, usually against a foreign dictator, a crime boss or an enemy spy, and ending with the line that the Secretary will disavow any knowledge if the team is caught; the tape then destroys itself. The leader picks a team from a set of files and plans an elaborate con using disguises, gadgets and staged events to trick the target into ruin. In season 1, Dan Briggs leads the team; from season 2, Jim Phelps takes over. The regular team includes Cinnamon Carter, a model and actress; Rollin Hand, a master of disguise; Barney Collier, an electronics expert; and Willy Armitage, the strongman. Later seasons bring in Paris, a new master of disguise, and other agents as earlier cast members leave, and the show moves from foreign plots toward stories about organised crime in the United States.
How Mission: Impossible ends
The series has no closing story: each episode is a self-contained mission that ends with the team slipping away as the con falls into place, and the show simply ended after its seventh season in 1973. Jim Phelps returns as the team's leader in the 1988 revival.
No. 02 · 1988 · Series · optional
Mission: Impossible recap
The revival is set fifteen years after the original. When Tom Copperfield, the IMF leader Jim Phelps trained, is murdered, Phelps comes out of retirement to find the killer and stays on to lead a new team: Nicholas Black, an actor and master of disguise; Max Harte, the strongman; Casey Randall, a fashion designer; and Grant Collier, an electronics expert and the son of Barney Collier from the original series. The missions follow the old format, with recorded instructions, a team chosen from files and an elaborate con, now with 1980s technology. Casey is killed on a mission in the first season and replaced by Shannon Reed, a former Secret Service agent. Barney Collier and Lisa Casey from the original team return as guests. The show was filmed in Australia.
How Mission: Impossible ends
The series ends without a closing story, with each episode a self-contained mission. ABC cancelled it after two seasons, and the last episode aired in February 1990. The 1996 film brings back Jim Phelps as Ethan Hunt's boss and turns him into a traitor.
No. 03 · 1996 · Film
Mission: Impossible recap
Ethan Hunt's IMF team, led by Jim Phelps, tries to stop the theft of a list of undercover agents in Prague. The mission goes wrong: Phelps is shot, and the rest of the team is killed, except Ethan and Phelps's wife Claire. Ethan's boss, Eugene Kittridge, tells him the operation was a trap to catch a mole, and Ethan is the suspect. Ethan escapes by blowing up a restaurant aquarium and contacts the arms dealer Max, who was buying the list, offering her the real one. He recruits two disavowed agents, the hacker Luther Stickell and the pilot Franz Krieger, and with Claire breaks into CIA headquarters at Langley to steal the full list, hanging on wires above a pressure-sensitive floor. Then Phelps appears, alive, claiming Kittridge is the mole, and Ethan realises Phelps is the traitor.
How Mission: Impossible ends
On the high-speed train to Paris, Ethan exposes Phelps to Kittridge with a camera in his glasses, and Phelps shoots Claire, who was in on it. Phelps and Krieger escape into the Channel Tunnel in a helicopter tethered to the train, and Ethan blows it up with explosive gum, killing both. Max is arrested, Luther is reinstated, and Ethan quits, only to be offered a new mission on the flight home.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 04 · 2000 · Film
Mission: Impossible 2 recap
Sean Ambrose, a rogue IMF agent, uses a mask of Ethan Hunt to steal Chimera, a deadly engineered virus, killing its creator, Dr. Nekhorvich, who was carrying the only cure, Bellerophon. IMF chief Swanbeck sends Ethan to recruit Nyah Nordoff-Hall, a professional thief and Ambrose's former girlfriend, to spy on him. Ethan and Nyah fall for each other, but she goes back to Ambrose in Sydney. Ambrose plans to release Chimera and profit from the cure through stock options in the pharmaceutical company Biocyte, which made both. Ethan breaks into Biocyte to destroy the virus, but Ambrose catches Nyah, and she injects herself with the last sample of Chimera to keep it from him. She has 20 hours before she dies.
