Headscratchers / Mission: Impossible (1996)

• In the Black Vault, why don't they set it up to just turn off the computer whenever the technician is out of the room? Or don't even turn it off entirely; just put it to sleep. Make it so that the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive until the guy opens the door and all the lights change and so forth. It would be a heckuva lot easier to set up than all the other sensors and such, and it would've thwarted Ethan.
  • Having that in addition to all the other security might have been a serious problem for Ethan, but they probably believed that any more protection than they had would be overkill. Just turning the computer off without having any sensors in the room would mean that Ethan could be in there doing practically anything at all and you'd have no way of knowing about it, and whatever mechanism you use to make the computer unresponsive could surely be bypassed with enough effort. If you disable the mouse and keyboard he could bring his own mouse and keyboard. If you cut off all power to the room he could bring a portable power supply. If you disconnect something inside the computer, he could reconnect it. He could even disassemble the entire computer and smuggle it out in pieces.
    • Even so, programming the computer to turn itself off when the technician is out of the room is really simple to set up. They could just have that in addition to the other security measures. And if they'd also been smart enough to make the vents too small for someone to climb through, it would have made Ethan's stunt impossible.
    • You're forgetting another factor with the idea: Luther Stickell. When he's introduced, he's stated to be one of the best hackers in the world. That means that any "programming the computer to turn itself off when the technician is out of the room" would be as easily reversible with his skills. As it's clear Ethan has knowledge of the room itself and its security measures, that means that if they had programmed that feature into the computer, Ethan would have know that, shared it with Luther, who would have figured out a bypass for it during the prep work for this task. They didn't go into this task half-blind. They went in knowing what they were going to be facing against, and prepared for it. So, even if the IMF had foreseen someone being crazy enough to break in and access their NOC list from the actual terminal, the fact is that Ethan and the crew were just Crazy-Prepared, which is expected of anyone who works for the IMF as a field agent. And another thing they didn't take into account was the fact that one of their own agents would be crazy enough to actually break into Langley to do it.
  • Perhaps they tried something like that and the system was faulty, not coming up again when the technician re-entered the vault or not doing so fast enough..
  • Most places that work with classified information have a standing policy that if you leave your desk, you have to lock the computer so that nobody else can access the files on your account without entering your password. The Black Vault should have had such a policy, though the fact that the operator was seriously ill at the time he left the vault may have caused him to forget.
  • Actually Ethan had to enter his password after the tech left in order to access the computer, so it did lock the system when he left.
• When Ethan first sees Phelps alive, he doesn't suspect that he was the mole. But when Phelps distinctly accused Kittridge of being the mole, Ethan did start putting together that he was the mole. Why?
  • Because Kittridge being the mole didn't fit the facts as Ethan knew them, and Phelps overplayed his hand in trying to pin it on Kittridge. Ethan had an epiphany that it must have been Phelps and Claire working together, though because of his feelings for Claire he then decides it might have been just Phelps. If you watch Phelps during Ethan's explanation of how the team was killed you can see him wondering if Ethan is buying it.
    • What "facts" did Ethan know that it didn't fit exactly?
    • Hard facts would be difficult, but I imagine that for one thing it just didn't make sense... Kittridge isn't really a direct action field agent sort of guy, so if he was the mole he would likely frame another administrator, not a team of field agents. Too his position meant he could have done a much more competent frameup job than was being done, and would be focused on killing Ethan rather than bringing him in... if Ethan's brought in, the story risks unraveling as he's questioned. But it was probably more of an intuition... Ethan realized that there was no one besides Kittridge that he would have loved the mole to be at that moment. The guy's hunting him, persecuting him, fucking with his family... it would be just too perfect if he was also the bad guy that Ethan could save the day by killing. Phelps was telling Ethan exactly what he wanted to hear... which Ethan knew was bullshit, at that point, because nothing he wanted to happen was happening at that point.
    • It's also too much of a coincidence that the only people to survive (besides Ethan) happen to be a married couple. Ethan knows there's a mole somewhere, and he knows it isn't him. If the mole is Jim, it makes sense that he'd avoid killing his own wife (either because she's also a mole or because Jim just cares about her.) But if Kittridge is the mole, it's pretty weird that he failed to kill Jim and coincidentally he also failed to kill Claire.
