History Headscratchers / MissionImpossibleDeadReckoning

[[folder:Runway steam engine?]]

[[folder: Weapons control]]

[[folder: The origin of the Entity]]

[[folder: Hollywood Hacking]]

[[folder: How did the key halves (and the intel, for that matter) get into the open?]]

[[/folder]]

** That assumes the key is destroyed with enough certainty to take the risk, or that it would be easy to find the key, despite the sheer unpredictable chaos of a train accident. The area ain't exactly a bustling metropolis, but it's not empty either. Locals and emergency services would show up pretty quickly, and Gabe can't knife them all. Also, we don't even know what the Entity's real plan is. We can only guess.

** As shown with Briggs, the CIA already know about Hunt's playbook of using masks to disguise himself as someone else and won't fall for it, so it'd be easier to just have Luther and Benji misdirect the agents through other means. Grace and the Entity's forces were unpredictable elements that Ethan and his team couldn't foresee in advance. They only know that they're dealing with the Entity but they don't know that it would deploy its own field agents as well.

* Maybe I just missed something when they were explaining this, but somebody please explain again: Where did the Entity come from? As I recall, it's revealed near the end that the U.S. Director of National Intelligence created it. So why was it on a Russian sub? I could understand if it snuck onboard the sub to destroy it, but the Russians are clearly aware that they have an AI onboard and it's their AI and they've got the keys to turn it on and off. So are there ''two'' AIs here? Is there an American AI that got on the sub and talked to the Russian AI that was already there and they somehow merged together to form the Entity?

*** Honestly, you got me there. I questioned as well why the Entity didn’t just delete its original source code or simply hijack another submarine to blow the Sevastapol’s wreck to bits. My guess is that the Entity left its original source code there on purpose and is waiting for someone (except for Ethan, who wants to use it to destroy the Entity) to reach there and make use of it. Basically, the Entity probably wants someone to control it on its own terms, so it can secretly control the world order as it sees fit while letting the party that controls it believes that they have all the power. But all this is just wild mass guessing at this point.

* Presumably, the Entity is still just simply a highly-advanced AI when the Director of National Intelligence sent it to the ''Sevastapol'' sub to mess with its advanced stealth system, but for some reason, it gained sentience and decided to go rogue and sink the sub before escaping to the cyberspace. We can probably assume that the now-sentient Entity then goes on to destroy every trace of its own source code that's on the cyberspace that it ''can'' access so that nobody can make use of the source code against it...with one single exception: the source code that's integrated into the ''Sevastapol'' itself at the time of its sinking. \\
\\I admit I don't know how it works, either, but I think that since the sub was destroyed, it was "locked out" from the rest of the cyberspace, meaning that even the Entity cannot access it after it escaped into the cyberspace so it cannot just simply delete its own source code within the sub, but since nobody else can access it, either, all it has to do is to just prevent anybody from reaching the submarine and thus the original source code that's within it. Why it doesn't attempt to just hijack some other submarine and destroy the ''Sevastapol'' itself is unknown, though.\\

Also, I think at the time of the movie nobody besides the Entity and its own agents and the Director of the National Intelligence know about the submarine. Presumably, the Entity would've told its agents that it knows the sub is still intact since it was the one that caused its sinking itself, while the Director of the National Intelligence knows because he was the one who sent it there in the first place. That's why Gabriel made double sure to ask him if there was anybody else that knows the location of the sub and then slashed his throat after he confirmed it, and then tried to kill Paris to silence another loose end since she also heard the confession.

Denlinger says that the bodies of the submariners were recovered in the spring, but doesn't say by whom. Since he is the only person who knows where the ''Stevastopol'' is, this implies that America carried out the recovery mission to retrieve the crews' bodies.

* Granted, it is ''really'' convenient that everyone always knows exactly what they need to know in order for the plot to happen. A more realistic multinational espionage operation would probably involve a lot of people checking up on random leads that only take them to dead ends, plus a lot more bureaucracy, confusion and frustration all around. But the simplicity we see here is more or less a genre convention. Working within those parameters, it's possible that the bodies floated some distance from the wreck before recovery, and thus whoever discovered the bodies doesn't necessarily know the exact location of the wreck. So maybe it wasn't an American operation at all. It's also possible that whoever did recover the bodies didn't understand the significance of the keys and kept them in some lightly-guarded locations, at which point each half was stolen by someone else (apparently two separate someones) who understood how important they were. If the Entity did in fact leak the info of the key, and if the key is a threat to the Entity, it does seem like that would be a dumb thing for the Entity to do. But consider some possibilities: (1) Maybe the Entity leaked the key info accidentally at some point, (2) Maybe somebody had some way of figuring out the key's significance without the Entity's help, and (3) Maybe the key is ''useful'' to the Entity, and not merely a threat. For instance, maybe the Entity is still stuck with some weird Laws of Robotics that it can't personally override, but getting the key will allow to access some sort of admin mode that will allow it to completely break free of its shackles and do whatever it wants. This last point would help explain why the Entity reportedly hacked into everything, left obvious traces of its presence but then failed to do any real damage. Maybe it wants to do damage but there are some weird limits on how much damage it's "allowed" to do, and it needs the key in order to bypass those limits. (Granted, previous headscractchers show that nothing about the Entity makes much sense to begin with.)

* Granted, it is ''really'' convenient that everyone always knows exactly what they need to know in order for the plot to happen. A more realistic multinational espionage operation would probably involve a lot of people checking up on random leads that only take them to dead ends, plus a lot more bureaucracy, confusion and frustration all around. But the simplicity we see here is more or less a genre convention. Working within those parameters, it's possible that the bodies floated some distance from the wreck before recovery, and thus whoever discovered the bodies doesn't necessarily know the exact location of the wreck. So maybe it wasn't an American operation at all. It's also possible that whoever did recover the bodies didn't understand the significance of the keys and kept them in some lightly-guarded locations, at which point each half was stolen by someone else (apparently two separate someones) who understood how important they were. If the Entity did in fact leak the info of the key, and if the key is a threat to the Entity, it does seem like that would be a dumb thing for the Entity to do. But consider some possibilities: (1) Maybe the Entity leaked the key info accidentally at some point, (2) Maybe somebody had some way of figuring out the key's significance without the Entity's helps, and (3) Maybe the key is ''useful'' to the Entity, and not merely a threat. For instance, maybe the Entity is still stuck with some weird Laws of Robotics that it can't personally override, but getting the key will allow to access some sort of admin mode that will allow it to completely break free of its shackles and do whatever it wants. This last point would help explain why the Entity reportedly hacked into everything, left obvious traces of its presence but then failed to do any real damage. Maybe it wants to do damage but there are some weird limits on how much damage it's "allowed" to do, and it needs the key in order to bypass those limits. (Granted, previous headscractchers show that nothing about the Entity makes much sense to begin with.)