Christopher L. Bennett's Blog

When I upgraded my site to a new theme last month, I lost the PayPal donation button from the sidebar, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Today I figured out how to generate the code for such a button and embed it in the sidebar, but for some reason, the theme template refuses to display it.

Luckily, PayPal gives the option of including a link instead of a button graphic, so I’ve added it to my list of site links in the sidebar. Here it is again:

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/5G7YPAN2UCCHQ

I hope it works. Feel free to test it out. Assuming it works, I’m thinking it’s been way too long since my last autographed book sale, so I’ll probably organize one soon. I should’ve done one before Christmas, but I was too occupied with my writing.

Here’s an excellent, informed column on the state of generative “AI” (i.e. large language models and large multimodal models) by novelist John Scalzi, discussing creators’ relationship with it and its likely future. I think he’s very much on the ball here, and I was thinking I should post here to express my own position on “AI,” but it would boil down to pretty much “what he said” (in short, that I want nothing to do with the damn thing and all my writing comes exclusively out of my own unassisted brain), so it’s better just to post a link to his column, which is more detailed, more informed, and probably more polite that anything I could say about the subject.

10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition

Okay, I figured out this morning that there was, in fact, a simple way to convert the table format of my annotation pages into a form that’s more legible in the new site theme. I just had to open each page’s edit window, copy the table into a blank word processor document, use “Convert table to text” with paragraph breaks selected as the divider, copy and paste the text back into the edit window, make whatever minor tweaks were necessary (including reloading inline images that didn’t come through right), and save. So I’ve spent the morning doing that, and I think I’ve managed to convert all the pages.

In a few cases, where I had tables nested within table cells (which didn’t translate well at all), I just reopened my original HTML files for those pages (from when I created them for my old website using an HTML editor I no longer have) and copied and pasted the tables in between paragraphs. So there are still a few small tables here and there, reasonably legible, though they could be better if this template allowed more options than “all columns equal width” or “the left column squished down to one character wide.”

I’m actually kind of glad the new template forced me to do this. I’ve thought for a while now that the old table format was less than ideal, and I’ve stopped using it in recent years, though for a while I was keeping it up on the new site for the sake of consistency. But it feels better to have all my annotation pages in a consistent format (more or less) without all the excess formatting that doesn’t translate well to different display formats. (It never occurred to me to check whether the tables were even legible on a phone screen.)

Incidentally, it finally struck me this morning why the new site theme looks familiar. It uses the same font as Patreon, and in roughly the same size. So now both my free site and my Patreon site have a similar look, which I guess is a good thing.

In the “please pardon our dust” department, I’ve discovered that a number of my older annotations pages, which were in a table format carried over when I copied them from my old pre-WordPress website, do not translate well to my new site format, because the headings’ table boxes are only one character wide and very hard to read. Unless I can figure out an easy fix, it looks like I’ll have to manually reformat every annotations page one by one, which could take a while.

I’ll get on that as soon as I can, but I just started a new revision of Arachne’s Legacy, which I’ve realized could use a bit more work before I try shopping it to new publishers. Since I diverged heavily from my outline, and since that outline was written for my own use instead of aimed at prospective editors or agents, I started out just planning to revise the outline as part of a pitch document; but looking at the story in overview that way made me realize there were some weaknesses in the first act and think of ways I could make it stronger. In which case I might as well do a new revision pass or two of the whole book while I’m at it. (It’s quite possible that Danielle, my editor at eSpec Books, would have caught this and pointed it out to me if the book had gone ahead there, but she never got the chance.)

EDIT: I knew I should’ve tried addressing the problem before I posted about it… I have found a quick and easy way to make the table format more legible, by converting the “Classic” formatting to the modern “blocks” formatting, but it’s still less than ideal, making the column with the actual notes too narrow. So I may attempt to rework those later, but for now, I’m just doing the quick fix.

As those of you reading on the site can see, I’ve decided to change the visual theme of Written Worlds, since I found the old theme, called INove, to be too cramped-looking. I’m trying out a theme called Nook which seems to be okay, though it’s been a learning curve to figure out how to edit parts of it. I’m afraid the top menu may be harder to navigate now because of the larger text size causing the menus to be too long for the screen, and some of the menu entries have added gibberish that I can’t figure out how to remove.

I hope my readers find the change amenable despite such glitches, since I’m kind of stuck with it. I tried giving up and going back to INove when I first ran into problems, but apparently it isn’t offered anymore, and I couldn’t figure out how to undo the change.

One other change: I’ve added an Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe Chronology page, updating the chronology I did as a blog post back in 2020. It makes more sense to have it as a page, which I’ll expand on as new ATU fiction (hopefully) gets published.

