Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has finally arrived on the big screen, marking the potential end of the Tom Cruise-led franchise.
Alongside the high-octane action and heavily insured stunts, the eighth film in the series also treats fans to a healthy dose of nostalgia. But there’s one particular blast from the past that’s bound to please lovers of the original film.
Picking up from the events of Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning sees Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF team embark on easily their most difficult mission yet: to locate the sunken submarine containing the source code to an all-powerful AI known as The Entity, and then stop it before it destroys humanity.
Coincidentally, the only person with said submarine’s coordinates is a man named William Donloe, someone who will be highly familiar to M:I fans.
Who is William Donloe in ‘Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning’?
William “Bill” Donloe is the CIA Analyst who features in the first Mission: Impossible film. He was the overall gatekeeper for the Non Official Cover list of agents from organisations around the world.
During the events in 1996, Donloe went to work at the vault, but was previously given a foreign agent which made him unwell. He left the room long enough for Ethan and his team to narrowly escape with the NOC list. Donloe then returned seconds after the list was stolen to find a knife stabbed into the table, curious as to where it came from.
Donloe was subsequently removed from his duties in Langley and sent directly to a polar substation in Alaska for the next couple of decades, which is where Benji (Simon Pegg) Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) find him in The Final Reckoning.
In a four-star review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, NME wrote: “Away from the stunts, a character returning from the first Mission: Impossible and a montage of key moments from other films in the series will delight fans, while a small role for Severance star Tramell Tillman as a submarine commander is an unexpected highlight. There’s ultimately lots to love about Final Reckoning and if this is the end, Cruise and Co are finishing on a high.”