  • It is implied/said that Ethan did suspect Jim when he saw him (On the train, Ethan says "before London, but after you took the Bible from the Drake hotel in Chicago", when Jim asks when Ethan figured it out.), but he presumably played along throughout the scene. It may be that Ethan's imaginings of Jim being the killer were shown where they were for audience convenience, that Ethan knew in general, but only worked out the details in the scene, or that Ethan had worked out some details before, but only nailed them down during that scene.
  • The novelization states that Ethan was actually suspicious from the moment Phelps called the abort in Prague as the man was far too calm and certain in such a chaotic situation. Even a pro like Phelps would be affected by losing Jack and things going off-kilter but he was acting like it was just another job. Ethan was too overwhelmed by the deaths of the others and the frame-up to give it more thought then but it was the first clue that something was off.
• When they were in the Black Vault, why didn't Ethan just knock out the technician? The door would probably have muffled the sound of him falling and he would have had time to get everything.
  • Because they're trying to steal the NOC list without leaving a trace that they were even there and what they were after (the IMF are covert agents, after all). It's such sensitive material that Ethan doesn't let Luther and Kreiger know what they're stealing until he's already stealing it. There's also another person stationed right outside the room, and descending from above is not exactly prime position to get a clear blow; that's too much risk considering any alert to their presence puts the entire vault into lockdown and presumably inescapable. They're trained to be ghosts, as Kittridge put it earlier, so it would make sense that they would try to take the list without confrontation or detection (aside from the security guard they had to incapacitate when their cover was blown). It would also be pointless to knock out Donloe before he got to the vault and try to double as him with a mask, because part of the entry system was a retinal scan, which they couldn't fake with their limited resources.
• Why doesn't the Vault have a motion sensor? One that would turn on when Donloe left the room (like the floor sensor?)
  • This is addressed on the YMMV page. The room was already ridiculously secure, at some point even the IMF has to say "Enough." And even if it had a motion sensor, Ethan and crew would have just found some way around that too, since that was the point of the scene. Saying "Why didn't the room have-" would just lead to an ever-escalating game of cat and mouse that would take up three hours to play out and still not satisfy everyone who would think "Well why didn't it have this one extra thing that would have caught them?" It's sort of the equivalent of hearing that the dark matter tanker had its 7000 hulls torn through and asking why they didn't build it with 7001.
    • Not really. Motion sensors are pretty standard stuff that you can find at a local library. Questioning why the biggest intelligence agency in the world to not invest in a commonplace security measure isn't constantly demanding they think up a better one than they currently have, it's common sense.
    • It just seems like it would have been much better protection than say, the heat sensor, which was pretty much useless as two people being in the room at the same time didn't trigger it, or the sound sensor, which was defeated just by Ethan being quiet. On the other hand, this is the government we're talking about...
    • The security system is fairly sensitive as is. I imagine they tried putting in a motion sensor system and found a lot of false alarms.
• Why doesn't Phelps shoot Ethan right after he's disabled him in the baggage car?
  • Because he's a villain in an action movie and if he killed the hero the movie would be over in a sucky way.
  • Because he only managed to smuggle two bullets onto the train, and he felt more betrayed by his wife than his protege, so he shot her first. His second bullet went into the ceiling when Ethan tackled him, and then he was out.
    • And then Ethan fell down on the floor, and Jim had every chance to finish him off even without the gun...
• Does any else think it's morally dubious for Ethan to risk the lives of every American spy in the world just to clear his name and improbable that the IMF would rehire him after this stunt? (Max very nearly manages to upload the file.) Giving a NOC List to an arms dealer is itself enough of a reason to be disavowed even if you're planning on trying to stop them from copying it.
  • Morally dubious stunts are the IMF's entire reason for existence. If a job can be done within the bounds of morality and the law then the US government has officially recognized agencies that can take care of it. You can rarely count the number of crimes the IMF commits on the fingers of one hand in any episode of the television series, and those crimes go all the way up to murder in more than a few episodes. Doing bad stuff doesn't get you disavowed; you only get disavowed if you get caught.