2025 has been another pretty slow year for me in terms of getting stuff published. My short story collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories was finally released in July, a year later than hoped, and my second Aleyara story, “Aleyara’s Flight,” was published in the November/December 2025 Analog, although there have been delays in getting out the print version of the issue (I gather that finally cleared up this past week or so, so hopefully subscribers will see it soon). I sold a third story in the series, “Skin in the Game,” though it probably won’t be out for another year. My 2006 novel X-Men: Watchers on the Walls finally came back into print in an e-book edition in February.

On the Patreon front, I finally brought my Original Fiction tier slightly back from oblivion with two exclusive stories: “Birth of Knowledge,” an old unsold story that’s outdated in some respects but resonates with current concerns over AI, and “The Demon in the Depths,” a new story (the third) in my Thayara fantasy universe. My weekly rewatch-reviews covered Blake’s 7 Series A-B and Series C-D, the short-lived 1993 series Space Rangers with Linda Hunt, Marjorie Monaghan, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and the Starhunter ReduX re-edit of the Canadian space bounty-hunter series from 2000 — which got to be kind of a slog to get through (though the second season, which I’m currently reviewing, is a marked improvement), so I added a parallel review series of the RoboCop film and TV franchise (with a few comics covered as a bonus), running on Fridays alternating with Starhunter on Tuesdays. Both series are completely written and uploaded and will continue through late May 2026 (coincidentally both ending in the same week).

I know my Patreon doesn’t have as much to offer as I would’ve hoped, but it’s my only regular source of income at the moment, so I’d really appreciate it if more of my readers would subscribe, even at the $1/mo Tip Jar level. As a new feature, it’s now possible for non-subscribers to buy individual stories, story collections, or review series, so you can contribute with a one-time purchase rather than a monthly subscription.

If my Patreon doesn’t grab you, one way my readers could help me is simply by posting reviews of my books on Amazon. Books that have at least 50 reviews get promoted more on the site, so posting even a brief review or rating is a good, simple way to help out. To date, all my Star Trek books have well above 50 reviews or ratings, but none of my original books have reached that threshold (nor have my Marvel novels, but I get no royalties from their sales, so it’s a moot point). Only Superhuman comes closest, needing only 8 more reviews to hit the threshold, but my other original books (including audiobooks) are desperately in need of reviews. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to me, but to any author you want to support.

My writing progress this year has been slower than I’ve hoped, but I achieved a few goals. I completed turning my unsold Troubleshooter graphic novel script into a prose novel, which would now be the second of the three completed novels in that series (Only Superhuman being the first), and I’ve completed a draft of a fourth Aleyara story. I wrote two Thayara stories for open-call anthologies, yet both unrelated anthologies inexplicably closed to submissions earlier than I’d been led to expect, before I was even able to submit either story, so that was frustrating. (“The Demon in the Depths” was the second one. I’m still trying to sell the first somewhere, but it will end up on Patreon if I can’t.)

I’ve had a list of projects taped up on the inside of my apartment’s front door, although what started as a list of projects for 2023 ended up being headed “PROJECTS 2023 4 5,” because I usually write more slowly than I expect when I don’t have a deadline. But by the start of December, I’d finally crossed off everything on the list except an outline for a fourth Troubleshooter novel (and one tentative possibility with a question mark after it, which didn’t really count). Maybe it’s premature to outline a fourth novel before I’ve sold the second and third, but I really wanted to clear the list at last, so I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to get that outline figured out, and I finally managed to cross off that item yesterday. (Even a self-imposed deadline can help.)

So my board is clear for new projects, which I hope to line up before long. I’ve been grateful to be able to live off my late Uncle Clarence’s generous inheritance and take an extended sabbatical devoted to my original writing, but it’s high time I got back into contract work, and hopefully it won’t be much longer before my name appears on a Star Trek project again. I really hope to find something as soon as possible, not just so I can start earning an honest living again, but because I get depressed when I’m not working on something creative.

Unfortunately, I have one major setback to report. Due to the challenges of the current economy, my publisher at eSpec Books has reluctantly decided that they will not be able to publish Arachne’s Legacy, the third volume of the Arachne saga. (This will not affect the availability of the first two novels, though, and they stand alone as a complete story without the third, since they were originally written as a single long novel. So don’t let this discourage you from buying the first two, since eSpec could use all the support they can get right now.) So as the new year begins, I’m going to have to devote myself to seeking a new publisher, and ideally finally finding an agent to help me line up writing projects. Between Arachne’s Legacy, two Troubleshooter manuscripts, and the four Aleyara stories that I intend to combine into a fix-up novel, I now have four novels’ worth of original science fiction that I need to get published. So I really need to get better at connecting with publishers, or find an agent who can do it for me.

If any of my writer or editor friends and colleagues reading this have any advice about finding agents or publishers, can recommend any who are open to submissions, or are aware of any SF or fantasy anthologies that are recruiting authors, please contact me. I’m completely available at the moment.