How Mission: Impossible 2 ends
Ethan gets the Bellerophon cure, fights his way through Ambrose's men on a motorcycle chase, and kills Ambrose in a fistfight on the beach. Luther gets the cure to Nyah in time, her criminal record is cleared, and she and Ethan meet again in a Sydney park.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 05 · 2006 · Film
Mission: Impossible III recap
Ethan Hunt has left field work to train agents and is engaged to Julia, a nurse who thinks he works for the transport department. He is called back to rescue his former trainee Lindsey Farris from the arms dealer Owen Davian in Berlin, but she dies from an explosive planted in her head. Ethan marries Julia, then captures Davian at a party in the Vatican. Davian threatens to kill Julia, and his men break him free from IMF custody on a bridge. Davian kidnaps Julia and demands the Rabbit's Foot, a mysterious item, giving Ethan 48 hours. Ethan steals it from a building in Shanghai. Davian plants a charge in Ethan's head too. Ethan learns that a senior IMF official is working with Davian and suspects his boss, John Brassel.
How Mission: Impossible III ends
In Shanghai, Ethan kills Davian, then finds Julia tied up, and with the charge in his head about to go off, shocks himself with live wires to disable it and has Julia revive him. The traitor is Ethan's superior Musgrave, and Julia shoots him. Back home, Brassel congratulates Ethan, who leaves on his honeymoon.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 06 · 2011 · Film
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol recap
Benji Dunn and Jane Carter break Ethan Hunt out of a Moscow prison to stop Kurt Hendricks, a nuclear strategist codenamed Cobalt who wants to start a nuclear war. During their mission in the Kremlin, Hendricks bombs the building and the IMF is blamed. The president invokes Ghost Protocol, disavowing the whole IMF, and the IMF Secretary is shot dead, leaving Ethan with the analyst William Brandt. The four go to Dubai, where Ethan climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa so the team can trade fake codes to the assassin Sabine Moreau, but Hendricks gets away with the launch codes. Brandt admits he is a field agent who stepped back after failing to protect Julia, Ethan's wife, in Croatia, where she was reported killed. The trail leads to Mumbai, where Hendricks plans to use a Russian satellite to launch a missile at San Francisco.
How Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol ends
Ethan fights Hendricks in an automated car park and stops the missile just before impact, as Hendricks jumps to his death with the launch device. Ethan tells Brandt that Julia's death was faked to protect her, and that Brandt was never to blame. Ethan sees Julia from a distance in Seattle, then gets a new mission about the Syndicate.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 07 · 2015 · Film
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation recap
Ethan Hunt is captured in London by the Syndicate, a network of rogue agents thought to be a myth, and sees its leader, Solomon Lane. Ilsa Faust, a British agent undercover in the Syndicate, helps him escape. CIA director Alan Hunley convinces the Senate to shut down the IMF and absorb it into the CIA, and Ethan becomes a fugitive. Ethan pulls Benji to Vienna, where they stop an assassination of the Austrian chancellor at the opera. Ilsa, Ethan and Benji steal a ledger from an underwater facility in Morocco; it holds the Syndicate's funding. Ilsa takes it to her British boss, Atlee, who erases it, and Benji is captured by Lane. Lane wants the ledger's accounts and forces Ethan to decrypt it. Ethan works out that the Syndicate was created by British intelligence and gone rogue, and that only the prime minister can unlock the funds.
How Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation ends
With Brandt and Luther, Ethan exposes Atlee, who is covering up his own role, and lures Lane by claiming to have memorised the ledger. Lane chases him into a trap and is caught in a bulletproof glass cell. Hunley presents the operation to the Senate as a sanctioned IMF mission, and the IMF is restored.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 08 · 2018 · Film
Mission: Impossible - Fallout recap
Two years after Lane's capture, the Apostles, his followers, plan to set off three plutonium cores. In Berlin, Ethan Hunt chooses to save Luther and loses the plutonium. CIA director Erica Sloane sends her agent August Walker with Ethan to Paris to buy the plutonium from the arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, the White Widow, who wants Lane broken out of custody in exchange. Ethan, Benji and Luther free Lane in a violent convoy hold-up through Paris, while Ilsa wants Lane dead to be free of MI6. Walker reveals himself as John Lark, the Apostles' mastermind, and frames Ethan. In Kashmir, Lane and Walker plan to detonate the bombs at a medical camp where Ethan's former wife, Julia, now works with her new husband.
