In Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise hangs from a flaming biplane and dodges missiles at the bottom of the ocean. But the movie’s most inspired stunt has nothing to do with death-defying acrobatics. It’s the return of CIA analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon).

Neither the character’s name nor the actor’s is likely to ring much of a bell. But you know him the moment you see him: the hapless, sweaty guy in an off-the-rack suit who keeps running to the toilet while Cruise’s Ethan Hunt descends from a ceiling vent to steal classified information from a seemingly impenetrable vault at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Nearly 30 years after the first Mission: Impossible movie, it remains one of the series’ most breathtaking action sequences, as fiendishly simple, and as pin-drop quiet, as the more recent movies’ set pieces are spectacular and loud. But despite Brian De Palma’s masterful staging, Ethan’s triumph has always had a slightly sour aftertaste. We don’t mind that Ethan has stolen a list of names that could jeopardize the lives of every covert operative in the world if it fell into the wrong hands, because we know that he’d never let that happen. But William Donloe, whose job it was to keep that list secure? He’s left holding the bag. Even worse than the gastrointestinal issues (Ethan’s team has dosed his coffee) is the wrath he faces from his boss: IMF Director Eugene Kittridge is apoplectic when he discovers the theft, telling an underling he wants Donloe “manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day.”

In The Final Reckoning, we find out that this was no idle threat. In search of a downed Russian submarine that contains the only means of stopping a rogue artificial intelligence that plans to destroy the world, Ethan’s new team—now with no other members overlapping from the first movie’s—makes its way to a remote island in the Bering Sea, where whom should it find but William Donloe himself.

Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Paramount Pictures.

I confess that, blearily making my way into a Cannes press screening at 8:30 in the morning, I had completely forgotten that Saxon’s casting had been announced two years earlier. But even if I’d remembered, that knowledge might have been drowned in the flood of callbacks that takes up much of The Final Reckoning’s first hour. Christopher McQuarrie, who after writing and directing the past four Mission: Impossible movies has become almost as synonymous with the series as Cruise himself, is intent on styling Final Reckoning as a capstone to the series—not just one last hurrah but a climactic summation that weaves all eight films into one majestic closing argument.

As screenwriting challenges go, finding a common thread between movies that have always put thrills before narrative cohesion is the equivalent of scaling the Burj Khalifa without a safety line. Not even Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning writer of Chinatown, could make sense of John Woo’s directive for the second Mission: Impossible movie, which essentially involved taking a handful of preconceived action sequences and inventing a story that would make them make sense. Pausing production to rework the script on the fly is a regular part of McQuarrie’s filmmaking process, which is fine when you’re making movies one at a time, but much trickier when you have to make the entire series seem as if it were all part of some great master plan. Final Reckoning barely manages to work as a coherent sequel to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, even though the films were originally intended as two halves of a single unified story. That idea, along with the plan to label them Part One and Part Two, was apparently scrapped when the first part underperformed at the box office. The battle against the A.I. known as the Entity continues, but if you’re waiting for the past history between Ethan and the mysterious human villain known as Gabriel (Esai Morales) to finally come to light, you, unlike Tom Cruise, should not hold your breath.

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Cruise has announced and then backtracked on whether The Final Reckoning truly marks an end for the franchise, but McQuarrie certainly tries to instill the movie with a sense of, well, finality. Like a night manager straightening up before he finishes his shift, McQuarrie ties up dangling plot threads from movies no one but the most die-hard of M: I fans has thought about in years. Remember the mysterious Rabbit’s Foot from M:i:III? Well, here’s a momentum-stalling montage and accompanying speech to jog your memory, for the sole purpose of claiming that despite having all the signs of being a toxic bioweapon, it was actually the Entity all along. Cool story, bro.

William Donloe, though—that’s a different story. Action-movie objects are interchangeable, so much so that Alfred Hitchcock called them all by the same generic term: MacGuffins. But people aren’t, especially when the actors do their jobs as well as Rolf Saxon did his. Donloe is on-screen for no more than a few minutes, but his flustered bumbling is integral to making the Langley sequence work, which makes it extra unjust that the movie condemns him to such an ignominious fate. (The worst thing he does is look a little rattled around Emmanuelle Béart, which you can hardly blame him for.) So bringing him back for what may be the series’ last hurrah doesn’t just come off as an Easter egg. It’s more like repaying a long-overdue debt.

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The Final Reckoning pays William Donloe back, and it does it with interest. He doesn’t only turn up—he stays. Donloe has, indeed, spent the past 30 years manning a radar tower in Alaska. (Technically, it’s some sort of subsonic monitoring, but let’s not split hairs.) But he’s made a life of it. He married an Inuit woman (Lucy Tulugarjuk), assembled his own team (of sled dogs), and by his own account is happier than he ever was at CIA HQ. And Rolf Saxon, who had to pad his part in 1996 by devising improvised bits between takes, gets to be a full-on hero this time, willing to sacrifice his own life to save the world. Given that Ethan has evolved into the kind of hero who would solve the trolley problem with a helicopter, Donloe’s noble gesture ends up being less fatal than he expects. But Mission: Impossible has already wrecked his life once. No need to do it twice.

Saxon has never been one to get stopped on the street, and while Cruise and co. were posing on Cannes’ red carpet, he was somewhere else. But he’s been a working actor for 30 years—he was, among other things, the narrator for the American version of Teletubbies—and William Donloe’s reappearance has given him a long-deserved moment in the spotlight. There’s a weariness to the way Saxon plays the older Donloe, but a deep contentment too, the fruit of a life lived on its own modest terms. For him, at least, there was life after Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise might want to ask for some tips.

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