In other news, I got a couple of major technology upgrades. The high-end hand-me-down laptop I got from my big sister has worked out very well for me. Since my desktop mini-PC occasionally crashes for no known reason (which it’s rarely done since I took it to the shop earlier this year, despite their inability to find the problem, yet has begun doing again infrequently in recent months), I now do all my fiction and review writing on the laptop, promptly backing it up to the cloud (and to my PC, which I finally figured out how to access through the laptop’s File Explorer). My apartment also finally got a fiber-optic phone/internet upgrade in February, making my browsing and smart-TV viewing much faster and smoother. I was surprised when the internet service went out suddenly last week, the first time it’s done that since the upgrade, but when I called tech support, I got a recorded message saying they were already aware of an outage with the networking service and were working to fix it. Luckily the weather was unseasonably warm that morning, so I went for a long walk and it was fixed by the time I got back. It’s a nice contrast to the old copper-wire system, which had so few qualified technicians left to work on it that it usually took days to fix the frequent outages.

Other household purchases this year have included a new, whisper-quiet fan for my living room, necessary in hot weather as I spend a lot of time there since getting my smart TV and my new laptop, and my apartment’s circulation in that area is poor. It’s battery-powered so I can put it wherever I need it without having to keep it plugged in, so it’s very convenient, if not as powerful as a bladed fan. I also got one of those adhesive nightlight bug traps for the kitchen, which worked very well at trapping gnats at first but less so subsequently, and I’m not sure if that’s because the refill adhesive cards I bought are inferior or if it’s just that gnat season was already ending around then. I also got a new wristwatch because my old one was falling apart. I had some troubles with persistent “ghost flushing” in my toilet (water slowly draining from the tank until the valve opened and it refilled), and the maintenance guy and I tried replacing various components until I finally figured out that it was simply because the tube from the fill valve to the overflow pipe was pushed too low, so its outlet was below the water level and caused a siphoning effect. All I had to do was pull it up slightly and the problem was solved.

All in all, it’s been mostly a pretty quiet, comfortable year, aside from a couple of minor setbacks like my tire blowing out en route to the Shore Leave Convention, though that worked out more easily than it might have. I also had my car battery die last winter, and my jumpstarter battery got overstrained, expanded dangerously, and had to be replaced. I haven’t had to use the new jumpstarter yet, and when there’s been heavy snow, I’ve made sure to go out and clear it off the windshield so my solar battery tender could keep the battery charged.

My health has been pretty good aside from an infection that cleared up with antibiotics, and I’ve managed to take pretty regular walks around the neighborhood, which aren’t just good exercise but are my best time for plotting stories and figuring out scenes. Thanks to some new sidewalk construction, the nearby Fairview Park has become one of my favorite places to walk and think, though it’s a far enough walk that sometimes I’ve driven to the outskirts of the park and then walked the long loop through the park and back to my car. I could still probably use more exercise than I’m getting, though, and it looks like I’ll need a new glasses prescription soon. I was concerned that my ACA health care subsidies might be reduced or go away in 2026, but it looks like I’m one of the lucky ones who’ll still be covered. Which makes my need to find new work a little less urgent, but still important in the long run, since I need to save up for the future.

So I go into 2026 at a fairly comfortable place, but with basically no idea what my future holds, aside from knowing that “Skin in the Game” will appear in Analog probably late in the year. Hopefully some of the feelers I’ve put out already or will put out soon will produce results before long. In the meantime, maybe I can use the time to develop some of the tentative ideas I’ve still got floating around, or come up with something new. Hopefully next year will see some improvements in the state of the country as well. I’m aware that my quiet, relatively trouble-free life is a luxury in these times, but there are some reasons for optimism that things will start to get better, or at least not as much worse as we’ve feared.

For the first time in a while, I have a new story to offer on my Patreon’s Original Fiction tier. “The Demon in the Depths” can be read by all subscribers at the $3 level or above, or purchased individually for $3 (which is the lowest amount Patreon allows me to charge for individual posts).

https://www.patreon.com/posts/fiction-demon-in-145623682

This story is set in my Thayara fantasy universe, a loose sequel of sorts to “The Science of Sacrifice,” though set maybe 2-3 decades later, near the time frame of “The Melody Lingers.”

The story was written for an open-call anthology, but the submission window closed earlier than had been announced, so I never got the chance to submit it (the second time in a row that happened to me in 2025). So it ends up on Patreon instead, alongside the other Thayara stories.

The annotations for the story are available on my $5 Behind the Scenes tier. More information about Thayara can be found in my worldbuilding notes.