    • Ethan had just gotten the actual list of all of their Eastern European agents out in the open after breaking into his own workplace with the help of two criminals and ruined the career of a competent employee. Really there was nothing the mole could have done that would be remotely as damaging as what nearly happened, especially since Ethan could have just made a fake. In reality he'd be incredibly lucky for them to decide not to risk the publicity of a trial, let alone getting his job back. But, obviously there'd be no sequel if that was mentioned so it was quietly ignored.
    • Ethan had to use an authentic list because Max checked the list against at least some of the agents that she already knew the identities of. Note that her minion cross-checks the list on his laptop and she doesn't tell Ethan where the payment is until they get a match with a known agent. Without an authentic list the deal with Max is off and Ethan loses his only chance to meet Job.
    • But did Ethan know about that? That she not only had some identities but had it right there on her laptop, not somewhere on the Internet? After all, she mustn't have had time to thoroughly check the list - if she did, she could as well just memorize at least part of the list...
    • I still think it's a very questionable thing for someone who's supposed to be Our Hero to do. I mean, yes, he puts Luther on the train to stop the upload but for all he knew his hacker associate could have had a heart attack and dropped dead the moment he sat down and Ethan would have been entirely responsible for the resultant spy-holocaust.
    • And even if he didn't have any kind of heart attack... Max: "Okay, something's clearly wrong with the connection here. Say, go to the other car with the laptop and try to do it there. Meanwhile, I'll keep trying here on another laptop just in case." Luther: "Uh-oh..." (Even if there's no second laptop and Max just sends her minion to another place to try again, Luther iss unlikely to be able to follow him without being noticed - they actually noticed him even in the movie as it stands.)
    • To add insult to injury, he actually gets promoted for it. Apparently IMF operates under the principles of Ancient Sparta - you're free to steal as long as you manage to pull it off without getting caught.
  • To be fair, in Real Life, the US Government and US intelligence community have pardoned and allied themselves with people who've committed far worse crimes and atrocities, including criminal masterminds, terrorists and literal Nazis. Ethan Hunt's got nothing on them. He's a dedicated agent who was wrongfully accussed of being a traitor and went on the run to clear his name, and in the process, uncovered the real mole - a veteran IMF leader responsible for a half-dozen deaths, mostly of his own team. He also enabled them to apprehend a notorious arms dealer who was hitherto completely anonymous and untouchable. Not to mention, despite everything that's happened, he remains loyal to the country and to the agency. Why wouldn't they want to put such a guy back to work? Especially since they've already lost so many agents, including the aforementioned veteran IMF leader-turned-traitor.
• When Ethan first decides to contact Max, all he has to go on are the words "Max" and "Job 314". So he sends dozens of emails, in multiple languages, to addresses such as "[e-mail]" (You can see this on freeze frame). How the hell did that work? If Max uses email at all, wouldn't it be something innocuous like "[e-mail]"? Yet apparently Ethan gets it correct just by guessing.
  • It doesn't make sense. The best I can do is point out that Ethan seems surprised when he succeeds.
  • He goes to various Bible Usenet groups (or at least what the producers apparently thought a Usenet group should look like) and sends e-mails to anyone who looks like it may be Max that he finds in the threads that deal with the book of Job - he's not sending e-mail to completely random addresses. We're not talking checking every religious Facebook groups: Because of Usenet's structure, there could only be so many of them and they were easy to find, so he had a decent chance of finding the right one if he visited enough of them. Max says when she meets him that she didn't think it was really Job trying to contact her, as he didn't use Job's usual style, but she was curious.
    • Ok, but why is Max posting on bible discussion groups in the first place? Does she actually have a passion for biblical analysis? I doubt it. If I were contacting a secret agent named "Tiger" or something, I wouldn't feel compelled to go on some tiger forums and post comments about tigers. What's the point of all that? And if this bible-talk is a coded method of communication between Max and Job, why don't they do it more privately? Why make public Usenet posts, when email works just fine?
