The Final Reckoning Is Closure for Tom Cruise’s Infamous Couch Jump

Spoilers ahead for the plot of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.

There’s a moment in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning that has the president of the United States passing wax-sealed notes. CIA director turned leader of the free world Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) needs Rear Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham) to turn over control of her aircraft carrier to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), an objectively insane thing to do. To make it clear the request is coming from Sloane directly, she writes down “May 22, 1996” on a piece of paper for Neely’s eyes only. It’s a date that has special significance to the two of them and their shared trauma, and it happens to mean something to the audience, too: It’s also the date that the first film in the franchise, Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible, hit theaters.

That movie — remarkably restrained in retrospect, given the Burj Khalifa heights this series would eventually reach — hangs over Final Reckoning, which ties up the 1996’s film’s loose ends by letting Ethan apologize to William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the CIA agent he inadvertently screwed over, and get his knife back. But there’s another equally important event and associated date that casts a shadow over this concluding chapter. Final Reckoning hits theaters on May 23, 2025, 20 years to the day since an erratic Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch to declare his love for Katie Holmes and forever changed the way we see him.

There is some debate over what effect, exactly, the couch jump had on Cruise’s star power and bankability. It’s hard to separate the Oprah Winfrey Show moment from things like Cruise’s harrowing “You’re glib” interview with Matt Lauer (during the same 2005 press tour) or our collective concerns with Scientology. But while War of the Worlds still had a strong opening one month after the couch jump, 2006’s Mission: Impossible III was a relative box-office disappointment. To date, the third installment of the film series remains its lowest-grossing.

At the time, Cruise’s love story with Katie Holmes felt inextricably linked to the third Mission: Impossible film, which saw Ethan Hunt getting hitched to Julia, played by Michelle Monaghan. Since then, however, the franchise has moved away from romance. Whether a reaction to the third film’s box office or to the controversies that have surrounded Cruise’s personal life for decades, Ethan went from romantic lead to vaguely asexual. His sexual tension with Claire (Emmanuelle Béart) in Mission: Impossible, his steamy affair with Nyah (Thandiwe Newton) in 2, his unshakable devotion to Julia in III — all became distant memories. In the fourth film, Ghost Protocol, Ethan has opted for a life of bachelorhood to keep Julia safe, and whatever chemistry he has with subsequent sidekicks Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Grace (Hayley Atwell) never becomes overtly romantic.

That is until The Final Reckoning, in which Ethan’s passion for Grace is unambiguously revealed to be more than friendship. Sure, he loves Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) and, bafflingly, psychopathic assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). But he loves Grace. The film’s extended pre-title sequence culminates in Ethan brutally murdering the henchmen that Gabriel (Esai Morales) has dispatched to kill her. It’s arguably the most violent we’ve seen Ethan, even if the worst of it happens offscreen, and Grace appears visibly shaken. Ethan doesn’t make the situation better when he declares that he would never let anything happen to her. Cruise lets himself look at Atwell the way he looked at Oprah 20 years ago, speaking to his co-star with an intensity previously reserved for calling Matt Lauer “glib.” Even without a couch for him to jump on, the movie makes it clear that Ethan will not be held back, and neither will the actor who plays him.

Ethan and Grace do not fall into bed the way that he and Nyah did back in 2000, but this is the closest we’ve come to an actual Mission: Impossible romance since Julia. After Ethan drowns in frozen waters while swimming up from a sunken submarine, he hallucinates that Grace is kissing him. That may be the bends talking — in reality, she’s giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — but then they cuddle in a decompression chamber in an obvious approximation of post-coital bliss. Ethan has even stripped down to his skivvies for plot reasons that basically amount to Cruise wanting to show off how good he still looks in his 60s (and honestly, more power to him). Just as the movie puts a bow on a series that began nearly three decades prior, it delivers closure on the couch jump. After 20 years, Mission: Impossible is no longer afraid to show Cruise crazy in love again.

There may also be a bit of score-settling here, too. In its conflation of AI supervillain the Entity with the internet as a whole, the film clearly has thoughts about the spread of misinformation, particularly when it comes to how those vicious lies make you feel about Ethan Hunt — or Cruise himself. (Why invent a distinction that isn’t there?) When Ethan has a face-to-face with Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs (a.k.a. Jim Phelps Jr.), he insists that the Entity wants Jasper to hate him. Later, as Ethan fends off an attack from an Entity disciple trying to kill him, he repeatedly kicks the assailant in the face while chastising him: “You! Spend! Too! Much! Time! On! The! Internet!” He may as well be talking to us. Perhaps, the film seems to argue, all the mean things we’ve read about Cruise, especially after that Oprah appearance, are as good a reason as any to destroy the internet for good. (Whether Ethan actually accomplishes that particular task remains oddly ambiguous.)

But aside from obliquely blaming us for perpetuating the couch-jump controversy, The Final Reckoning is also a reminder of what that infamous moment was really all about: love. “We’ve never seen you behave this way before,” a startled Oprah told Cruise in 2005. While she tried to give him an out by asking if he was getting enough sleep, as far as Cruise was concerned, the couch jump was an honest expression of a feeling he’d never experienced before and couldn’t contain. It was true love, the kind he’d apparently never had with ex-wives Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman, and that should make it all comprehensible. In The Final Reckoning, love makes everything okay. Donloe, who has been banished to a remote arctic station as a result of the 1996 NOC List heist, bears Ethan no ill will. Instead, he thanks Ethan, because without that banishment, Donloe never would have met his wife, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), the love of his life.

Love is also why Ethan and his team have done the work they’ve spent all these years doing — a deep and genuine care for one another and for the people they’ve never met, which manifests as a refusal to sacrifice any single person for the greater good. Regardless of how you feel about Cruise in 2025, perhaps you’ll be moved by Luther’s evocative words: “Our lives are not defined by any one action.” Even if that action happened on The Oprah Winfrey Show.