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning concludes the story begun in Dead Reckoning, which I reviewed in February 2024. The first movie was released as Dead Reckoning Part One with the assumption that this would be Part Two, but the title was changed and the story rewritten, after plans to shoot the two films back-to-back were abandoned due to COVID restrictions and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes. It’s still a direct continuation resolving the cliffhanger ending of Dead Reckoning, but it seems some things were changed from the original plans. In particular, the first film gave prominent billing to Mariela Garriga, who appeared in brief flashbacks in DR as a lover of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) who was murdered by the villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) over 30 years before in the incident that led to Ethan’s recruitment into the Impossible Missions Force. Both her billing and the way the flashbacks were presented implied to me that there would be more flashbacks in Part 2 fleshing out the backstory; however, Garriga is absent from The Final Reckoning except in archive footage of Part 1’s flashback.

Most of the cast of Part 1 is back, though, the most prominent omissions being Rebecca Ferguson, for reasons obvious to anyone who saw Part 1, and Vanessa Kirby, who disappeared to play the Invisible Woman in Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In exchange, M:I: Fallout’s Angela Bassett returns, after COVID restrictions scuttled plans to bring her back in Part 1. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen are back, as is most of the crew, except composer Lorne Balfe, who was initially on board but was replaced by two of his frequent collaborators, Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey. Their score is similar to Balfe’s, but I found it a bit more interesting and less repetitive. Naturally, it incorporates Lalo Schifrin’s M:I theme and “The Plot” to a similar degree to previous scores in the series.

The film opens with a voiceover recap of Part 1, including a swift photomontage of scenes from the previous seven movies. This is followed by Ethan getting a videotape message from Angela Bassett’s Erika Sloane, previously the CIA director in Fallout and now the President of the United States. She summarizes events since Part 1: the sentient artificial intelligence called the Entity has taken over most of the internet and altered data and images to create false narratives generating increasing worldwide tensions building toward global war, with doomsday cultists springing up and infiltrating major institutions with the Entity’s backing. (The message is on videotape since analog media are the only things the Entity can’t read or alter.) In Part 1, Ethan acquired the special key that would unlock the device containing the Entity’s original source code and allow him to destroy it, but President Sloane begs him not to, as the entity is so deeply embedded in cyberspace that killing it would destroy the internet and produce global cataclysm. She urges him to surrender so that the US government can take control of the Entity, as every major government wants to do.

The tape sequence also includes quick flashbacks to events from past films, and these two montages are the only times that anything from the much-reviled Mission: Impossible II has been referenced in any of the sequels. However, they’re just glimpses buried in the overall montages, with no dialogue references to any of the film’s events, so I haven’t entirely let go of my preference to treat the second film as apocryphal. (Apparently Tom Cruise hates it, so I’m a little surprised it even got this much reference.)

Ethan and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) reunite with Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) in his lair in the London Underground, where he’s built a “Poison Pill” dongle that will allow the Entity’s destruction. All of Luther’s scenes are in the lair, and some of them show him in a hospital-style bed with a breathing tube, suggesting he’s in ill health, but this is not set up or explained, suggesting some material was cut out.

To find Gabriel, Ethan breaks out his assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), who speaks almost exclusively in French (which I still think is way too on-the-nose for someone called Paris), and who wants revenge on Gabriel for trying to kill her. (Conveniently, everyone on the IMF team is fluent in French, and Paris understands English reasonably well.) Ethan and Benji free Paris from Agent Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) and his partner Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Ethan prevents Paris from killing Briggs, convincing Degas that he’s the good guy, so Degas defects to the impromptu IMF team that Paris also agrees to join as long as it gets Gabriel in her sights. (Despite the presence of characters named Degas and Paris, there isn’t a single ballerina in sight.)

Ethan tracks Gabriel to London, where he’s saved from federal agents by pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), who disarms them faster than even Ethan could see, leading to an exchange about timing making a great pickpocket, which will be relevant later. In the last film, Ethan told Grace to surrender to CIA director Eugene Kittredge (Henry Czerny, formerly IMF head in the 1996 movie) and agree to become an IMF agent, but now she betrays Kittredge to side with Ethan. (This is hard to reconcile with Part 1’s retcon that the IMF is an independent team separate from the CIA and answerable exclusively to the President, but that’s a contradiction within Part 1 itself.)

However, Ethan and Grace are captured by Gabriel, who in Part 1 was the Entity’s loyal agent, but has been renounced for his failure and now wants to take control of the Entity so he can Rule The World. He’s after the key too, as well as the location of the sunken Russian sub Sevastopol, which holds the only copy of the Entity’s original source code, an active-learning stealth software system on a device called a Podkova (Russian for horseshoe, for unexplained reasons). Gabriel reveals that the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III, which Ethan stole to save the life of his wife and which M:i:III made a point of leaving unexplained, was actually a computer virus that merged with the Podkova stealth software to create the Entity, so that Ethan is partly responsible for its existence. (The film clarifies that the Sevastopol sequence that opened Part 1 took place in 2012.) Gabriel intends to hold Grace hostage to force Ethan to bring him the source code so he can control the Entity, but Ethan fakes biting a cyanide capsule to get uncuffed and takes out Gabriel’s men while the camera focuses on Grace’s horrified reaction to the brutal-sounding offscreen battle, a clever bit of direction. This is followed by the main titles, 23 minutes into the 2 hour, 49 minute film, the longest in the series.