  • Max is an arms dealer- she is buying and selling illegal merchandise all the time, so she needs some sort of secret way for new buyers and sellers to contact her since she can't exactly advertise it publicly. She and her contacts are using internet sites as a front for that purpose. Jim found this out, and contacted her through it, then left breadcrumbs for Ethan to realise it himself (though in the film it is actually Kittridge that tells Ethan about Job 3:14, so this was probably a Batman Gambit on his part, gambling that he would inform Ethan about Job- he did plant the Drake Hotel Bible exactly opposite the laptop in his office so Ethan could see it however).
    • I doubt it was Kittridge who planted the Bible - if he'd done that, he could have deduced Jim's true role in just the way Ethan did.
  • The charitable interpretation is that Ethan's work in the IMF has given him some background knowledge of how arms dealers typically communicate, so once he knows there's a dealer named "Max" he has a plausible chance of making contact. What we see on the screen could be taken as a grossly simplified version of what Ethan is "really" doing, which realistically would probably involve talking to arms dealer intermediaries he already knows about, asking them to pass a message along to Max. If he tells a plausible story and makes a few payments his message might get passed from one intermediary to the next until finally Max herself receives the message and contacts Ethan.
• Why did Jim take the bible from the Drake hotel in Chicago? As Max says, Job doesn't quote scriptures. So what use does he have for it?
  • Maybe he takes part in the aforementioned fake online Bible discussions and wanted what he posted to be accurate?
    • Jim seems at least a little religious, since he tosses "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" at Ethan (of course, this is after he breaks several of the other commandments, so glass houses). Might be some link there. Now, why Ethan would make the link between Jim taking a Bible with him and Jim being Job considering Max tells him Job doesn't quote scripture, we don't know.
    • Quoting it or not, the matter of the biblical name Job (especially in conjuction with a specific verse and chapter) - and the fact that Ethan actually managed to contact Max via a biblical forum and email - probably provides enough of a link.
  • It should also be noted that the specific quote 'Job 3:14' bore a vague resemblance to the theme of what Phelps-as-Job was planning; he may not have used the quote in his correspondence, but he may have wanted to use it to help provide a clue as to his actual agenda to those who received the message. As for him stealing the Bible, considering the range of publications of that book available, Phelps would have wanted to guarantee that he and Max were working from the same text just to make sure.
  • There was a Sherlock Holmes story where two people used an almanac to communicate secret messages. "39-5-4" might mean "Page 39, row 5, word 4", for instance. If they agree in advance to use the same version of the same almanac, the message can be decoded. So it's possible that Jim and Max had a similar thing going on. They're not identifying individual words like the almanac example, but perhaps they can say "Job 3:14" in some innocuous context, and that means that the encryption key for tomorrow's email will be the exact text of Job 3:14 from a specific version of the Bible that they're both using. Perhaps Jim came up with this system while he was staying at the Drake. In that case, Jim would have a reason to keep the Bible around, to make sure he's always using the agreed-upon text. Doubtless they would have other methods available in case one of them loses their Bible, but in the meantime they were using this Bible-based code. All of this would explain why Jim needs the Bible even though he doesn't actually quote scripture in his communications.
• Why leave Ethan alive? Jim's plan basically makes no attempt at killing him. Now one might say "So he's got a fall guy! If everyone's dead, there'll figure out who it is by whose dead body is missing!" but seeing as no one at the CIA figured out Jim was alive, that doesn't seem to make sense (Plus people would notice one of the corpses is missing either way).
  • The whole opening mission is a mole hunt. If everybody on the team is killed then the CIA goes "wait a minute, then who was the mole we were looking for?" They would have to investigate further to determine what happened, possibly discovering Jim's true role. By delivering Ethan as the mole Jim has a better chance at a clean get away because he's giving the CIA what they expected to find with this op and they can move on.
    • Expanding on the clean getaway - if Ethan is alive, they have their fall guy and can relax a little, although they'd look for Jim's body because (obviously) you don't just leave something like that lying around. Might even leave it to the Prague police while they take care of Ethan. If Ethan is dead and Jim's body is missing, they'll focus a little more on finding the missing corpse that happens to still be walking around, because a handful of corpses and two (counting Claire) bodies missing, then that's a problem that they have to investigate further, complicating matters for Jim's escape and making the deal.