How Mission: Impossible - Fallout ends
Ethan chases Walker in a helicopter battle through the mountains and kills him in a fight on a cliff edge, getting the detonator, while Benji, Ilsa, Luther and Julia defuse both bombs. Lane is taken into custody. Julia tells Ethan she is happy, and he heals with the team around him.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 09 · 2023 · Film
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One recap
A Russian submarine is sunk by its own torpedo, turned by the Entity, an artificial intelligence that has become sentient and gone rogue. Governments race to control it through a cross-shaped key, split into two halves, that opens its source code. Ethan Hunt's mission is to get the key, but he decides to destroy the Entity instead. He finds Ilsa Faust in the Arabian desert with one half. At Abu Dhabi airport, Grace, a professional thief, steals that half, and the Entity, which can predict Ethan's moves, sends Gabriel, a man from Ethan's past who killed a woman Ethan loved. In Rome, Ethan and Grace are chased through the streets. In Venice, Gabriel kills Ilsa. Ethan follows the key to the Orient Express, where the arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis is to sell it, and Grace takes Alanna's place in the deal.
How Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One ends
Ethan rides a motorcycle off a cliff and parachutes onto the train, where Gabriel has killed the intelligence chief Denlinger and stabbed Paris. Gabriel takes the key, fights Ethan on the roof, escapes and blows up a bridge ahead. Ethan and Grace climb through the falling carriages, and Paris, wounded, tells them the key is linked to a sunken Russian submarine, the Sevastopol. Ethan has pickpocketed the key from Gabriel during the fight, and Grace tells Kittridge she wants to join the IMF. Part two continues directly.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
No. 10 · 2025 · Film
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning recap
Two months later, the Entity is taking over the world's nuclear weapons with help from cultists. President Erika Sloane orders Ethan to hand over the key, and he refuses. Luther has built the Poison Pill, malware to trap the Entity, and Ethan frees Paris and recruits Theo Degas. The Entity shows Ethan visions of nuclear destruction and demands access to a digital bunker in South Africa. Gabriel steals the Poison Pill and traps Luther with a bomb, and Luther gives his life to contain the blast. Ethan convinces Sloane to let him find the Sevastopol, a sunken Russian submarine holding the Podkova, a module that could control the Entity. William Donloe, the analyst Ethan once got exiled after the Langley break-in, sends the wreck's coordinates. Ethan dives to the wreck, takes the Podkova and nearly dies of decompression sickness before Grace revives him. At the South African bunker, Gabriel ambushes the team and escapes with the Poison Pill.
How Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning ends
Ethan chases Gabriel in a biplane battle, takes back the Poison Pill, and Gabriel dies in a fall from the plane. Ethan parachutes away and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair, and Grace traps the Entity just before nuclear missiles launch. Ethan hears Luther's farewell message and hands the destroyed Podkova to Kittridge. In Trafalgar Square, Grace gives Ethan the drive holding the Entity, and the team parts ways.
Post-credits scenes
No. There is no post-credits scene.
Common questions
What is the Mission: Impossible story so far?
The Impossible Missions Force, a secret U.S. agency, takes on missions the government will deny if they fail, first on television under Dan Briggs and Jim Phelps, then in the films under Ethan Hunt. Over eight films, Ethan is framed by Phelps, loses and regains his wife Julia, sees the IMF disavowed and shut down, and fights the anarchist Solomon Lane and finally the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence. The Final Reckoning ends with the Entity trapped on a drive in Ethan's hands and the team going separate ways.
Where did Mission: Impossible leave off?
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) is the latest. Ethan chases Gabriel in a biplane battle, takes back the Poison Pill, and Gabriel dies in a fall from the plane. Ethan parachutes away and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair, and Grace traps the Entity just before nuclear missiles launch. Ethan hears Luther's farewell message and hands the destroyed Podkova to Kittridge. In Trafalgar Square, Grace gives Ethan the drive holding the Entity, and the team parts ways.
Keep reading
Watch order guideHow to watch the Mission: Impossible movies in order10 titles · 177 hours
Skip guideWhat can you skip in Game of Thrones?2 titles you can skip
RecapChainsaw Man recap: the story so far2 titles recapped
Watch order guideHow to watch the One Piece movies in order8 titles · 498 hours
Skip guideWhich Star Wars movies can you skip?5 titles you can skip
Watch order guideHow to watch the Star Trek movies in order26 titles · 735 hours