Ethan’s team pursues Gabriel, but finds the sensory deprivation chamber where the Entity communicated with Gabriel. The Entity invites Ethan into the tank and tells him it plans to set off a nuclear war if humanity doesn’t surrender to its rule, and says Gabriel will kill Luther if Ethan doesn’t go along with its plan to bring the Podkova to a South African “Doomsday Vault,” an underground data bank preserving the world’s information in the event of a holocaust.

Ethan puts Benji in charge of the team and rushes to save Luther, but Gabriel has stolen the Poison Pill and locked Luther inside his lair with a nuclear bomb. Luther can disarm it enough to prevent the plutonium core from going critical, but he can’t prevent the conventional trigger detonation and has to sacrifice himself to save London. Ethan realizes Gabriel has arranged things to get what he wants, since Luther’s the only one who could build another Poison Pill, whereas Gabriel needs Ethan alive to retrieve the Podkova from the sub. Luther gives Ethan a rather moving farewell speech, and Ethan reluctantly leaves him to his fate.

Ethan then surrenders himself and the key to Agent Briggs, and in a fairly random swerve, it turns out that Briggs is actually Jim Phelps Jr., who resents Ethan for outing Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps as a traitor back in the original 1996 film. (Just a reminder for classic series fans: Rogue Nation established that the cinematic IMF wasn’t founded until c. 1975, two years after the TV series ended, so the movies are a reboot continuity and Voight’s traitorous Jim Phelps is a separate character from Peter Graves’s heroic one.) The movie continues the previous film’s retcon of the IMF as an organization that recruits criminals by offering them “The Choice” to become IMF agents, and Phelps disappeared in this way when Briggs/Jim Jr. was seven.

Briggs and Director Kittredge take Ethan to the emergency bunker beneath Mount Weather, where he learns that the Entity has taken over every nuclear arsenal except the four biggest, and they’re projected to fall within three days. (Like so many works of fiction, it presumes that what should be an unpredictable deadline can be predicted down to the second with no margin of error.) There’s a meeting of suits including the returning Mark Gatiss and Charles Parnell from the briefing scene in Part 1, and they’re briefed on the IMF’s actions over the past three decades, setting up another few clips and callbacks, notably including the iconic CIA Black Vault break-in sequence from the original film. When President Sloane enters, Ethan asks her to put an aircraft carrier at his full disposal so he can destroy the Entity, which everyone objects to since it would destroy the internet. The President calls for his arrest, but it’s a ruse and she secretly has him taken to the carrier, giving its Captain Neely (Hannah Waddingham) a brief note saying “May 22, 1996” (the release date of the original film), which reminds Neely of her and Ethan’s common losses in that film’s events, though what exactly she lost and how that convinces her to trust him are not made clear. (Something more may have been cut.)

Meanwhile, Benji leads the team to a Cold War listening station in the Bering Strait that will have recorded the Sevastopol’s sinking and its exact location. Ethan’s crazy plan is that once they send him the location, he’ll dive there, fight off compression sickness from the rapid descent, retrieve the Podkova, swim up beneath the ice, and basically freeze/drown and count on his team to retrieve him, revive him, and put him in an inflatable decompression chamber.

The chief of the listening station turns out to be William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the analyst from the Black Vault break-in scene, whom Kittredge ordered exiled to Alaska for his failure in a throwaway moment in the 1996 film. It turns out it’s the best thing that ever happened to Donloe, since he met his wife Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk) there and has lived happily with her for three decades. He’s been trying to warn about the Entity for years and is eager to help, but the Russians beat the team there and are trying to force Donloe to give them the coordinates instead. He claims they’re buried somewhere on his outdated floppy disks, and the Russians order Benji to make a disk reader, but it’s a ruse and Donloe has already memorized the coordinates, which Tapeesa and Grace sneak out to transmit under cover of feeding Tapeesa’s sled dogs. Naturally it doesn’t go smoothly and a fire and a big fight break out. At the same time, Ethan transfers to the sub that will take him to the dive location, and a doomsday cultist tries to kill him, so the two fights play in parallel. A crewmember played by Katy O’Brian saves him, and he gets the coordinates. Tapeesa takes Grace out over the ice to the coordinates, and there’s a fun scene where Tapeesa, who speaks no English (really, after decades of marriage to Donloe?), teaches Grace how to drive the dogsled so they can take shifts.