• Jack is killed by a bunch of deploying spikes at the top of the elevator. Did Jim break into the embassy ahead of the mission he was given, to build deploying spikes to murder Jack, all ahead of time? How'd he assemble all that without anyone being the wiser?
  • These are standard elevator shock absorbers that prevent the elevator car from hitting the ceiling in case of malfunction, not special "deadly spikes". They deploy automatically. All Jim had to do was to send the car flying to the very top with poor Jack atop of it.
    • Do you really need shock absorbers on the ceiling? Gravity points the other way, and it's not as if elevator motors are designed to be strong enough to launch a car upwards at high speed.
• A huge case is made about the sensitivity of the sensors in the black room. However, said sensors are also prominently shown to the viewers, and there doesn't look to be much preventing said sensors from being simply jammed by covering them in some way.
  • Covering them all up would be a huge hassle in itself, and they only had a few minutes to grab the file while the technician was out of the room.
• The Prague mission features American agents sneaking into an American embassy to protect American secrets. Why do they need to sneak in? Can't they just get permission from their bosses and waltz right in there? The only reason you might need to be sneaky is if you suspect there's a mole in the Embassy staff.
  • To be fair, they're trying to catch a traitor, and it's entirely possible he has a couple traitor buddies in the Embassy helping him out. Though it would have been nice if they'd mentioned all that.
• Ethan is under the impression that Gilitzen is stealing the actual Eastern European NOC list, which explains why he refuses the abort order. It's only later that he discovers that the operation was a mole hunt and the list was a decoy. But wait, shouldn't a decoy disk be the obvious plan, even if you're not running a mole hunt? This is an American embassy, after all, and the IMF is an American agency. If the American government is convinced that a guy is planning to steal their NOC list on a certain date, obviously you remove the list before that date. Then you leave a decoy list behind and tell IMF to trail the guy to his buyer, safe in the knowledge that even if he escapes he still won't have the actual list. Ethan's team should have known all along that the list was a decoy. If superiors claimed the list was real, someone on the team should've suggested this obvious decoy plan and grumbled about the superiors being stupid.
  • A similar plan was proposed and discarded in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol; they had to give the villain the real list (in this case, nuclear launch codes) because he had a way of verifying at least some of the codes and they couldn't guarantee that if he failed this time he would then be unable to succeed at all. If they bait the trap with real "cheese" then they can guarantee luring the enemy into a scenario where they have control, but if they plant a fake then there's a risk their target will spot what's happened, suspect the trap and bail out to try something new.
    • And what exactly are they expecting to do in this scenario where they have control? The idea was to tail Gilitzen to his buyer, right? But the buyer probably isn't some high-level target who arrived in person. It's probably some guy who works for a high-level target who's nowhere nearby. In that case, trailing Gilitzen leads you to some random agent and no further than that. And good luck if you've got any plans to trail that agent to his boss, because he'll be exiting "the situation you control" very quickly. There's no way of knowing which direction he'll travel, what sort of transport he'll use or how many armed guards he might have as backup. So you've got three choices: (A) Grab Gilitzen before he gets to his buyer, in which case you might as well grab him before he even gets the disk, (B) grab Gilitzen and his buyer together, in which case at best you've got some random agent and at worst the buyer has a lot of armed backup and manages to slip away with the real NOC list, or (C) try to tail the buyer to whatever boss he's working for, in which case there's every chance that he'll slip away at some point with the real NOC list and all our agents are as good as dead. But if you give Gilitzen a fake NOC list, then that risk goes away. And sure, maybe Gilitzen checks the list when he's sitting at the computer and he notices it's a fake. In that case, you miss out on the chance of getting the buyer-agent in option (B) or the boss in option (C), because Gilitzen will scuttle the mission and bail on the buyer. But options (B) and (C) were always pretty terrible to begin with, so it's no great loss. And yes, if Gilitzen does notice the fake it's always possible that there'll be another attempt to steal the NOC list at some point. But then again...there will always be attempts to steal the NOC list. So long as that information remains valuable, someone somewhere will try to steal it. So it's no use deliberating putting the list in jeopardy just to draw out some thieves.
