It didn’t have Tom Cruise dangling from an airplane — it didn’t even have Peter Graves thumbing through IMF dossiers in his apartment — but the Mission: Impossible TV pilot still managed to light the fuse on one of Hollywood’s biggest action franchises.

The Final Reckoning, fans of the Tom Cruise-led franchise will delight in the parade of callbacks and references that date all the way back to 1996. But, there's actually a much deeper cut embedded in The Final Reckoning that predates

Ambrose tells his henchman, Hugh (Richard Roxburgh), that he’s willing to overlook the likelihood that Nyah is a spy to get her in bed one more time. Part of the charm of Mission: Impossible II is that it embraces that kinkiness, allowing its villain to be a pervert who gets some thrills out of swapping identities.

The last hurrah for Tom Cruise's agent Ethan Hunt "gets tangled in knots trying to pull together threads from the earlier movies, which were originally designed as one-offs," reviews film critic Sean Burns.

Years later, at the height of the remake-of-old-TV-shows craze – Charlie’s Angels, Maverick, The Fugitive and so on – Tom Cruise, then and now the biggest star in the world, thought Mission Impossible could be a good excuse to do a few death-defying stunts. And he hired Brian de Palma to direct it.

While the film has an air of finality about it – both with the title and the fact that it brings the franchise full circle with various references and callbacks – the fact that Ethan Hunt survives means the door is potentially always open for more impossible missions.

We’ve gotten to the “Final” in one of the (if not the) greatest secret agent action franchises of all time. The Mission: Impossible films have slowly morphed since their 1996 first instalment (and 1960s television show), this one being the pinnacle of a breathless stunt parade that’s at least more fun to watch than the last.

Tom Cruise has been leading the Impossible Mission Force, but that chapter is coming to a close this week with Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. There may be Mission: Impossible movies in the future,