Ethan dives to the Sevastopol, and naturally it’s teetering on the brink of one of those bottomless ravines that the laws of movie physics require every sunken submarine to wind up teetering on the brink of. Entering the sub and shifting the balance of the water inside causes it to start rolling, complicating Ethan’s retrieval of the Podkova and subsequent escape, and he ultimately has to ditch his high-tech dive suit and swim to the surface in his undies. There’s an artistic sequence where the camera rotates so that the ice above him becomes the ground below him, and Grace appears underwater to try to revive him, but it’s actually a dream/hallucination transition to the reality of Grace trying to revive him in the decompression chamber after managing to retrieve him. (A previous scene explicated in flashforward how the retrieval was supposed to happen, so we didn’t need to see it here.) Grace suggests that the only way to restore the world from the damage the Entity has caused is for Ethan to take control of the Entity with the source code rather than destroying it. Ethan thinks no one should have that power, but Grace says he’s the one person she’d trust with it.

On the flight out, Ethan finally meets Donloe face-to-face and apologizes for getting him transferred, but Donloe is grateful and returns the knife Ethan dropped in the iconic scene. Donloe and Ethan explain to the others that the Entity plans to transfer itself into the Doomsday Vault in Kongo Yowa, South Africa, to weather the apocalypse it’s about to trigger, then emerge (somehow) and rule over the survivors. Since the Vault is shielded against signals, it’s counting on Ethan’s team to rig a receiver to let the Entity in, which it knows they’ll do because it’s the only way to trap it. Ethan’s plan is to let Gabriel take the Podkova and use the Poison Pill to control the Entity, thinking he’s won. But Luther has programmed the Poison Pill to deceive the Entity so that instead of entering the Vault, it will transfer itself into a special optical drive Luther built to hold it. But it will trigger the nukes as soon as it’s in the vault, so the drive will have to be unplugged the instant it’s inside, but no sooner. Ethan realizes Grace is the only one with the reflexes to do it, calling back the earlier exchange about a pickpocket’s timing. Grace is concerned that this may be what the Entity wanted all along, because it’s exactly what it predicted Ethan would do. They’re basically giving it what it wants unless Grace’s timing is perfect.

At the vault, the staff have all gone home since the world is ending—which is odd, since the vault’s whole purpose is to be a doomsday failsafe, so this is the one time they’re most needed to do their job. On the other hand, maybe they fled because Gabriel planted an even bigger nuclear bomb there, since if he blows up the Entity’s bolthole, it won’t dare destroy the world and itself along with it. (Where is Gabriel getting all these nukes?) Ethan is about to surrender the Podkova to Gabriel as planned, but Briggs and Kittredge arrive and capture Gabriel’s men, which starts the deadman-switch countdown on the nuke.

Gabriel’s men start a firefight in which Gabriel escapes, and Ethan goes after him. Benji conceals the fact that he’s been shot until Ethan is gone. Donloe, Tapeesa, and Degas stay to disarm the nuke (which will mean sacrificing themselves in the trigger detonation like Luther did) while the others enter the vault, where Benji simultaneously directs Grace to prepare the receiver and the optical drive and directs Paris to operate on him so his lungs don’t collapse from internal bleeding. Donloe figures out a way to delay the detonation by ten seconds so they have a chance of getting into the vault in the nick of time. (This wouldn’t have helped Luther if he’d figured it out, since he was locked in.)

Meanwhile, President Sloane’s advisors have tried to convince her to launch first strikes on the control centers of the other nuclear powers, which will mean destroying their capital cities. (Wouldn’t their nuclear control centers logically be as far from the capitals as possible precisely because they’re prime targets?) To avoid a retaliatory war, they crib a plot point from Fail Safe and propose sacrificing an American city as a goodwill gesture, though I’m not sure the logic works there the same way it did in Fail Safe. Sloane is on the verge of pushing the button, but decides to do the noble thing and order the US nuclear arsenal’s power cut completely, preventing the Entity from taking over but leaving the US defenseless. She says this will make them the only nation with the power to choose not to attack, continuing the theme of choice that ties the duology together. But a doomsday cultist tries to shoot her, and though she’s saved, it delays them enough to let the Entity seize the US arsenal, so Ethan is the only hope.

Meanwhile, Ethan has followed Gabriel to the pair of biplanes he had ready as an Entity-proof analog way of escaping the nuclear blast zone. He lies down and grabs onto the second biplane’s axle as it passes over him during takeoff, and while most of the climactic aerial stunt sequence was performed for real by Tom Cruise, I find it impossible to believe Ethan could’ve grabbed onto the axle of a plane moving that fast without his arms ripping out of his sockets, if he could even close his fingers around it in time. Anyway, there’s a big long biplane chase, he manages to transfer to Gabriel’s plane, and Gabriel tries to shake him off, which doesn’t make any sense, because he still needs to get the Podkova from Ethan and therefore logically needs to keep Ethan alive until they’re safely out of the blast zone. Ethan grabs the Poison Pill as the plane stalls out, and Gabriel gloats that only he has a parachute, before knocking himself out on the plane’s tail fin and falling to his doom. He proves incorrect, because Ethan escapes using the emergency parachute in the biplane’s cockpit seat—which catches fire and burns up. Ethan plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova as he plummets parachuteless.