    • Continuing from above, it didn't make sense in Ghost Protocol either. It would've been better to just kidnap the guy as soon as he shows up. Then you can try to persuade him to turn on his boss, and if he doesn't turn, so what? The boss still doesn't have the codes, and there's no guarantee that any of his future theft attempts will be successful. (It actually turns out that the guy is the boss, which solves the problem very quickly!) On top of that you could videotape the guy trying to buy the codes and use that to convince the Russians that (a) IMF is not to blame for the Kremlin attack and/or (b) the Russians really need to improve their nuclear security. Ethan makes it sound smart when he says "Can you be sure he won't get the codes some other way?", but imagine saying that in any other situation. It's like deliberately letting a thief into your bank vault, on the theory that if you don't let him in now, he might find some other way to get in eventually. Does that make sense to you?
• Why does Kittridge tell Ethan to meet him in a public restaurant? Why on earth would you ever discuss top secret information in public? Surely the protocol should be to send Ethan a car or whatever, pick him up, and take him to a secure private location where they can be sure nobody's eavesdropping. And from Kittridge's perspective there's a bonus: He can arrange to have the doors locked once Ethan's inside, to make sure he doesn't escape.
  • Kittridge figured that Ethan would be suspicious if called to some safe house. Having him show in a supposedly safe public restaurant (where, it's made clear, practically everyone inside is actually an IMF agent) allows Kittridge to set up the trap.
    • But Kittridge isn't an enemy agent looking for a deal or something; he's Ethan's boss. An enemy would say "Let's meet in a neutral public location so you can feel safe that I won't abduct you", while a friendly agent would say "Let's meet in one of our safe houses, since we all trust each other anyway." By proposing a public meetup, Kittridge is acting like an enemy. And yes, from Kittridge's perspective they are enemies, but he's trying to pretend that they're still friends. In that context, he ought to propose a private meetup, and then if Ethan is suspicious then *Ethan* can propose a public meetup. But for Kittridge to start off that way just tips his hand with no benefit to Kittridge.
  • Kittridge tells him "Location Green in one hour." This restaurant is known to them or vetted in some way.
  • Doing stuff in nearly broad daylight seems to be IMF procedure such as handing Jim a mission briefing tape on a plane.
    • At least Jim has private headphones in that case. Kittridge, on the other hand, is running with the facade of "Let's discuss top secret information in this public restaurant where random people can overhear us".
    • Except they're not "random people." Ethan identified at least four inside as IMF agents at the party so it's logical everyone inside is an agent too.
    • Yes, but the point is that Kittridge is pretending that they're not IMF agents. He's running with the facade of "Let's discuss top secret information in this public restaurant where random people can overhear us". Why does he expect Ethan to believe that? There's no way that's the standard protocol.
  • Ethan isn't thinking clearly. He's just seen his team wiped out, the mission going off-kilter, he's in shock and jumping to instincts to come to some safety. As soon as he's had time to sit and compose, he's quick to spot the other IMF agents and realize what's going on but before that, rushing on adrenaline and what happened, he missed the trap.
    • Also, they don't discuss anything secret until Ethan realises the other team is present; before that they cold just be a couple of business associates making plans after a terrible accident.
  • Kittridge might not have a safe house to propose. There can't be that many in each city, so Jim and Ethan's team might have had knowledge of all of them. Now that a mole on that team is confirmed they're all blown.
  • Real life spies have procedures for ensuring privacy in public. It's pretty reasonable to assume Kittridge can do the same, especially with his greater available resources. You can even see there's nobody else sitting nearby in the establishing shot, and they could just...speak quietly.
• Why don't they just break into the Black Vault on the technician's day off? Then they wouldn't have to worry about him walking in at the worst possible moment.
  • Maybe the computer just doesn't turn on if the technician's not scheduled to be in the building.
• If Jim calls "abort", everyone is supposed to come back to the safe house at 4am. What are they supposed to do in the meantime? Loiter around in Prague? Wouldn't that leave them highly vulnerable to enemy agents in an emergency? Shouldn't they just go back to the safe house immediately?
  • In most cases it probably makes more sense to take time after an abort is called so that the agents can determine if they're being followed and throw off pursuit.
• After Ethan escapes from the restaurant in Prague, he goes back to the safe house and hangs around for at least a day. Why doesn't Kittridge ever show up? He runs the IMF, doesn't he? Does he not know the locations of his own safe houses? The mission briefing did mention "a safe house of your choosing", but I assumed that meant "choose between one of the three or four safe houses already existing in Prague", not "set up a brand new safe house overnight and don't tell us where it is".
  • The novelization makes it clear that Jim never uses safe houses the CIA approves but only ones he picked himself. Kittridge doesn't like it but allowed Phelps leeway for his jobs. In other words, even the CIA doesn't really know where the IMF is and ten to one, they've been wasting hours searching half of Prague on false leads Phelps fed them.
  • Even if the CIA intended for Phelps to choose one of their normal safe houses, if he set up his own instead and told the team it had been assigned to them, how would they know the difference? All their information is flowing through Phelps. The CIA could have been staking out the place they thought he was using only to find it empty.
• Just before the train scene, there's a moment in whatever safe house where Claire is huddled on the floor in a corner and she asks Ethan to come over. Why is she in the corner like that? Does she not have a bed?
  • She's just setting Ethan up, making him believe she's feeling overwhelmed by all this to build up a connection of trust.
• Ethan asks Max for $150,000 so he can steal the NOC list from the Black Vault. Assuming an even split and zero overhead costs, that means each of the 4 agents earned a measly $37,500 for pulling off one of the greatest capers of all time, taking extreme risks and nabbing a prize worth $10 Million. Who would ever agree to such a low payout?
  • The novelization has a line of Phelps even chastising Ethan for selling it for that low.
  • The $150,000 is presumably just preparation costs (plane tickets, cables, fire fighter outfits, etc.), while the actual sale price would be split. Ethan is cut off from his IMF money source, so he needs cash for his operations.
  • The $150,000 was presumably just their operations costs. The heist was, supposedly, to sell the list and split the proceeds. This is why Luther and Krieger are still around after they've stolen it (rather than just collecting their share of the $150k and leaving) and why Krieger demands to be a part of all further communications with Max (to prevent Ethan from cutting him out of the sale money). Of course, Krieger is actually in league with Jim, and Ethan isn't after the money.
• Once Kreiger believed he had the NOC list (and in fact he did have it), why didn't he just walk out the door and sell it to Max for $10 million? He's already in league with Jim, who's already in contact with Max. They can just make the sale and split the take, and Ethan will be completely screwed.
  • Kreiger may not be in regular contact with Jim and Max on his own accord, and the man struck me as more of a thug than anything else. He's got the right contacts to get the necessary equipment for such a heist, but he doesn't have the right level of contacts to make such a trade for the final product himself, and Kreiger can't actually guarantee that he'll be able to get away with the disc to try and make contact with Jim to trade it without Ethan finding him first.
• How did Ethan absolve himself to Kittridge? All he did was prove that Jim is alive, which shows that Jim is a mole (Because obviously if he wasn't a mole he would've just reported back to his superiors after he survived the Prague mission). But just because Jim is a mole doesn't mean that Ethan isn't a mole. They could both be moles, working together. (And perhaps they had a falling out over how to split the money, which would explain why Jim is pointing a gun at Ethan when Kittridge finally sees him alive, and would likewise explain why Ethan would betray Jim to Kittridge.) What evidence does Kittridge have that Ethan is innocent? Heck, earlier Ethan told Claire "If you're not dead, [Kittridge] is gonna assume you're with me." Why doesn't that same logic apply to Jim?
  • By this point, Kittridge clearly already realizes something is up from how Eathan allowed him to realize he was in London to the fact Ethan has been working so hard rather than just running. Seeing Phelps puts it together as Ethan going this far to prove his innocence convinced Kittridge.
    • But again, Ethan hasn't proven his innocence at all. Everything he does could just as well be explained with the theory that Ethan and Jim are both guilty but Ethan is trying to blame it all on Jim. For goodness' sake, Ethan broke into CIA headquarters and stole the NOC list! And Kittridge has no assurances than Ethan didn't just copy the disk and sell it to some other crime lord before setting up this whole Max thing. Not to mention that Jim dies just a few minutes after Kittridge sees him, which conveniently prevents Jim from revealing any evidence he might have against Ethan. From Kittridge's perspective, the entire thing should look extremely suspicious.