The Entity takes the bait, Grace grabs the drive at the right instant, the world is saved, and the Donloes and Degas get into the vault just before the blast. It turns out Gabriel was doubly wrong because there was a backup parachute, and once Ethan is safely on the ground, a message from Luther plays on the Poison Pill, making a pretentious speech about how we’re masters of our fate and we can build a future based on kindness and understanding, “should we choose to accept it.” The message self-destructs at the end, so the Podkova is useless when Kittredge arrives for it. Briggs and Ethan are reconciled.

Later, the team members gather in Trafalgar Square, just nodding to each other clandestinely, and Grace gives the Entity drive to Ethan, leaving the fate of the world literally in his hands.

–

So whatever happened to the whole internet collapsing if the Entity was taken out of it? Did that happen and nobody thought to mention it? Or is the idea that once the Entity retreated into the vault, it let go of its control on the internet so that it was safe now? There’s a lot of other stuff that doesn’t add up, like, how did plugging the Poison Pill into the Podkova trick the Entity into going into the optical drive when it was supposed to destroy it? Since Gabriel had the Pill the whole time, there was no chance to reprogram it. And I can see no way that Luthor could’ve predicted in advance that the Entity would try to transfer itself into the Doomsday Vault, so how did he know to build the optical drive? Also, the climax is way too much a rehash of the climax of M:I: Fallout—to prevent a nuclear disaster, Ethan must engage in a lengthy aerial chase to retrieve a device from the villain and deactivate/activate it at the last second.

There are also signs that parts of the movie were restructured or cut out in editing, like the lack of explanation for why Luther needs a hospital bed in his lair. Also, when Ethan enters the sensory deprivation tank to talk to the Entity, Paris warns that it will change him, but there’s no followup. There are a couple of scenes where Ethan seems to black out and looks disoriented when he wakes up, which made me wonder if the Entity had gained some control over him, but nothing came of it.

Generally, the story is very over-the-top, with literal fate-of-the-world stakes and the repeated insistence that Ethan Hunt is the only man who can save the world—although to be fair, it ultimately comes down to Grace being the only woman who can save the world, and most of the others all get their hero moments. It also gets rather self-parodic with the magnitude of the self-destructive things Ethan has to do in order to retrieve the Podkova, like letting himself suffer compression sickness, drown, and freeze. It’s like the filmmakers have taken Cruise’s real-world reputation for constantly trying to top himself with death-defying stunts and have made it a textual part of Ethan Hunt’s character. This is the third M:I movie where Ethan has been clinically dead and needed the female lead to revive him, after M:i:III and Rogue Nation. It’s starting to feel like a fetish.

The film also continues the weakness of Part 1 in asserting in exposition that the Entity is having a cataclysmic effect on global affairs, but never actually showing it in the main body of the story, aside from the couple of bits where implicit doomsday cultists attempt to assassinate Ethan and Sloane. Both films make the global impact of the story way too abstract and offscreen. In the epilogue, Trafalgar Square looks perfectly intact and functional, with no sign of any disruption. The world that we were told was in chaos looks perfectly intact at the end.

Still, for all its plot holes and extravagances, I liked The Final Reckoning much better than the previous half. It avoids some of the weaknesses of the first film, like the repetitiveness of Briggs’s pursuit and the lack of characterization for Gabriel and Paris. Okay, Gabriel is still more a plot device than a character, but Paris has a small arc of bonding with the team and learning to apply her skills more constructively. And the film is strong where the first half was strong, in the character work (mostly) and the relationships. The main players and a lot of supporting players get effective moments. Luther’s farewell speech to Ethan actually got me a bit misty-eyed (though that’s admittedly not hard to do), and I loved the way they brought back the minor character of Donloe from seven movies ago and built him up into one of the biggest heroes and most entertaining characters in the film, along with his wife who doesn’t speak English but gets her own big hero moments. The film also makes up for leaving Angela Bassett out of Part 1 by making President Sloane a key heroic figure in her own right, and I have to say, seeing a heroic and principled Black female President of the United States is some wish fulfillment I can really go for right now.