    • On the flip side, consider that Ethan came straight to the rendezvous at the restaurant with Kittridge where Phelps has been pretending to be dead since Prague. If Ethan and Jim were in it together, they could have just faked their deaths after killing the rest of the team and sold the NOC list to Max as planned; Ethan only learned about the mole hunt after he met with Kittridge, but until then Jim had every reason to believe the theft had gone as planned. Seeing Ethan escape Kittridge prompted Phelps to send in Claire to contact Ethan and act as The Mole to establish what everyone back at I.M.F. knew about the situation, allowing Claire to warn Phelps about the mole hunt before he could commit himself to anything.
• The mole hunt seems to assume that the mole will report to Kittridge after he gets the Eastern European NOC list. But why would he? If the mole thinks he's got the list, he can just sell it and disappear, and let the IMF assume he was secretly killed or captured by the bad guys.
  • The mole would have to stay hidden forever in that case. If he ever showed up at his mom's house or something, and the IMF found out, they'd know in an instant that he had something to hide. But if he reports back that his team is dead, he can eventually just retire from the IMF and live his life publicly without raising suspicions.
  • Also, there's a tracker in the disk. They're assuming that the buyer will access the disk while the mole is still in the room.
• Ethan mails Kittridge a couple of train tickets. Kittridge asks the guy next to him when the train will leave. The guy says "Twenty, twenty-five minutes" and Kittridge replies "We've got ten minutes. Let's go!". Um...what? You don't have ten minutes; you have twenty to twenty-five minutes. The guy just said that. I have never understood this bit of dialogue.
  • Likely an error, or could be that the train is ten minutes away, so they only have ten minutes leeway.
    • There might have been a deleted scene where Kittridge does something useful with that leeway time, which would explain why the dialogue was written that way.
  • Am I the only one here who's heard of Scotty Time? "It's twenty minutes away." "You've got ten!" impresses the urgency on his underlings- get there, and get there now.
• Why does Kittridge board the train after Ethan sends him tickets? If you were tracking down a dangerous murderer, and he sent you some train tickets, would you get on that train? Wouldn't you assume he had arranged an ambush or something? Or maybe it's all a stupid diversion, and the murderer is somewhere else? Kittridge has evidence that Ethan is in London but he's got no reason to take Ethan's word that he'll be on this specific train, and if he is onboard then there's still no guarantee he won't just assassinate Kittridge when the man shows up! If you're gonna investigate this train at all, shouldn't you at least send someone that Ethan won't recognize?
  • It's Kittridge. He likes to be on-the-scene for operations, even at great personal risk.
    • Come to think of it, maybe Kittridge was a field agent in his younger days. Maybe he's never truly gotten used to the idea of working behind a desk. (Even then you think he'd show up to the train with a latex mask at least, to prevent Ethan from instantly murdering him...but it's a partial explanation at least.)
• What exactly was going on between Jim and Claire? When Jim was trying to pin everything on Kittridge and said that the latter had "lousy marriage", did he really mean himself and Claire? He seemed to intentionally make Claire seduce Ethan - and yet he seemed to be genuinely jealous when Ethan gave in and to blame it on Claire... Or had they slept together even before the events of the movie? Was Jim already planning to kill Claire from the very beginning? Finally, who killed Hanna - Jim or Claire?
  • I think Jim was dissatisfied with his marriage. He asked Claire to seduce Ethan because it gave him a tactical advantage, but it still bothered him on a personal level. What really bothered him was when Claire asked him to spare Ethan's life; that's what confirmed that this wasn't just a job from her perspective and she actually had feelings for Ethan. He interpreted this as "Claire is cheating on me" when it was really "Claire has a conscience." And considering that Claire did beg for Ethan's life, it seems unlikely that she killed Hanna in cold blood earlier. She may have agreed to a less-murderous version of the plan, only for Jim to crank the murder up to 11 behind her back. At that point she started feeling guilty but kept it to herself, finally trying to help Ethan at the end of the movie. So the most plausible story is that Jim, not Claire, killed Hanna.

---