There’s a lot of looking backward in the film, with retrospectives of the past series worked in multiple times, but the inclusion of Donloe and the reference to the Rabbit’s Foot feel pretty organic (although I loved the idea of the Rabbit’s Foot being a pure unexplained MacGuffin, so I have mixed feelings about it being explained at last). The attempt to connect Briggs to Jim Phelps feels more gratuitous. It gives some justification to the relentlessness of his pursuit of Ethan, but nothing much is done with it. It just feels like a token attempt to bring things full circle, but they did that far more effectively with Donloe. And I question whether it’s a good idea to remind people of the first film’s controversial handling of its version of Jim Phelps.

I’m still not convinced by this duology’s retcon that all IMF agents are reformed criminals who were given “the Choice” to accept service to their country. It’s hard to reconcile with M:i:III’s portrayal of the IMF as an integral part of the CIA bureaucracy with its own training academy, and with the way Benji was introduced as an Oxford-educated analyst/tech hoping to get into field work, rather than a career criminal seeking redemption. But I do think the script does a pretty good job of building on the “your mission, should you choose to accept it” line and making the power of choice a central, recurring theme throughout the story, in counterpoint to the Entity’s removal of choice. The philosophical speeches get kind of pretentious at times, but at least the movie is trying to have something to say beyond “Watch Tom Cruise climb stuff and run fast.”

All in all, after my disappointment in Part 1, I’m relieved that this, possibly the final film in the series, ended it on a reasonably strong note. Overall, I think I’d rank the films thusly, from best to worst:

In other words: 4, 3, 6, 5, 8, 7, 1, 2. In every case except the first pair, the even-numbered films are better than their immediate predecessors. I’m a little unsure of this order, though, because in my past reviews I said Rogue Nation was a close third behind the previous two, but then said Fallout was much better than RN. But the fourth and third films are still my favorites, the fourth for being truest to the original series and just a very fun movie overall, and the third for having the best, most textured character work, the one time Ethan Hunt felt the most human and real. Maybe I just meant RN was close compared to how much I disliked the first two films. In any case, the pattern remains that I prefer the four films made with J.J. Abrams’s involvement (either as director on the third or producer on 4-6) to the ones made without him, though it’s fair to say that Christopher McQuarrie’s contribution to the series was relatively positive overall, though more ambivalent. Overall, the middle four films are the strongest, most consistent run in the series, in between a very clumsy start and a flawed conclusion.

It’s unclear whether this is really the end of the series. McQuarrie has said he has ideas for more, but Cruise claimed at the film’s opening that it would be his final one, despite having previously expressed an interest in doing more. I’ve felt for years that it was time to retire Ethan Hunt and let the series continue with a new lead; I’d been hoping that would be Rebecca Ferguson, but Hayley Atwell would be an even better choice, I think. Still, I wouldn’t mind if the series ended here. Maybe then, somewhere down the road, we could finally get a film reboot that was more in the heist/caper vein of the original series.

Back at the end of 2023, I mentioned that my favorite quiet thinking spot from my days at the University of Cincinnati, a small enclosed courtyard that I always called “the Alcove” because I didn’t know the correct term for it at the time, had been torn down as part of the demolition and replacement of the deteriorating 1930s extension of the 1917 Old Chemistry building. This morning, I went for a long walk and wandered over to that part of campus for the first time in a while, and I discovered that the new Old Chemistry building (it’s still called that) was complete. So I wandered around its outside and inside for a few minutes, getting a sense of the place, which seems typical of the modern interiors of the newer campus buildings in the perpetually “Under Construction” UC. Even the interior of the original Old Chemistry building has been fully remodeled, though the exterior is basically the same.

When I came out into the plaza that had overlooked my courtyard, there was just the side of the new building filling up the space where it had been. I went back inside to find out what was occupying the Alcove/courtyard’s footprint and see if I could at least stand where it had been, but there’s a large room labeled “Engineering Lab” where it was. But there is a small study lounge one floor above it, so I guess that carries forward the spirit of the Alcove in a way.

Meanwhile, I see they’ve closed off the area around Crosley Tower for its impending demolition, which is slated to begin in January. Apparently many consider it an eyesore, and it’s sinking or tilting or something due to foundation problems, but I’ve always found it quite striking, and the concrete plaza skirting it was another favorite study/thinking spot for me over the years. It’s been a dominating part of the campus skyline all my life (it was built in 1967, about a year before I was born, though some sources incorrectly say ’69), and it will be strange and sad to see it gone.

I’ve just posted a new entry in my Patreon’s Behind the Scenes tier for the first time in a while. As a supplement to the release of “Aleyara’s Flight” in the current issue of Analog, I’ve posted a series of excerpts from my worldbuilding notes about the Nilyoru, the ground-dwelling Biauru culture introduced in “Flight.” As with my earlier notes for the rainforest-dwelling Rularu, these notes cover their historic origins, their mythology, and the basis of their language. In time, I’ll probably post them here along with the earlier notes, but for now, they’re a Patreon exclusive.

The new page can be found here, available at the $5 subscription level:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/aleyaras-flight-144007427